Let’s take the long view. To study Shakespeare’s works and the literature of the English Renaissance is to look back from these texts’ vantage points to those of antiquity, to trace the ways Renaissance writers reworked and remixed the values, literary forms, and philosophies of Greece and Rome in the context of Protestant Christianity, expanding trade and exploration, and a nascent empire. Yet to study this period’s literature and culture asks also that we look forward to the modern and to the ways these monumental works of the English language anticipate, influence, and serve novel purposes in and for a more secular culture and advancing empire. In this broader view of history, stretching some two millennia back and more than four centuries forward, we reckon with hope at vastly different scales that offer us, at turns, both consolation and utter despair. From this extended perspective, we see hope’s radical fluctuations, responding to devastating plague, the horrors of world wars and colonization, and the many triumphs of the human spirit. Throughout, one quality remains consistent: the power of narrative to shape and reshape experience, to offer consolation, and to supply some hope at scale.

King Lear, perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, traces a curious path through time. The drama, like all durable works of literature, arrives to us not merely from its moment of publication in 1608; rather, this narration of the decline of the patriarch into senility as he “unburden’d crawls toward death” looks markedly different over four centuries. Set in the 8th-century BC, the play appears first in print as the True Chronicle History of King Lear, then fifteen years later as the Tragedy, then back to a genre history for the remainder of the century. It is at the close of the seventeenth century that Nahum Tate set to change more than the titular genre: he worked also to rewrite Lear’s catastrophic fifth act filled with despair, death, and utter hopelessness so that audiences and readers would be left in a more bearable and happier state. Life replaces death and loves reunites families. Tate’s version dominated the page and stage from the 1680s to the start of the twentieth century. The Tragedy of King Lear was too great a burden. But it’s narrative’s trajectory could be altered.

Think of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and its lead character Prospero, an educated sorcerer and sometime avatar for Shakespeare deposed and exiled from his post as Duke of Milan to an island sparsely inhabited, an island conjured by the London commercial theater as something of a mixture of the mediterranean and the Caribbean. Upon arriving to the island with his daughter Miranda, Prospero frees the trapped spirit Ariel, trading his physical freedom for indentured servitude. Caliban, the only other “human form” at the start of the play, preceded Prospero, having arrived via his Algerian sorcerer mother Sycorax sometime before. Prospero enslaves Caliban, and Caliban in turn gives poetic voice to the pains of the colonized and enslaved subjects whose numbers increase exponentially after the play’s publication in 1623. Prospero’s name gives us a version of hope. From the Latin spero meaning ‘hope’ we derive a sense of expectation and abundance: ‘to prosper’. Yet it is Caliban’s rebellious defiance and deep eloquence on the plight of the enslaved and colonized that granted prosperous hope to many in the decolonial period we continue to inhabit. Think Aime Cesaire’s 1969 A Tempest, a rewriting of Shakespeare’s drama from the perspective of the world’s Calibans. His story has served to inspire those stripped by various European empires of their language, culture, religion, freedom, family to assert their human dignity and reject a narrative of righteous subjugation. Narrative change is not material change: It neither liberates the enslaved nor feeds the starving. Nor still are these two essential modes divorced from one another. To alter the material conditions requires an altered sense of possibility: a narrative of hope, however limited.

One influential German-born philosopher of history repeated and modified his predecessor in observing that all great persons and facts in history occur twice: first as tragedy and then as farce. The subjects of this commentary were Emperor Napoleon, whom the elder philosopher Hegel witnessed arrive in the city of Jena with world-historical force, giving way to his nephew the inept bourgeois King Napoleon, whom Marx, the younger philosopher, derided for his essential tackiness. The exalted followed by the petite; the grand genre then the common. If tragedy for these thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries operated by means of a noble and fated necessity working toward ultimate catastrophe, farce leaned on mere accident, a bumbling from one act to the next. In our own era we might try on this formula to see if we can find footing in the delirious experience of living through historical rupture. Working through the second Trump administration prompts me to reverse the sequence of history’s genres, as from where I stand I see the stuff of tragedy replacing initial farce. The threat to universities, the humanities, to my hopes for a stable career and home feels ever more tragically overwhelming, a Lear-like catastrophe without comfort. 

I’ve taken some license in remixing the historical formula. After all, reworking the narrative is a mechanism of hope even and especially when hope feels depleted. I’m enough of an historian to hold deep skepticism of the seduction of grand narratives. And yet I’m also a literary theorist, clinging tightly to my belief in narrative as strategy. Stanford’s own Francis Fukuyama prematurely pronounced the end of history at the close of the Cold War to declare the victory of Western ideology over Communist forms. I’ll follow the lead instead of Sun Ra, the great Afro-futurist pioneer and prophet from Saturn, when he chidingly reminded audiences in the 1970s “It’s after the end of the world. Don’t you know that yet?” History, tragedy, farce, catastrophe, comedy. Given enough time and resources we’ll make new narratives of hope when all seems lost, after the end of the world. May that be some consolation, a useful strategy at least.