The New York Times Book Review - Simon Callow
Slyly and wittily, [Greenblatt] analyzes political events in Shakespeare's world in terms of our own experience…Tyrant is a fine polemic, but it is considerably more than that…Illuminating scene after scene, Greenblatt is especially fine on the mechanisms of tyranny, its ecology, so to speak, leaving one deeply moved all over again by Shakespeare's profound and direct understanding of what it is to be human—which includes, alas, being a tyrant.
Publishers Weekly
02/12/2018
Greenblatt (The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve), a Harvard humanities professor, offers a canny parallel to contemporary political concerns in this survey of tyrannical figures in Shakespeare’s works. Using the protagonists of Coriolanus, King Lear, Macbeth, and the Wars of the Roses plays, among others, Greenblatt convincingly and bracingly explores the circumstances that allow for the rise of autocratic rulers. His quotations furnish vivid examples of how bullying and intimidation stifle opposition—Richard III declares “I’ll make a corpse of him that disobeys”—and of how public figures can get away with brazen lies—a rebel leader in Henry VI, Part 2 claims an aristocratic mother, though in truth “she was a midwife.” Nor does he ignore the role of sex as a motivator for tyrants and the role of women in defying autocrats, using as respective examples the self-loathing, misogynistic Richard III’s declaration that he was not “made to court an amorous looking glass” and Cordelia’s refusal to flatter her father at the start of Lear. Though Greenblatt names no names from current events, the reader can fill in the blanks with any number of contemporary politicians. The chapters on Richard III are perhaps the most visceral and immediate, but the entire book is full of insight, both for lovers of literature and for students of history and politics. (May)
Los Angeles Times - Charles McNulty
"[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."
Guardian
"An engaging study of some of the most eloquent despots on stage."
Booklist
"Compelling literary history and analysis."
Independent Whig.
"In Tyrant, Greenblatt demonstrates the enduring relevance of Shakespeare’s outlook as much as providing a commentary…Shakespeare’s voice rings down the ages, and, as with innumerable other human matters, we would do well to listen to it."
Los Angeles Review of Books
"Greenblatt shows us not only that Shakespeare’s writings can serve as a brilliant guide to the mess of our current politics but also that he—Greenblatt, that is—is perfectly well able to give us an account of them."
Bookpage
"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. "
Christian Science Monitor
"Shakespeare lived five centuries ago, yet Greenblatt’s book has the feel of a series of urgent and very contemporary dispatches."
Wall Street Journal
"Mr. Greenblatt breaks with the traditional assumption that Shakespeare must have been an uncritical admirer of monarchy. The Shakespeare that this book reveals is not only able to tell a bad king from a good but willing to raise serious doubts about monarchy as a regime."
Christian Science Monitor - Steve Donoghue
"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."
Philip Roth
"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.'"
Simon Callow
"Greenblatt is especially fine on the mechanisms of tyranny, its ecology, so to speak, leaving one deeply moved all over again by Shakespeare’s profound and direct understanding of what it is to be human—which includes, alas, being a tyrant."
Literary Review (UK)
"Shakespeare’s fascination with the tyrannical impulse, in domestic as well as political settings, is undeniable and is acutely observed by Greenblatt. The overlap between the private and public spheres is always catastrophic, as is the tyrant’s blind, psychotic fury at resistance when pure obedience is expected, an emotion the plays release and explore compulsively."
|Los Angeles Times
"[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."
John Lithgow
"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."
Eliot A. Cohen
"Elegant and deftly written."
