---

´Brilliant´ Sunday Times

How does a truly disastrous leader - a sociopath, a demagogue, a tyrant - come to power? How, and why, does a tyrant hold on to power? And what goes on in the hidden recesses of the tyrant´s soul?

For help in understanding our most urgent contemporary dilemmas, William Shakespeare has no peer.´Brilliant, timely´ Margaret Atwood, on Twitter´A scintillating book, uncannily illuminating about current politics, as perceptive about the victims of tyranny as it is about the tyrants themselves´ Nicholas Hytner

---

"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

---

Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of twelve books, including The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, which won the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, as well as the New York Times bestseller Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare and the classic university text Renaissance Self-Fashioning.

He is General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and of The Norton Shakespeare, and has edited seven collections of literary criticism.

---