Literary Review

Stephen Greenblatt’s ardent and involving new book is concerned with rulers and aspirants in Shakespeare who abuse their power. It draws attention to a very wide range of characters. There are the out-and-out villains, best typified by Richard III, the nonpareil power-grabber, King Lear’s sadistic and vindictive daughters Goneril and Regan and the rather more crudely drawn butchers of Titus Andronicus. But then there are more complex, puzzling figures. There is Lear himself, the king turned fool, unleashing chaos in his realm for the sake of an egoistic game of Who Loves Me Most? There is the curiously ineffectual Coriolanus, who marches back and forth between cities in a perpetual strop