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Hindustan Times
17-05-2025
- General
- Hindustan Times
Stephen Greenblatt: 'Shakespeare is like an enormous planet Jupiter'
How did you arrive at the theory of New Historicism, which you espoused in the 1987 essay, Towards A Poetics of Culture? When I was at the university, the overwhelmingly dominant approach to literature and culture was via New Criticism, which I had a deep immersion into. We were told that we shouldn't be interested in anything outside the text. I remember reading Alexander Pope, and coming across an extremely misogynistic and unpleasant reference to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. And I said, 'Who is Lady Mary Worley Montagu?' I was told that wasn't a relevant question. In the 1960s, after I graduated from Yale, I went to Cambridge on a grant, and one of my teachers was Raymond Williams. I'd never encountered a Marxist nor had I encountered anyone before who had a powerful, vital sense of a world outside the text. That vital sense had a huge influence upon me. When I returned to graduate school and to Berkeley to teach, it seemed crucially important to read the texts and understand the world in which they were participating. This did not seem to me a betrayal of literature but quite the opposite. What I always wanted to do was love the work, care about it, and understand it better. And I still feel that way as I look back on my 50-year career. Tell me about your fascination with Shakespeare. In Will in the World, you call him a 'person who wrote the most important body of imaginative literature of the last thousand years.' My love for Shakespeare started fairly late. I remember being 13 years old and having my junior high school teacher teach As You Like It, and I hated it. I thought this was the worst thing I'd ever encountered. But then somewhat later than that, still in high school, I had a teacher who taught us King Lear, which is a crazy thing to teach high school kids. What I most remember is that this incredibly wise teacher once said 'I don't understand a certain portion of the play'. And none of my teachers had ever said that. And the fact there was an enigma that he couldn't understand had a powerful effect on me for reasons I can't explain. As an undergraduate I did not take a Shakespeare course, and as a graduate student I wrote on Raleigh, not on Shakespeare. And yet Shakespeare is like an enormous planet Jupiter, and it just slowly pulls everything that's floating around closer and closer to the centre. Beyond Shakespeare, why does Renaissance fascinate you? A lot of it is not because of Shakespeare, but because of Christopher Marlowe, a crazy person murdered at 29, who had the mad courage to break the mould and start doing things. I'm interested in moments in which something breaks the mould, in which things happen. If you suddenly think of why, in the 15th century in Italy, there was one genius after another doing unbelievable things, it's partly competitive, and partly they echo each other. I'm fascinated by how culture does that; why it turns a corner. How did you stumble upon the story of the Florentine book hunter, Poggio Braccionlini and his discovery of the 500-year-old copy of Lucretius' The Nature of Things, which you argue paved the way for modernity in your book, The Swerve? The immediate occasion that led me to write The Swerve was an academic conference I attended in Scotland. The assignment was to write about when an ancient work returned to circulation. I had discovered Lucretius' De rerum natura in translation when I was a student at Yale. The paperback cover had a provocative painting by the surrealist Max Ernst, and I bought it for 10 cents. A poem about ancient physics does not seem ideal for summer reading, but I did end up reading it, and I thought about how it radically suggested a secular world view, including a universe made up of little atoms. So, at the conference, I chose to think about the person who recovered Lucretius' poem, and I thought, who's this odd book hunter, a papal secretary? He seems to be a very strange character. In your book Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, you comment on contemporary politics, including on Donald Trump. How can reading Shakespeare help us understand Trump's return to the presidency? Often, Shakespeare asks himself, 'How can a country fall into the hands of a catastrophic leader? And he thinks the principal answer is election, not assassination. This is the whole point about Richard the Third, who only becomes what he is because enough people support him. Donald Trump is not Superman who miraculously has so many powers. He has to have many people who feel they have a stake in what is being done and want it to be done. The question