Great writers and poets do more than tell stories. They recognise the spirit of an age before historians give it a name. They reveal how history is experienced by those living through it. Dickens revealed the social upheavals of industrial capitalism; Garcia Marquez the decay of exhausted political orders; Bulleh Shah the turbulence of an age of raiders; Habib Jalib the inequities of unchecked power; and Faiz hope in times of despair.
Their enduring greatness lies in illuminating the human condition at moments when one age is giving way to another. And, in their understanding that in such moments humanity must consciously decide what kind of future it wishes to create.
Seen this way, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet becomes more than a love story. It reveals the tremendous human cost of narrow tribal loyalties that outlive their times. Europe learned the lesson only after centuries of wars fought over territories such as Alsace-Lorraine, rivalries that disappeared within an integrated Europe.
Conflicts once regarded as permanent often become historically obsolete as societies reorganise themselves at higher levels of social and political integration. It is a lesson our own subcontinent has yet to learn despite crippling costs in terms of lives and resources.
Europe is not alone. Across the world, institutions such as ASEAN, the African Union and Mercosur reflect the same historical movement: building forums capable of managing growing economic and political interdependence. Alongside them, the UN, the WTO and the WHO recognise that humanity’s greatest challenges, such as wars, free trade, pandemics, poverty, malnutrition and climate change, can no longer be addressed by nations acting alone.
These institutions may be incomplete, contested, and flawed. Yet they point towards the direction of history: away from fragmented sovereignties and towards regional and global cooperation. The central political question of our time is therefore whether these institutions will be strengthened.
This brings us to Macbeth, which speaks more directly to our age than perhaps any other of Shakespeare’s plays. It embodies the human agony of an age in transition – a condition that Antonio Gramsci would later describe as an interregnum: when ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born’, when inherited certainties dissolve and new directions remain uncertain; an age in which the old seeks to preserve itself while the new struggles to emerge; a period of instability, eroding legitimacy, and destructive energies released into society.
In’ Macbeth’, the old order of warlords is giving way to centralised monarchy and unfettered markets, better suited to the emerging commercial society in Shakespeare’s times. Written during the consolidation of the monarchy under James I, after the weakening of warlords in the Wars of the Roses, the play reflects the historical transition from warlord politics to monarchy. Macbeth seizes power through the methods of the fading order – regicide – but discovers that violence does not create the legitimacy it destroys. It ruins him, revealing the terrible human cost of resisting history.
His coup carries an implicit warning against warlord disorder, against attempting to solve the problems of a new age with old methods.
Shakespeare understood something that historians would later explain more systematically: every age creates institutions appropriate to its own historical conditions. Tragedy follows when people attempt to preserve institutions whose historical purpose has passed, instead of building ones through which the new can be born.
With the US marking the 250th anniversary of its founding, there is perhaps no more appropriate moment to revisit this warning. Few periods in history have transformed the world as profoundly as the American century. Yet, in transforming the world, America also transformed the conditions under which power itself must now operate.
The paradox of modern capitalism, whose development America did so much to advance, is that it fragments societies even as it binds humanity together through worldwide production chains, finance, communications, migration and shared environmental risks. The more integrated the world becomes, the less its problems can be solved through rivalry or domination, and the more intense is the need for institutions of peace, democracy and civil society.
Here Shakespeare becomes uncannily contemporary. The modern Macbeth is any leader who believes that force can substitute for legitimacy, exclusion for belonging, and domination for renewal. Such leaders promise to restore a vanished order, yet often deepen the very fragmentation they claim to overcome.
Whether one sees echoes of Macbeth in Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Marine Le Pen or Javier Milei matters less than Shakespeare’s larger warning: every interregnum tempts societies to confuse the restoration of the past with the creation of the future. History rarely moves backwards. Yet the possibility of regression is never absent. The task of leaders and people alike is to strengthen the institutions through which the new will be born: institutions shaped by peace, democracy and civil society.
Based on the upcoming book In the Interregnum.
The writer is a freelance contributor. He can be reached at:
