Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Stephen Greenblatt

Quote by Stephen Greenblatt

Work

Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt is a renowned literary critic born on November 7, 1943. His research focuses on Renaissance literature, particularly the works of Shakespeare. Known for his innovative research methods and interdisciplinary approach, Greenblatt has had a profound impact on the field of literary criticism. more

You May Also Like

“As with modern totalitarian regimes, people developed techniques for speaking in code, addressing at one or more removes what most mattered to them. But it was not only caution that motivated Shakespeare's penchant for displacement. He seems to have grasped that he thought more clearly about the issues that preoccupied his world when he confronted them not directly but from an oblique angle. His plays suggest that he could best acknowledge the truth- to possess it fully and not perish of it- through the artifice of fiction or through historical distance.”

PoliticsShakespeareHenriad
Book:Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics
Create image

“A succession of murders clears the field of most of the significant impediments, actual or potential, to Richard's seizing power. But it is striking that Shakespeare does not envisage the tyrant's climactic accession to the throne as the direct result of violence. To solicit a popular mandate, Richard conducts a political campaign, complete with a fraudulent display of religious piety, the slandering of opponents, and a grossly exaggerated threat to national security.”

PoliticsShakespeareHenriad
Book:Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics
Create image

“This ad in the middle was placed by some arm of the G-5-to-be, trying to round up a few 're-education' experts. Vital, vital stuff. Teach the German Beast about the Magna Carta, sportsmanship, that sort of thing, eh? Out inside the works of some neurotic Bavarian cuckoo clock of a village, were-elves streaking in out of the forests at night to leave subversive handbills at door and window—'Anything!' Roger groping back to his narrow quarters, 'anything at all's better than this. . . .”

SportsmanshipMagna CartaThat Sort Of ThingGerman Beast
Book:Gravity’s Rainbow
Create image