is, why should you think about literature in this context? The reason is that great literature, Shakespeare's plays being an example, tend to show the complicated, mixed motives that lead to catastrophes of this kind. During your session at the Jaipur Literature Festival, you mentioned feeding Shakespeare's reading list to a Large Language Model. What was your experiment about and what is your stand on AI? Shakespeare at the end of his life was reading Cervantes' Don Quixote, the first and possibly greatest novel ever written, and he wrote a play based on an episode in Don Quixote called Cardenio. It's lost (An adaptation of the play called Double Falsehood was found later). So, I wrote a version (performed in Kolkata in 2007) based on Double Falsehood and I thought it would be fun, just as an experiment, to see what happened if you fed the play into AI and say, 'Write Cardenio'. It will almost certainly fail to give us something truly powerful because AI is not human. It doesn't have the craziness that human beings have, but also because there are guardrails built into AI so it can't be misogynistic, or homophobic. It's actually difficult to write a Shakespeare play without crossing all kinds of lines. That's the nature of plays that they're full of offence. I asked the same AI model to do a version of Taming The Shrew that wasn't misogynistic, and it erased virtually the entire play. You speak of loving a work of literature, but lately, cancel culture has overpowered this narrative. Walter Benjamin, the great German critic, said, 'Every monument of civilization is a monument of Barbarism'. If you look hard at Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, you realize it's complicit in horrendous colonial acts in Ireland, but you must love the poetry simultaneously. Understand that if you don't have an aesthetic appreciation or if you simply hate it, you're missing 9/10ths of what matters. I want to tell my students, 'I want you to have some reason to believe that the works are worth spending time with.' When you love them, you and others will feel some resonance inside you while reading them. It's also difficult to have your mind in two or three places simultaneously, but that's the whole point. It's a point that goes back to the Iliad or the Odyssey. The works of art that most matter put you in this uncomfortable position of having your mind in multiple places simultaneously. My teacher, Harold Bloom called Shakespeare God. He attacked what I was doing because he said I was the Chief of the School of Resentment. But I don't hate the works. I love them, but I also want to understand what they're complicit in. Kanika Sharma is an independent journalist.
The Independent
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Decolonising Shakespeare makes no sense for this simple reason...
No question: something is 'rotten in the state of Denmark' when one of Britain's redtops splashes on its front page with WOKEO & JULIET in 60-point caps. What's going on? Ostensibly against 'trigger warnings' at the Globe, this broadside comes in the contemporary context of a wider and more bitter row about Shakespeare 's canon. For some years now, there's been a steady drumbeat within education for a refocusing of the curriculum, to 'teach Shakespeare differently'. Or, in the weasel words of one teacher, 'to teach students, through literature, to challenge the status quo.' This week, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, a well-meaning research and promotional institute, announced that it was to 'decolonise its museum collections' to tackle the claim that the playwright's legacy promotes 'white supremacy'. It feels something like Woke's Last Stand. Mind-to-mind combat between the crusty, 'tosh'-spouting defenders of a hallowed literary tradition versus (as they see it) the doctrinaire enemies of Shakespeare, the 'universal' genius, led by Helen Hopkins of Birmingham University who wrote the latest decolonisation report. All this is – as the poet himself might have put it – 'hot ice and wondrous strange snow'. Adventures first; explanations second. Shakespeare himself would view this brouhaha with a sceptical, slightly mystified expression. As the most famous and successful playwright of Elizabethan England, he's the most semi-detached author imaginable, certainly by 21st-century standards, never troubled by book prizes, literary festivals or X. Not that he was any kind of slacker. Every day of his adult working life must have been devoted either to running The Globe, and writing two or more plays a year, together with poetry such as his 'Sugar'd Sonnets' for his aristocratic and royal patrons. Nevertheless, it was not until he was well into the second decade of his career that he paid much attention to the printed