Shakespeare’s Messy Characters and the Experiences of Plague
By Katherine Walker
For many, the experience of COVID-19 has provoked reflections on what it means to live in a world of infectious disease, one in which the worry of contagion has severely restricted our ability to both work and play. As a new faculty member in the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Department of English, this year has posed particular challenges for me, from moving across the country to adapting my Shakespeare courses to an online format.
One of my greatest worries during the fall semester was how to answer the “so what?” question in a Shakespeare class during the era of COVID-19. Why should we read Shakespeare when the pressures of staying safe, caring for loved ones, and working continually demand our attention? What, besides escaping the present stresses, might Shakespeare offer us?
It was not me, but rather my students, who answered these questions. In August I asked them: Why this class, why now? And the responses were astonishing. As a few students who had read a bit of Shakespeare before replied, his characters are figures in ethical, emotional, and sometimes physical pain. They provide, as Hamlet says, “a mirror up to nature,” or models that enable us to look back on our own behaviors. For those who had not read Shakespeare before, the responses were equally insightful: as an author known for his poetic powers, his own words might give us certain pathways for psychological healing or reflection. And when we turned to the idea of plague in Shakespeare’s works, we discovered that at the very least, Shakespeare’s evocative worlds are so striking that they illustrate how disease affects every part of society in radical ways. And because his plays are an embodied medium, meant to be experienced with the senses, we all got a chance to watch performances and think about why bodies matter significantly in Shakespeare’s works.
As my students and I explored together throughout the semester, Shakespeare’s characters live messy lives. Nothing is quite clear, whether that involves a female character in disguise as a young male page or a villain who artfully uses language to sway his victims. But that very messiness is the point. We shouldn’t strive to “be like” a Macbeth or Cleopatra, certainly, but neither should we discount their expressions of desire, their articulations of knowledge, or their contemplations of how one might love in times of heightened external and internal pressure. And we have to recall that these affections are articulated through their language and their bodies. They feel, in multiple senses of the word, the difficulties of traversing unmapped territories. These figures are interwoven in a texture of life that highlights not only (or even primarily) sublimity, but rather, more often in Shakespeare, uncertainty.
The very messiness of Shakespeare’s characters points to an important element of the playwright’s insights—that of how disease significantly shapes the mundane existence of us all. It was certainly the case that Shakespeare and his contemporaries lived with the constant reality of plague. Infectious disease shaped their cultural idioms and how they thought about such ideas as death, the body, and acts of memorializing those no longer with us. In the literary market, there was an explosion of what we today call plague pamphlets: short treatises that detailed the extraordinary spread of the disease, its social and physical effects, and were interspersed with moral narratives of those who died and those who miraculously recovered.
The playwright lived during an era of periodic and devastating occurrences of what was known as the plague or the pestilence and what today we refer to as the “Black Death” or Yersinia pestits, the bubonic plague. During the year Shakespeare was born, a local apprentice, Oliver Gunne, died of a plague that killed approximately a fifth of the population of Stratford-upon-Avon. Shakespeare and his family were incredibly lucky.
Plague would remain a constant for Shakespeare. Throughout the period in which he was crafting his plays, the plague shut down the popular theaters in 1592-93, 1603-04, 1606, and 1608-09. With his livelihood dependent upon the bodies that flocked to places like the Globe Theatre, Shakespeare was highly aware of the disruptions that disease could bring about for not simply his art, or his health, but his ability to put food upon the table and to survive in the competitive conditions for economic survival in Renaissance London.
Consequently, the language of plague is suffused throughout Shakespeare’s work. When Olivia realizes that she has fallen in love with the young page Cesario in the comedy Twelfth Night, she compares her love to catching the pestilence:
How now?
Even so quickly may one catch the plague?
Methinks I feel this youth’s perfections
With an invisible and subtle stealth
To creep in at mine eyes.
The power of attraction here is expressed in language of contagion, a type of wondering resignation. For Olivia and other Shakespearean characters, plague becomes poetry, expressing such a range of emotions as desire, hatred, fear, and exhilaration.
Knowing some of this background can help us return to the many plague references in Shakespeare’s plays. A common curse upon others, as Mercutio expresses it in Romeo and Juliet, is “a plague upon” you or your household. When we learn that the entire reason why Romeo never receives the news that Juliet is not dead is due to procedures of quarantining from the plague, it recalls Mercutio’s curse as that much more prophetic. Plague references also point to the importance of the many healers in Shakespeare’s work, who use not only science but also magic to cure the body.
With the theaters closed, Shakespeare and others turned to the page. It was likely during some of these closures that Shakespeare wrote many of his greatest tragedies, such as Macbeth and King Lear. But lest we somehow demand of ourselves a similar level of creative output, we should also remember that we know little of how Shakespeare personally responded to plague. What we have instead are his characters, who, like Olivia or Mercutio, live with the language of disease and acknowledge their own precarious position in a world that is always contingent upon disease itself.
Thanks to my brilliant students, I have now come to an important answer to that pesky “so what?” question. I propose that we strive to be less like Shakespeare, which since we know so little about him is impossible anyways. I’m not writing the next King Lear right now. Instead, we should learn that there’s no magic formula for pandemic productivity, nor should there be. Rather than trying to become Shakespeare in a pandemic, I think there is something compelling about acknowledging the prospect of plague that so many of his characters express. They are unsure of so much, but their own creativity arises from that indeterminacy, one that we know very well. They are shaped not simply by the language of plague, but by a physical existence within bodies that see, feel, and react to a world of possibilities.
Katherine Walker is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She researches science, magic, and early modern drama, particularly Shakespeare. She is writing a book titled Instinct, Knowledge, and Science in Early Modern England.
Photo/Katie Walker.
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