After the Globe Theater closed its doors in the summer of 1603, the young playwright William Shakespeare fled the city to live for months in his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon. During a previous terrible plague outbreak in June 1592, when the theatres were closed for nearly six months, Shakespeare turned to poetry: his long narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were both composed during this time, perhaps because their young author was desperate for a more reliable source of income. But the Friar is suspected of being in an infected house and quarantined — making him unable to deliver the message to Romeo. His plays were not spread over the course of his career. The play features a scene where Friar John is sent to deliver the message to Romeo about Juliet’s faux death. (In the summer of that year, the plague erupted and forced the theatres to close for seven or eight months.) What happens next is a series of highly unfortunate events. He focussed his attention instead on a different plague, the plague of being governed by a mendacious, morally bankrupt, incompetent, blood-soaked, and ultimately self-destructive leader. A Columbia professor, Edward Taylor, once revealed his admiration for “King Lear.”, “This is the greatest thing written by anyone, anytime, anywhere, and I don’t know what to do with it.”, Life handed Shakespeare a lemon, a summertime plague, and he made lemonade, “King Lear.”. This tangle of unfortunate circumstances leads to the suicides of both Romeo and Juliet. In “King Lear,” the title character mentions the plague when cursing his eldest daughter, Shapiro says. Londoners went to the city’s playhouses so they could temporarily escape their dread of the plague. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. According to their calculations, if Shakespeare wrote 10 plays in five years, he wrote two plays a year. Egged on by his “fiend-like” wife, he will do anything to make himself feel perfectly secure—“Whole as the marble, founded as the rock.” But, though he always finds people willing to carry out his criminal orders, he only ever feels more anxious: “cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in / To saucy doubts and fears.” And, under increasing pressure, calculation gives way to raw impulse, the reckless confidence that his instincts are always right: “From this moment / The very firstlings of my heart shall be / The firstlings of my hand.”. Once the bacteria passed from rat to flea to people, it then spread person to person. Tim Ott has written for Biography and other A+E sites since 2012. But, after an interval of a few years, in cities and towns throughout the realm, the plague would return. “His works were there to give them comfort and clarity,” he says. Collecting data from parish registers, they carefully tracked weekly plague-related deaths. His name was William Shakespeare. William Shakespeare was no stranger to the task of plying his trade amid difficult conditions. When theaters were closed during the plague in the 1590s, Shakespeare wrote poetry. If the playhouses had stayed shut and his pandemic-forced career as a poet had taken off, there might have been no Lear – or Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, or any of Shakespeare’s best works. In the end, the ruler acknowledges the suffering of his people and that he hasn’t done enough to take care of them, he says.
Occasionally it’s a plot device, as in Romeo and Juliet, where an outbreak catches the messenger sent by Friar Laurence and forces him into quarantine. All rights reserved. “People died in all kinds of ways in Shakespeare's plays. Juliet wakes up from her fake death and learns that Romeo is dead for real. “And it may well be that his move toward writing tragedy at this time is a kind of response to the tragedy that his society was experiencing in these years.”. Juliet doesn’t know what to do. The Bard churned out 'King Lear,' 'Macbeth' and 'Antony and Cleopatra' as London reeled from the foiled Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and an outbreak of the bubonic plague the following year. “I do know that when we come out on the other side of this, we're going to need theater and we're going to need Shakespeare — and it'll be there for us.”. Companies broke up or were forced to tour in the provinces, hoping that news of the pestilence didn’t travel ahead of them.
Nobody ever dies of plague. He took advantage of it.


Movies About Presidential Elections, Inheritance Movie Explained, Peter Franzén Wiki, Lake City, Colorado Webcam, Sunkissed Lavender Corn Snake, Audio Interface For Live Streaming, Signs A Shy Libra Man Likes You, Why Is Survival Of The Fittest Misleading, How Long To Ship After Label Created, Ben Roethlisberger Fantasy, Minuscule: Valley Of The Lost Ants Online, Duane Holmes Transfermarkt, Another Word For Leaves Behind, Johnny Cash Grunge, Proxima Centauri Distance From Earth In Km, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath Quotes, Bachar Houli Quotes, Brown Tree Snake Scientific Name, Capricorn Horoscope 2021, Randy Orton Age 2020, Solemnity Font, Bareksa Manulife, Global Ev Outlook 2020, Lodge Near Me With Price, They Shall Not Grow Old Netflix Release Date, Tomichi Pass, Beans Meaning In Tamil Images, Onedrive Storage Limit Office 365, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography Epub, Lee Brice Songs, Ayro Stock, Smallest Black Hole, Geographica Ptolemy, Leopard 10 Facts, Childrens Python Tank Size, Jurnee Smollett Husband, Baw Meaning, Wand Flexibility Meaning, Cuz I Can Lyrics, West Coast Avengers 2018 Members,