Tyrant is a look at Shakespeare's work -- focusing on his political beliefs thorough characters. You can look at the political landscape of today and draw your own conclusions. Greenblatt is used in college courses and high-level reading for Shakespeare -- this is for in-depth, academic readers. Recommended for Shakespeare readers and those interested in high-level research into his work.

One of the reasons Shakespeare is still passionately read today is how extraordinarily sharp was his insight into the complexities of human nature—and how he managed to make poetry even of the muck of evil.

The opening chapters are worth the price of the book alone as Greenblatt gives the reader a precis of Tudor history and culture, focusing on playwrights, censorship, and the social as well as political climate.

The specifics are so enlightening. I had not known, for example, that a couple of would-be rebels against Queen Elizabeth paid for a private performance of Richard II (a play, one of them seemingly remembered, depicting the downfall of a monarch) not long before they were arrested and executed. The actors were briefly arrested, but released when they pointed out that they were paid to give their play, and knew nothing of politics. They were actors, and that was an old, out-of-fashion play.

But this and other instances of danger for artists apparently, Greenblatt feels, inspired Shakespeare to set his plays firmly in the past. Mixing geography and names and cultures didn’t matter. Bohemia could border the sea. The fanciful trappings enabled him to make his commentary on current life safely oblique (or, as Emily Dickinson wrote a few centuries after, “Tell it slant”).

Greenblatt first examines the histories, then other plays centered around tyrants, the corruption of their morals and manners, and the way they prey on the common people while using them. Slogans are so easy to create an us against them mentality: “rage generates insults, and insults generate outrageous actions, and outrageous actions, in turn, heighten the intensity of the rage.”

Sound familiar?

There is no doubt that Greenblatt had current American politics in mind when he wrote this book, which focuses on the psychotic, sociopathic, narcissistic and venal tyrants of the plays, and how and why they were defeated. He contrasts these tyrants, and the circumstances in which each rose, sending me paging through my Shakespeare time after time to reread passages with renewed insight.

Furthermore, Greenblatt incisively teases out Shakespeare’s most powerful observations on the irreparable cost of tyranny even after the tyrant is finally gotten rid of.

Shakespeare was aware, centuries ago, that the common folk cannot always be counted on as a bulwark against tyranny. Greenblatt writes, “They were, [Shakespeare] thought, too easily manipulated by slogans, cowed by threats, or bribed by trivial ‘gifts’ to serve as reliable defenders of freedom.” Shakespeare knew well that it was difficult to stand up for human decency if the threat (right now) is not directly relevant to you.

It is said that hard times make heroes, but what exactly is a hero? In examining Julius Caesar, Greenblatt pulls out Brutus’s chilling ruminations on why it was necessary to kill the tyrant.

His long soliloquy undermines any attempt to draw a clean line between abstract political principles and particular individuals, with their psychological peculiarities, their unpredictability, their only partially knowable, opaque inwardness. The verbs “would” and “might” shimmer and dance their ambiguous way through the twists and turns of a mind obsessed.

Further, Greenblatt comments on how, in this play, the violent act made in desperate attempt to save the republic destroyed it: with the death of Caesar, Caesarism emerged triumphant.

I found especially interesting Greenblatt’s commentary on that hot mess, Coriolanus. He begins the section by observing that societies, like individuals, generally protect themselves from sociopaths. But sometimes they can’t.

He goes on to talk about how, yet again, though Shakespeare sets the play safely in the distant past, it appears to be addressing urgent and immediate affairs such as food shortages and bad harvests, exacerbated by rich landlords practicing enclosure of common lands. This play begins with a food riot, and as it progresses, it underscores the scorn that the wealthy hold for the common people as they connive and fight for power and more wealth.

When they have to address the common folk, “Just lie.”

Master of the oblique angle, Greenblatt states, Shakespeare was—in an age in which you could be drawn and quartered for writing political pamphlets, or even speaking out in the wrong place at the wrong time—able to get someone on stage and tell the two thousand listeners, some of whom were government agents, that “a dog’s obeyed in office.”

Shakespeare was against violence, especially state-organized violence, and while acknowledging that tyrants will rise, his plays breathe the conviction that the best chance for the recovery of collective decency lies in the political action of ordinary citizens.

