Shakespeare on tyranny
Stephen Greenblatt is a literary critic and historian whose insights into philosophy and the contemporary world are genuinely and consistently profound. His most recent book returns to his primary expertise, the corpus of Shakespeare's plays. But it is -- by intention or otherwise -- an important reflection on the presidency of Donald Trump as well. The book is Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics , and it traces in fascinating detail the evolution and fates of tyrants through Shakespeare's plays. Richard III gets a great deal of attention, as do Lear and Macbeth. Greenblatt makes it clear that Shakespeare was interested both in the institutions of governance within which tyrants seized power, and the psychology of the tyrant. The parallels with the behavior and psychology of the current US President are striking. Here is how Greenblatt frames his book. �A king rules over willing subjects,� wrote the influential sixteenth-century Scottish scholar George Buchanan, �a tyrant over u...