Pop-up Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre, York 2018
Some people believe that Shakespeare wrote King Lear in lockdown. It appears that wasn’t quite true, since the play was already in production when the Globe was temporarily closed because of plague in 1606. It is more likely that it was influenced by his experiences under an earlier lockdown in 1603.
Bubonic plague was endemic throughout his life, and the Privy Council tried to minimise its impact with actions that sound familiar to us today. The scale was horrendous – London, with a population of only 200,000 lost over 20,000 people to an outbreak of plague in 1592-1593, and a further 30,000 in 1603. And it was not just in London. At different times Shakespeare lost his only son Hamnet as well as three sisters and a brother to the plague in Stratford-upon-Avon.
The rule was that if deaths from the plague exceeded 30 per week in London then all theatres and public venues were to be closed. Red crosses were painted on houses in quarantine.
Closures occurred in 1582, 1593, 1603 and 1606. During the 1593 outbreak Shakespeare wrote his two long narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.
Shakespeare was living essentially a single life in London, only visiting his family in Stratford occasionally. So when the theatres were closed he could probably get on with his writing without too many distractions.
There have been some memes doing the rounds suggesting that we should all be using our time at home to be creative and productive. I don’t think that is very helpful. People may well find themselves in solitude and with time of their hands, but they may not be psychologically in the right place to be creative. Shakespeare managed it – but then he was totally exceptional.
When I looked around for information for this post (I would hardly call it research since my main reading was Wikipedia) I discovered many conflicting accounts of when the plague closures actually happened and how they affected Shakespeare. I came across this article How Shakespeare’s great escape from the plague changed theatre by James Shapiro, an acclaimed Shakespeare historian, so I have taken his version of events as definitive.
Happy Birthday, William Shakespeare.
Please note
We have been in full self-isolation since 16th March to protect my husband whose immune system is compromised.
If you are in self-isolation then join the Lib Dems in self-isolation Facebook group.
You can find my previous Isolation diaries here.
* Mary Reid is a contributing editor on Lib Dem Voice. She was a councillor in Kingston upon Thames, where she is still very active with the local party, and is the Hon President of Kingston Lib Dems.
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4 Comments
Interesting article, Mary.
Like many working in the West end in the summer months, I would often get a sandwich and eat lunch on the well-kept grass in Golden Square, Soho. It was only a some years later that I read this area was a plague pit. Lord Macaulay wrote in 1685:
‘[it was] a field not to be passed without a shudder by any Londoner of that age. There, as in a place far from the haunts of men, had been dug, twenty years before, when the great plague was raging, a pit into which the dead carts had nightly shot corpses by scores. It was popularly believed that the earth was deeply tainted with infection, and could not be disturbed without imminent risk to human life.’
It is said the Great Fire of London in 1666, may have helped end the outbreak of bubonic plague by killing many of the rats and fleas who were spreading the infection.
PS: Have we come to a conclusion yet as to whether William Shakespeare wrote his own plays or were they penned by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford?
Bubonic plague is still about
https://www.who.int/csr/don/27-november-2017-plague-madagascar/en/
‘London, with a population of only 200,000 lost over 20,000 people to an outbreak of plague in 1592-1593, and a further 30,000 in 1603.’
London, at that time, and until the mid-nineteenth century didn’t maintain its population on its own. The high death rate and the unhealthy living conditions meant that its population stability and growth depended on incomers, from surrounding counties, from farther afield and even from abroad.
‘whether William Shakespeare wrote his own plays ‘
I’m always slightly uneasy when people try to maintain that these wonderful plays must have been written by someone more aristocratic or better formally educated than a hick from Warwickshire. Sometimes, I think, (no disrespect to Joe) that it displays a sort of class or academic prejudice.
On the whole I like the solution, many decades ago, of Mr Punch: ‘The plays were not written by William Shakespeare, but by another author of the same name.’