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தினமணி நாளிதழில் 21.05.2020 அன்று
“நோய்த்தொற்றும் ஷேக்ஸ்பியர் சிந்தனையும்”
என்ற தலைப்பில்
வெளியான கட்டுரையின்
ஆங்கில மொழியாக்கம்.
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Views of Shakespeare on Pandemic
Dr. N. Arul,
Director (Translation),
Chennai.
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Shakespeare has mentioned the methods of living alongwith the widespread pandemic. He had responded to the pestilence in his own style, by satirizing the social and gender differences of the people as the virus destroys everything.
Shakespeare, the son of a glove manufacturer survived various pandemics. Majority of his writings were born out of the public lockdown. Shakespeare wrote the play ‘King Lear’ during the quarantine of a pandemic.
There was a close relation between Shakespeare’s life and pandemic spread. Shakespeare wrote his famous erotic plays in 1592-93 when the theatres were closed due to a viral spread.
The coronation ceremony of Prince James I of Britain, as a king was gridlocked in 1603-04 due to the pandemic. Satirizing the corrupt government employees Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” emerged when the pandemic took over the lives of the people of London at the ratio of 5:1.
In 1606, during spring, when the pandemic was at its peak, Shakespeare must had been involved with the play “King Lear”, because the first performance was at the palace of Whitehall, London – the residing place of King Tudor and Stewart.
Though the seriousness of the disease has faded away with time, the diction of the play must have shivered the audiece. Lear shouted at his daughter Regan and her husband Cornwall, “Vengeance, plague, death, confusion,” and berates her as “a plague-sore or embossed carbuncle / in my corrupted blood.”
“Plague-sore” refers to the inflamed lymph glands that were such a feared symptom of the disease — it’s not something any parent should wish on their child. Perhaps the play’s particular violence on the younger generation allegorizes that of the plague itself: The disease was most rampant among those in their 20s and 30s.
Shakespeare seems to have been able largely to shut out his immediate context. Though the plague existed everywhere, it was found nowhere in his work. In the language of “King Lear” and other plays it is ubiquitous — but otherwise it’s almost entirely absent.
Men and women, to be sure, die in any number of inventive ways. In “Othello,” Desdemona is smothered in her bed. Ophelia in ‘Hamlet’ died of drowning.
But no one in Shakespeare’s plays dies of the plague. Romeo and Juliet, who die because the friar’s letter is held up by quarantine measures in northern Italy, are the nearest his work comes to plague fatalities.
Shakespeare’s contemporary, the dramatist and pamphleteer Thomas Dekker, wrote a series of feverishly inventive, sardonic prose pamphlets on the plague. Ben Jonson, the poet and playwright, in his play “The Alchemist” captures the manic energy of a house during a plague lockdown left in the hands of the servants while the master is away.
Plague was indifferent to the boundaries erected by society, and its appetite was ravenous. Thousands of husbands, wives and children were led to the grave.
Mr. Dekker noted that,
“Servant and master, foul and fair
One livery wear, and fellows” were all rested in communal grave. Plague’s appetite was ravenous. Mr. Dekker recalled, “as if they had gone to one bed.”
The contemporary London had never been the plot of Shakespear’s plays. Likewise, he had never exactly mentioned the sudden deaths occured in his society.
While grimly terrifying the seriousness of the disease, his depiction also domesticates the death.
Death cares us, as much as it follows in our problematic lifestyle. The tragic plays of Shakespeare establish such a great bondage between the death and man. The reactions of the plays on pandemics never ignore the death but it satirizes the differences among the people. It shuns the fear.
Unsympathetically degrading man’s individuality and importance during his last moments were the unique features of Shakespeare’s tragic plays.
Shakespeare’s characters neither died suddenly nor were burried totally by dumping as a whole. Rather, last words are given full hearing, epitaphs are soberly delivered.
Shakespeare is not interested in the statistics — what in his time were called the bills of mortality. His fictions reimagine the macro-narrative of epidemic as the micro-narrative of tragedy, setting humane uniqueness against the disease’s obliterating ravages. His works insisted the preventive measures rather than understanding it on the quantitative basis.
King Lear realized his negligence to the plight of the people when the storm struck the heath. It was the expression of the dubious British ruling party of the time. That was the truth that the common denominator of a human race revealed without discrimination.
His Plays deliberately set aside the number and scale to resolutely focus on the individual. That was the fact, which was made to realize by the pestilence attack on the human race impartially.
Following lines of Shakespears could be remembered forever, as the king’s own misery makes him see, for the first time, that other people’s lives have meaning, too.:-
“Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this”
Maybe our misery now, like Lear’s, will help us to see the meaning in the lives of others. Maybe, like Shakespeare, we should focus not on statistics but on the wonderfully, weirdly, cussedly, irredeemably individual.
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