How is it possible for a whole country to fall into the hands of a tyrant?

That's a deeply unsettling question that Shakespeare grappled with again and again.

And he's not alone.

From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.

I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folgers director.

What you just heard comes from a new book by the eminent Shakespeare scholar, Stephen Greenblatt.

Professor Greenblad is the creator of a branch of literary criticism that has come to be called New Historicism.

As he said during a recent talk here at the Folger,

new historicists use the passions of the present as a way to illuminate and encounter the past.

And that's exactly what he's done in his newest book, which is called Tyrant. The book looks

at Shakespeare's Richard III, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Jack Cade from Henry

the Sixth, Part 2, and a little bit of Lear and Leontes, to explore tyranny. How societies allow

it to pop up, along with how and why Shakespeare might have been using its depiction in his

work to stir the audiences of his time.

But something else is clear.

This new historicist is also using the past to work out his own questions about our world

today.

Stephen Greenblatt came in recently to talk about all of this with us.

We call this podcast, He affects tyrannical power. Stephen Greenblatt is interviewed by Barbara

Bogaine. I thought we'd start with a simple question that is deceptively complex. So how does Shakespeare

define the term tyrant? There is a simple answer, which is that he doesn't define it. Shakespeare in general is not

much for definitions. Every once in a while, for a very obscure word he tries to give one. But he

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