Tyrant

Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics- Stephen Greenblatt
W.W. Norton
Release Date: May 8, 2018

Rating:
📚📚

Synopsis: As an aging, tenacious Elizabeth I clung to power, a talented playwright probed the social causes, the psychological roots, and the twisted consequences of tyranny. In exploring the psyche (and psychoses) of the likes of Richard III, Macbeth, Lear, Coriolanus, and the societies they rule over, Stephen Greenblatt illuminates the ways in which William Shakespeare delved into the lust for absolute power and the catastrophic consequences of its execution.

Cherished institutions seem fragile, political classes are in disarray, economic misery fuels populist anger, people knowingly accept being lied to, partisan rancor dominates, spectacular indecency rules―these aspects of a society in crisis fascinated Shakespeare and shaped some of his most memorable plays. With uncanny insight, he shone a spotlight on the infantile psychology and unquenchable narcissistic appetites of demagogues―and the cynicism and opportunism of the various enablers and hangers-on who surround them―and imagined how they might be stopped. As Greenblatt shows, Shakespeare’s work, in this as in so many other ways, remains vitally relevant today.

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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.   

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review