Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics [Hardcover]

Elegant and deftly written.[Both the risk and the thrill of this rhetorical daring electrifiesIn this brilliant, beautifully organized, exceedingly readable study of Shakespeares tyrants and their tyranniestheir dreadful narcissistic follies, their usurpations and their craziness and their cruelties, their arrogant incompetence, their paranoid viciousness, their falsehoods and their flattery hungerStephen Greenblatt manages to elucidate obliquely our own desperate (in Shakespeares words) 'general woe.'An incisive and instructive study of personality politics and the abuse of powertopical literary criticism with classical virtues.?Offers a canny parallel to contemporary political concerns&Full of insight, both for lovers of literature and for students of history and politics.Compelling literary history and analysis.Even those who don't share Greenblatt's political perspective should find his well-informed survey of the making and unmaking of autocratic rulers to be instructive and entertaining.?World-renowned Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt explores the playwrights insight into bad (and often mad) rulers.