Perhaps our best teacher on the nature of power – how it is acquired, exercised, and lost – is none other than William Shakespeare. An incisive observer of human nature, Shakespeare educates us on the qualities that make a successful leader and warns how power can corrupt a leader’s moral compass. Four centuries after his death, Shakespeare’s plays continue to inspire and relate to a 21st-century audience, and we can learn more about our contemporary political leaders through the lens of his characters.

The 1990s found agrarian societies in Pakistan undergoing profound transitions, not unlike the American South in the first part of the twentieth century. William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” captures the stark confrontation between waning Southern aristocracy (the Compson family) and the ascendant middle class represented by the Snopes family.