Review
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“Elegant and deftly written.”
- Eliot A. Cohen, Washington Post
“[Tyrant] is valuable less for what it has to say about
Shakespeare's plays than for how it applies the wisdom it has
acquired through careful study of these works to the crisis
roiling American democracy.”
- Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times
“Both the risk and the thrill of this rhetorical daring
electrifies Tyrant. Shakespeare lived five centuries ago, yet
Greenblatt's book has the feel of a series of urgent and very
contemporary dispatches.”
- Steve Donoghue, Christian Science Monitor
“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
“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
“An incisive and instructive study of personality politics and
the abuse of power―topical literary criticism with classical
virtues. ”
- Kirkus Reviews
“Offers a canny parallel to contemporary political concerns…Full
of in, both for lovers of literature and for students of
history and politics.”
- Publishers Weekly
“Compelling literary history and analysis.”
- Booklist
“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. ”
- Bookpage
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About the Author
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Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D. Yale) is Cogan University
Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Also General
Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, he is the
author of eleven books, including Tyrant, The Rise and Fall of
Adam and Eve: The Story that Created Us, The Swerve: How the
World Became Modern (winner of the 2011 National Book Award and
the 2012 Pulitzer Prize); Shakespeare's Freedom; Will in the
World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory;
Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World; Learning to
Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture; and Renaissance
Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. He has edited seven
collections of criticism, including Cultural Mobility: A
Manifesto, and is a founding coeditor of the journal
Representations. His honors include the MLA’s James Russell
Lowell Prize, for both Shakespearean Negotiations: The
Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England and The
Swerve, the Sapegno Prize, the Distinguished Humanist Award from
the Mellon Foundation, the Wilbur Cross Medal from the Yale
University Graduate School, the William Shakespeare Award for
Classical Theatre, the Erasmus Institute Prize, two Guggenheim
Fellowships, and the Distinguished Teaching Award from the
University of California, Berkeley. He was president of the
Modern Language Association of America and is a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical
Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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