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The bard & the plague

Globe Theatre in London could bring down the curtain if the UK government did not inject $7 million to make up for the losses it has suffered because of the coronavirus

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Uttaran Das Gupta
5 min read Last Updated : May 23 2020 | 12:56 AM IST
Earlier this week, The Washington Post reported that the Globe Theatre in London  — one of the most popular destinations for the performances of William Shakespeare’s plays — could bring down the curtain if the UK government did not inject $7 million to make up for the losses it has suffered because of the coronavirus pandemic. The Globe, in the fashionable South Bank of the Thames, is a meticulous reproduction in oak of the original playhouse where most Shakespeare’s plays were first performed, and was burned down in 1613. The current theatre, which was conceptualised by American actor and director Sam Wanamaker, opened in 1997.

This would, however, not be the first time that the theatre was shut down due to an epidemic. Between 1592 and 1594, when the bubonic plague hit London, theatres were shut for a period of two years, writes Roland Mushat Frye in his book Shakespeare’s Life and Times: A Pictoral Record. In 1593, when the disease claimed 11,000 lives in London alone, bodies had to be disposed of in carts and buried en masse — like they have been in New York because of the Covid-19 pandemic, as reported by the Post. Frye writes: “(T)heatres were all ordered closed to prevent the spread of the disease through large congregation.”

The Guardian reports that Elizabethan doctors had no clue that the plague was spread by rat fleas. As theatres — along with brothels and bear-baiting areas — were regarded with suspicion because of lewdness and cross-dressing (only men were allowed on stage during Shakespeare’s times), they were the first to be shut. “The cause of plagues is sin, and the cause of sin is plays,” was a common phrase among religious preachers, made popular by one T White. A glimpse of all this — albeit in a humorous note — can be seen in the 1998 Oscar winner Shakespeare in Love. When the Puritans came to power after the English civil war in 1642, they banned theatres.  

Shakespeare died in 1616, but even during his lifetime, the plague forced the theatre to be shut down several times. During this forced break from work — something most of us have become familiar with in the past two months — Shakespeare turned his attention to writing long poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594). Both the poems are dedicated to his patron, Henry Wriothesley, the third Earl of Southampton. Frye speculates that “the reward which a patron such as Southampton would have given him for the two dedicated works probably helped Shakespeare weather the bad times”.  

But it was not only poetry, Shakespeare also apparently wrote some of his best theatrical work during a forced work from home. James Shapiro, in his book The Year of Lear, says that in 1606, during another lockdown because of the plague, Shakespeare churned out two of his most famous tragedies, King Lear and Macbeth, and also Antony and Cleopatra. The plague is also a significant plot point in Romeo and Juliet  — a messenger sent by Juliet to Romeo is quarantined because of the plague and cannot deliver a message to prevent a fatal misunderstanding at the end of the tragic play.

Of course, if all this is giving you anxiety about not finishing the novel you have been trying to write for years, well, calm down a little, will you? First, you are not Shakespeare. Second, this lockdown is not necessarily the best time to get cracking. Novelist Amitav Ghosh recently predicted that there might be a “huge wave of novels about the pandemic”. He has not predicted anything about their quality, but one wonder if, having lived through and hopefully survived, we would have any appetite for such books. Would it not be like watching a movie about a plane crash during a turbulence?

Last summer, I found myself in London with a rather generous fellowship for journalists, and one of my first pilgrimages was to the Globe. (There was also an official visit later and also the treat of watching a show of Richard II, with an all-woman cast.) I took a bus from Euston to St Paul’s, and walked across the bridge. It was a sunny day and the South Bank was full of Londoners and tourists, in cafes and bars, or simply strolling about.

The shadow of Brexit had shrunk in the glare of the midday sun. A group of schoolchildren were giggling loudly in French in the queue to enter the theatre. And only a few metres away, near a graffiti of the Bard in psychedelic background sat a poet on a folding chair with a typewriter on a folding table in front of him. A handwritten cardboard sign declared the price of poems composed to order: “£2!” As I walked past him, the poet seemed to be dozing, his eyes shut behind dark glass. Could he have imagined the pandemic? Could he have written: “The infectious pestilence did reign”?

All this is now a photograph in my memory from BC (Before Covid).   

The writer’s novel, Ritual, was published last month

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Topics :CoronavirusWilliam ShakespeareShakespeareUK govt

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