From Richard III to Trump, Stephen Greenblatt on Shakespeare’s timeless warnings about ‘charismatic leaders’

Shakespearean lens on modern politics

In Tyrant, Greenblatt examined how Shakespeare’s plays portray the dangers of charismatic leaders and political manipulation — an analysis that feels eerily relevant in today’s world of media-driven populism.

When asked about these themes playing out in the present, he didn’t hold back. “You ask a painful question to my way of thinking because I think that we’re collectively — not just in my country, but in various countries around the world — in the grip of precisely a heightened… charisma, if that’s the right word for it. Mysterious charisma,” he said. “I often don’t get what’s exciting to people, but a charisma that’s linked to irresponsible, what I regard as politically irresponsible, behaviour.”

For Greenblatt, part of the problem is the media’s role in amplifying political fantasy and misinformation. “What we need, first and foremost, is modes of news media that are more reliable, that don’t allow the levels of fantasy and lie that we’ve all been exposed to now in our political lives.”

Shakespeare’s prescient warning

With US politics in a state of flux, after Trump was elected as the US president, when asked if this moment marks a cyclical return to tyranny or a new chapter in American history, Greenblatt’s response was steeped in Shakespearean insight. “I am a professor of literature, not a politician. I have my views, which are strong views about our political life, but I don’t have the platform in which I can declare with great confidence what the meaning of our historical moment is,” he said. “What I do feel is the force of Shakespeare’s brooding about why, how it comes about that a culture can fall into the hands of a catastrophic leader.”

And Shakespeare’s answer to that? Not assassination or coup d’état, but election.

“The elections would be partly real, partly fraudulent, but that’s how he imagined at least one form of disaster occurring. And I do think that that was a surprising and prescient aspect of his own thinking,” he said

Future of literature in the AI era

As AI and digital media transform the way we read and interpret texts, Greenblatt acknowledged that storytelling will evolve but remain central to human life.

“The need for stories will remain, but the way we produce and process stories will change and already is changing,” he said. “My hope is that we will not turn this deepest of human achievements and desires over simply to our machines. We will interact with our machines, but we’re not simply going to give up telling stories ourselves.”

And what would he say to a young person debating whether to study literature in an age where STEM dominates and culture primarily leans towards kitsch? “I don’t think, by the way, that that’s true,” he countered. “Knowing how to write, to think, to process complex matters, such as you learn when you study literature, is quite valuable — and valuable in surprising places: in medicine, in the treatment of people, or business.”

On the book currently on the scholar’s nightstand, Greenblatt revealed that he was reading Your Face Tomorrow, a trilogy by Spanish writer Javier Marías.

Modern quest for immortality

Greenblatt has also explored how Renaissance beliefs about the afterlife shaped culture. In Hamlet in Purgatory, he argued that the doctrine of purgatory allowed the living to negotiate with the dead, creating a system where wealth and power influenced the afterlife. When asked if today’s billionaires investing in life-extension technologies, cryonics, and legacy projects reflect a secularised version of purgatory, he found the idea fascinating.

“I would not have connected the desire for multiplying lifespans — 100 years, 200 years, 300 years — to purgatory. I would have connected it to a long-term literary desire to achieve immortality through writing,” he said. “Shakespeare has the dream that he understands he’ll die, but that his works will last forever. And other writers have had the same fantasy.”

He shared a surprising anthropological study of hunter-gatherers in the Philippines. When asked which members of their society were most valued, they didn’t name the best hunter or gatherer — but the storytellers.

“They measured the number of offspring these people had, and it turned out that the storytellers had more offspring than even the best hunters and gatherers,” he said. “The dream of extending life is a dream that has to do with two different things: One is symbolically through stories, and the other is through children.”