The Tyrant: Special Edition
- ISBN-10
- 1717154654
- ISBN-13
- 9781717154651
- Series
- The Tyrant
- Pages
- 102
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2018-04-20
- Publisher
- Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
- Author
- Rafael Sabatini
Description
Adapted from Sabatini's long story, The Lust of Conquest, which appeared in the collection The Justice of the Duke. Like Sabatini's other work on Cesare Borgia this is a defense of the man who would serve as Macchiavelli's model for The Prince. The Tyrant is very evidently the work of a writer more familiar with the printed page than the stage. The play is filled with very elaborate descriptions of costumes, characters and scenes. Adapted from Sabatini's long story, The Lust of Conquest, which appeared in the collection The Justice of the Duke. Like Sabatini's other work on Cesare Borgia this is a defense of the man who would serve as Macchiavelli's model for The Prince. The Tyrant is very evidently the work of a writer more familiar with the printed page than the stage. The play is filled with very elaborate descriptions of costumes, characters and scenes. The gist of the play is that Cesare Borgia is threatening to capture the Castle of Solignola. Panthasilea Speranzoni, the daughter of the overlord, hatches a plot. Her idea is to seduce Borgia, then have him captured. They will then force Borgia to relinquish his lust of conquest of Solignola. The play is characteristically Sabatini in that there are plenty of turns and twists to the plot, and Borgia, being insightful and clever, is the just the kind of character Sabatini loved to write about. This is not a swashbuckling play but a drama of deviousness. I'm not going to suggest that The Tyrant ranks with the greatest of Shakespeare's plays. Nonetheless, there are some genuinely moving passages in this swiftly entertaining drama. And it is fascinating to watch Sabatini's mind at work as he revised drastically the story to the play, creating an entirely different ending for each.Rafael Sabatini was an Italian/British writer of novels of romance and adventure. He wrote short stories in the 1890s, and his first novel came out in 1902. It took Sabatini roughly a quarter of a century of hard work before he attained success with Scaramouche in 1921. This brilliant novel of the French Revolution became an international best-seller. It was followed by the equally successful Captain Blood in 1922. All of his earlier books were rushed into reprints, the most popular of which was The Sea Hawk from 1915. Sabatini was a prolific writer; he produced a new book approximately every year. While he perhaps didn't achieve the mammoth success of Scaramouche and Captain Blood, nonetheless Sabatini still maintained a great deal of popularity with the reading public through the decades that followed. The public knew that in picking up a Sabatini book, they could always count upon a good read, and his following was loyal and extensive. I'm not going to suggest that The Tyrant ranks with the greatest of Shakespeare's plays. Nonetheless, there are some genuinely moving passages in this swiftly entertaining drama. And it is fascinating to watch Sabatini's mind at work as he revised drastically the story to the play, creating an entirely different ending for each. (source: Jesse F. Knight) We are delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience
