‘What country, friends, is this?’ asks Viola at the start of Twelfth Night. She is shipwrecked and heartbroken; she does not know where she is, nor does she really care. Shakespeare is fascinated by strange places, and by how familiar places may become strange; how the world looks different if we look at it from an unexpected angle. But he also often returns to the opposite idea: that geographical and historical distance is ultimately trivial, and all places are the same. He sets a play in ancient Rome, but mentions a chiming clock. He sets a play in Venice, but none of the characters is aware of the canals. He is uninterested in difference. For Shakespeare, everything is here and now.
Stephen Greenblatt’s Tyrant plays a very Shakespearean game of seeing the present world from the perspective of the foreign. Greenblatt does not once in these pages name the current US president.
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