Description: World-renowned Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt explores the playwright's insight into bad (and often mad) rulers.
Brief description: Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. A leading scholar of English Renaissance literature, he serves as general editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and The Norton Shakespeare. He is the author of fourteen books, including Dark Renaissance and the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning The Swerve.
Review Quotes: 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