editions of his work. These quartos, in turn, were slow to identify 'W Shakspere'. As Stephen Greenblatt, author of Will in the World, has put it, Shakespeare always wrote 'as if he thought there were more interesting (or at least more dramatic) things in life to do than write plays'. There is, however, no getting away from Shakespeare's absolute supremacy as a poet and playwright. Even Ben Jonson, his most assiduous rival, was forced to concede, on the publication of the First Folio in 1623, that his great contemporary was the 'soul of the age'. Later, it would be the high Victorian poet Matthew Arnold who pronounced that 'Others abide our question, thou art free.' Sorry, but at the Birthplace Trust, he's not. And here's the thing: this is not new, not by a long chalk. He has been 'cabin'd, cribbed, confined' before, always vulnerable to the 'whirligig of time'. The first 200 years of his afterlife are marked by successive outbreaks of interference, first from the Puritan revolution which drove his works underground and next from another generation of prudes and bowdlerisers for whom the perceived coarse vulgarity of his work was offensive. In mood, if not in substance, the latest woke chapters of Birmingham University would find lots to discuss with Nahum Tate, an Irish playwright who, notoriously, devised a happy ending for King Lear in which Cordelia gets married to Edgar. Nor was Tate alone. The poet laureate John Dryden also conceived The Enchanted Isle as a 'comedy' version of The Tempest. In this context, the 'decolonisers' merely want to view these plays through a narrow lens. It's inevitable that some of their more untethered comments will provoke the rage of Middle England. But to Professor James Shapiro, the bestselling American Shakespeare scholar, these disrupted times mark a season of intense and timely renewal. 'Shakespeare is being embraced. What's happening is exciting. Right now we're going through a period where race matters,' he says. 'To those who are complaining, and are disturbed by the current focus, I'd give it 10 years.' Indeed, on the London stage, some of the so-called decolonisers' concerns have already been addressed by innovative young directors. In 2024, the sell-out Donmar production of Macbeth starred Cush Jumbo as Lady Macbeth, with colour-blind casting throughout the ensemble. The Globe never misses an opportunity to reinterpret and reframe his works through a progressive lens. But considering Shakespeare's honoured place before audiences in China and Japan, the Middle East, North and South America, and most of Europe, it's hard not to conclude that there is a distressingly 'Little England' tenor to some of the decolonisers' arguments. Further, the strictures of identity politics towards some RSC and NT productions ignore the degree to which non-English audiences revere some of our productions precisely because they are so quintessentially English. The poet WH Auden used to say that it was the business of our writers to 'commune with the dead', to engage in a dialogue with the creative past. Shakespeare himself communed with Spenser and Marlowe; followed by Milton, Johnson, Pope, Keats, and Coleridge all in thrall to Shakespeare. It's a trend that's gone on to the present day. Once we cease to treasure a dialogue with the dead, we run the risk of finding ourselves in a morgue. To my mind, there's something well-meaning, but misguided, about this decolonisation initiative that is fundamentally at odds with who and what William Shakespeare was as an artist. He was a very clever man, and a writer of genius (not necessarily the same thing) who was very lucky. Despite some perilous politics, he was never racked, or seriously threatened. Besides, no one could ever ask him to withdraw from, or betray, his own self because no one knew where to find it – and he wasn't saying. Always the Zen master of 'negligent ambiguity', Iago's 'demand me nothing' hints at the fiery solitude of the poet's mind for whom close personal scrutiny was no laughing matter. He remained a writer, a true artist, never in thrall to one kind of politics, identity or otherwise. Instead, he ingested the enthralling variety of the world around him. His spirit as an omnivore makes him uniquely seductive, and innately slippery: witty, sophisticated, wise and – from page to page – the most wonderful company. He would have been mystified by these decolonisers. His immense gifts were part of himself, and that self was never mortgaged, banged up, or bankrupted. It's as if, very early, Will Shakespeare took an oath of loyalty to his calling and its craft. He would never perjure that vow. He did not have to: his commitment to that precious gift, his 'imagination' and its free traffic, made him a free man, in a very English way.
