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
[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"
An incisive and instructive study of personality politics and the abuse of power--topical literary criticism with classical virtues.-- "Kirkus Reviews"
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"
Compelling literary history and analysis.-- "Booklist"
Elegant and deftly written.--Eliot A. Cohen "Washington Post"
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"
Offers a canny parallel to contemporary political concerns...Full of insight, both for lovers of literature and for students of history and politics.-- "Publishers Weekly"
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