Tyrant

TYRANT is a striking literary feat. At the outset, the book notes how Shakespeare craftily commented on his own times by telling tales of tyrants from centuries before. In an act of scholarly daring, Greenblatt then proceeds to do exactly the same thing. Rarely have these blood-soaked creatures seemed so recognizably human and so contemporary.

John Lithgow, Emmy award-winning actor

In this brilliant, beautifully organized, exceedingly readable study of Shakespeare’s tyrants and their tyrannies—their dreadful narcissistic follies, their usurpations and their craziness and their cruelties, their arrogant incompetence, their paranoid viciousness, their falsehoods and their flattery hunger—Stephen Greenblatt manages to elucidate obliquely our own desperate (in Shakespeare’s words) "general woe".

PHILIP ROTH

A brilliant, vivid, incisive, resonant account of Shakespeare's analysis of politics, and the corruption and abuses of power. He does not need to make contemporary parallels, they are so evidently before us.

Greg Doran, Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company

A scintillating book, uncannily illuminating about current politics, as perceptive about the victims of tyranny as it is about the tyrants themselves.

Nicholas Hytner, former Artistic Director of the Royal National Theatre

Brilliant, timely

MARGARET ATWOOD, on Twitter

Excellent.

Eliot A. Cohen, Washington Post Sunday

Greenblatt, as ever, writes elegantly and well.

Andrew Dickson, Evening Standard

Brilliant

Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times

Brisk and highly readable

Jonathan Bate, New Statesman

[Tyrant] illuminates our present political situation by analysing the traits of Shakespearean tyrants – and their mobs … nimble and intriguing … The 45th president is not mentioned anywhere by name in Tyrant , but the analogies are clear … illuminating.

Alasdair Lees, Independent

Brilliant ... [a] spikily insightful book

Daniel Swift, Spectator

Ardent and involving ... Greenblatt's points are well made and the implicit parallels are easily drawn ... acutely observed.

John Stubbs, Literary Review

[T]his is not just a book about the perverse psychology of megalomanics, it also describes the social ambience in which they move like sharks in a sea brimming with smaller fish – the enablers

Michael Burleigh, UnHerd

Never less than illuminating… In Tyrant, Greenblatt demonstrates the enduring relevance of Shakespeare’s outlook

Alisdair Lees

Greenblatt illuminatingly… offer[s] new understandings not just of the plays but also of the workings of power itself

Irish Times

A highly entertaining rhetorical exercise tinged with sinister intimations of dread

Robert McCrum, Observer

Tyrant is exceedingly relevant as a lens on US politics and social science research and makes a useful case, too, for incorporating interdisciplinary understanding of societies and governing systems

K. A. Doyle, London School of Economics