Even the most explicitly political contemporary approaches to
Shakespeare have been uninterested by his tyrants as such. But for
Shakespeare, rather than a historical curiosity or psychological
aberration, tyranny is a perpetual political and human problem.
Mary Ann McGrail's recovery of the playwright's perspective
challenges the grounds of this modern critical silence. She locates
Shakespeare's expansive definition of tyranny between the
definitions accepted by classical and modern political philosophy.
Is tyranny always the worst of all possible political regimes, as
Aristotle argues in his Politics? Or is disguised tyranny, as
Machiavelli proposes, potentially the best regime possible? These
competing conceptions were practiced and debated in Renaissance
thought, given expression by such political actors and thinkers as
Elizabeth I, James I, Henrie Bullinger, Bodin, and others. McGrail
focuses on Shakespeare's exploration of the conflicting and
contradictory passions that make up the tyrant and finds that
Shakespeare's dramas of tyranny rest somewhere between Aristotle's
reticence and Machiavelli's forthrightness. Literature and politics
intersect in Tyranny in Shakespeare, which will fascinate students
and scholars of both.
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