This is literary analysis at its finest and most lucid. You do not need to be familiar with Shakespeare’s plays to understand Greenblatt’s arguments. I only question Greenblatt’s faith in Shakespeare’s rendering of the ultimately mortal nature of tyranny. Not all tyrants rise and fall so precipitously, nor did the tyrants of Shakespeare’s era have the means of mass control they have now. North Korea is a good example of a dictatorship that just continues to persist despite the logical conclusion that its poor, starved masses should have just risen up long ago.