Stephen Greenblatt: “Shakespeare is like an enormous planet Jupiter”
The author of ‘Dark Renaissance’ on how he arrived at New Historicism, his fascination with Shakespeare and The Bard’s enduring popularity, and why reading him helps us understand our times
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?
If you went to England as a visitor from Florence, Rome, or Venice in the 1570s or 1580s and asked, “Who are the great artists? The answer would be nobody. Great scientists? Nobody. Great poets? Nobody.” Or they would have said William Warner or Nicholas Grimald – names you won’t have heard of, and that’s because the culture was virtually dormant. After all, people had their heads chopped off for the preceding 50 years every time the regime changed. By the late 1580s, it was exploding with amazing things.
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.