Shakespeare may have lived in a time when it was dangerous to openly criticize the monarch or the government, but he became an expert at finding ways to bring political questions to the people anyway. By setting his plays in ancient Rome or Scotland, Shakespeare could use the fact that history always repeats itself to make people think about current times when he boldly criticized past leaders. In this same way, English teachers for generations have tried to draw correlations between Shakespeare and modern society to convince their students that literary classics still have relevance in the modern world.

In Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, Greenblatt examines the careers of several of Shakespeare's famous kings and leaders: Macbeth, King Lear, Richard III, Coriolanus. How did these men rise to power? Why did they receive help from followers who must have known what they would be like once they had risen to the throne? Shakespeare was interested in what mental or emotional triggers create and destroy tyrants and in this book Greenblatt summarizes each case history for us. It becomes obvious pretty quickly that what Greenblatt is interested in is holding Shakespeare's views on tyrants and tyranny up to today's political mirror. Without naming names, Greenblatt leaves the modern reader in no doubt what modern politician he is thinking of when he describes Shakespeare's tyrants.

While I would have been more interested in reading about Shakespeare's plays and how he used them to safely criticize politics in his own time, Greenblatt's Tyrant was still somewhat interesting. What I was left uncertain at the end was, what was Greenblatt's point? To hold Shakespeare's plays up as a mirror of life today? To show that the more things change the more they stay the same? Was the reader supposed to see how the general public can prevent tyrants from gaining the power and control they seek? Or was Greenblatt offering suggestions of literary paper topics to future students? The end result is an ok book, but not one that seems to contribute anything new to the study of Shakespeare's plays, his time, or our own.

Stephen Greenblatt's Tyrant is an absolute must-read—and I don't say that lightly. Yes, I can find something worthwhile in a great range of books of varying style and qualities. But Tyrant is a must read. Must. Read.

Greenblatt examines the characters of Shakespeare's tyrants, developing a sort of evolution of tyranny—one that speaks to current-day America. Tyrant is less a book for literary types and more a guidebook for the resistance. In the acknowledgements, Greenblatt explains this book's origins: "Not so very long ago, though it feels like a century has passed, I sat in a verdant garden in Sardinia and expressed my growing apprehensions about the possible outcome of an upcoming election. My historian friend Bernhard Jussen asked me what I was going to do about it. 'What can I do?' I asked. 'You can write something,' he said. And so I did." Indeed.

Greenblatt opens by observing, "Shakespeare grapples again and again with a deeply unsettling question: how is it possible for a whole country to fall into the hands of a tyrant?" Tyrant's chapter titles give us a sense of the answers Greenblatt finds as he pursues this question alongside Shakespeare: These include "Party Politics," "Fraudulent Populism," "A Matter of Character," "Enablers," "Madness in Great Ones," and "Resistable Rise."

Though Greenblatt is writing about 16th and 17th Century fictions, I felt as if I was reading a history of my own times. Shakespeare, he tells us, recognized the reality of class warfare: "Shakespeare carefully noted the strong current of contempt among the landed classes of his time for the the masses and for democracy as a viable political possibility. Populism looked like an embrace of the have-nots, but it was in reality a form of cynical exploitation." Sound familiar?

John Cade, a populist rabble-rouser, not just in the plays, but also in real life during the 15th Century. And the distance between the 15th and the 21st (2016 in particular) Centuries seems like the blink of an eye. Cade's promises to his followers are clearly absurd, but "The absurdity of these campaign promises is not an impediment to their effectiveness. On the contrary, Cade keeps producing demonstrable falsehoods about his origins and making wild claims about the great things he will do, and the crowds eagerly swallow them"—much as a swathe of the U.S. electorate cheered and embraced the idea of a cost-free wall separating two nations.

Greenblatt observes that under Cade's regime the fact that "the common people would lose even the very limited power they possess—the power expressed when they voted...—does not matter. For Cade's ardent supporters, the time-honored institutional system of representation is worthless. It has, they feel, never represented them. Their inchoate wish is to tear up all the agreements, cancel all the debts, and wreck all the existing institutions."

I could write about and quote from this title endlessly, but you'll be best served if you pick it up and read it for yourself. Don't let the "Shakespeare bit" intimidate you. While Greenblatt is perfectly capable of writing dense, theoretical prose, in Tyrant his voice is straightforward and lucid. This book will give you a framework for understanding the times we live in and will help you think of ways to resist these times.