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Plagues and portents: Shakespeare, violence and covid chaos
‘…but when the planets / In evil mixture to disorder wander, / What plagues and what portents! what mutiny! / What raging of the sea! shaking of earth! / Commotion in the winds! frights, changes, horrors, / Divert and crack, rend and deracinate / The unity and married calm of states / Quite from their fixure!’ Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida, Act 1, Sc 3
Seismic social ferment and fear of plague dominated Shakespeare’s world, just as they do in ours right now, and the Bard has much to tell us that’s relevant in these tumultuous times of coronavirus. As fellow playwright Ben Jonson (1573–1637) wrote in the Preface to the First Folio, the collection of 36 plays published in 1623, Shakespeare was ‘not of an age, but for all time’.
One can say that Shakespeare’s works are about the England of his day even if set overseas (the native expressed in the foreign), and the Roman plays — Titus Andronicus, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus and Julius Caesar — are particularly useful examples.
The real issues affecting Shakespeare’s England in these dramas are of government, authority and social attitudes when people were aware of an appalling loss resulting from the English Reformation which had fractured the Christian Church. The same issues prevail today, but with the role of the Church greatly reduced…
