“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.” “His works were there to give them comfort and clarity,” he says. He stayed in the city because he understood his job as an artist was to help people come out of difficult periods when the theaters reopened, Shapiro says.ĭespite the uncertainty in the theater world right now, Shapiro is sure Shakespeare will still be there when the crisis ends - like he stuck around for the people of London during his lifetime. What strikes Shapiro about Shakespeare and the bubonic plague is the playwright never fled London. “It may be too much to hope that our national leaders and international leaders right now may have a similar response: feel that they, too, have taken too little care of the social problems that are under the magnifying glass right now,” he says. 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. The character King Lear is changed throughout the course of the play. In “King Lear,” the title character mentions the plague when cursing his eldest daughter, Shapiro says. “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.” English actor and producer John Gielgud on the throne in a production of Shakespeare's 'King Lear'. “These plays really bear the mark of living through such a terrible experience,” he says. A 1603 outbreak killed over a fifth of Shakespeare’s fellow Londoners and the plague returned again in 1610, he says.ĭuring and after the worst outbreaks of his lifetime, Shakespeare wrote some of his greatest works: “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” “Antony and Cleopatra,” “Coriolanus” and “Timon of Athens." In the early 1600s, more bubonic plague outbreaks struck and shuttered the doors of London’s Globe Theatre. “So the few times that he does mention plague, mostly in his tragedies, it hits with incredible force.” “People died in all kinds of ways in Shakespeare's plays. Now, he predicts artists will write about this pandemic in their diaries and it will take time before people want to go see movies about pandemics again. This use of the plague is “terrifying” in part because Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights seldom wrote about the subject, Shapiro says. British actors Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting join hands in 'Romeo and Juliet'. “That would have been lived experiences for Londoners just coming out of what I hope we'll be coming out of quite soon, but a far more lethal pandemic” than the coronavirus, he says. But the Friar is suspected of being in an infected house and quarantined - making him unable to deliver the message to Romeo. The play features a scene where Friar John is sent to deliver the message to Romeo about Juliet’s faux death. In “Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare uses the plague as source material.
Theatres closed for 14 months and 10,000 Londoners died, says Columbia University professor and author James Shapiro. A year or so before Shakespeare wrote “Romeo and Juliet,” a powerful plague struck London in 1593. Waves of the bubonic plague killed at least a third of the European population across centuries. The legendary playwright’s life was shaped by the plague. The pair barricaded themselves inside to protect their 3-month-old son - William Shakespeare. (Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images) This article is more than 1 year old.ĭuring the 16th century, a young couple in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, lost two of their children to the bubonic plague. A portrait of William Shakespeare is pictured in London on March 9, 2009.
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