Shakespeare Is Like An Enormous Planet Jupiter

On why reading The Bard helps us understand our times better

- Kanika Sharma

Can you tell us a bit 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. As a graduate student, I wrote on Raleigh, not on Shakespeare. And yet Shakespeare is like an enormous planet Jupiter, and it slowly pulls everything that's floating around closer and closer to the centre.

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?

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 of