As Covid-19 continues to pose a threat around the world following shutdowns and economic difficulties, many Americans wonder if there truly is light at the end of our long, dark tunnel. But, it is also a time to reflect on what could come as a result.
More than 400 years ago, as epidemics raged in London, forcing theaters and other public places to shutter, William Shakespeare was busy crafting stories of kings going mad and thanes coveting power. He was, scholars believe, in the midst of an astonishingly potent creative period, one that produced some of the most extraordinary tragedies ever written - “King Lear” and “Macbeth” among them.
It was a remarkable achievement, one that got me thinking about our current moment and the possibility that, during this pandemic, society's artful dreamers might find their own inspiration and make similarly groundbreaking creations. "The great work begins," playwright Tony Kushner wrote at the end of "Angels in America," his drama about another terrible modern epidemic.
In perilous times, we hunger with a special zeal for great works by artists who can capture the experience for us. The Coronavirus has created a vacuum in live entertainment of all kinds, including the performing arts, affecting 5 million workers in America, as venues have been shuttered for months.
All at once, the curtains closed on hundreds of plays, ballets, concerts, musicals - as well as the in-person classes in drama, music and dance that feed the future of these forms. Though some arts lovers have followed their favorite companies to the Web, where videos of old productions and super-skeletal versions of new projects are being tried out, one can not avoid a certain hollow feeling - a cultural deprivation unprecedented in our lifetimes. Pause for just a moment from reflecting on the terrible losses inflicted on so many families by the Coronavirus, and imagine another type of devastation: a life’s dream of seeing your new play onstage, or appearing in a recital marking the launch of your career, washed away in a tidal wave of worry about contagion in public places.
What, I wonder, is the fate of so many of these projects and events, some of them topical and inordinately perishable? With arts groups across the country deprived of ticket revenue and focused myopically on survival, where goes the impetus for the sorts of ambitious dramas, operas and other productions that put a stamp on an era?
And, when at last we emerge from this cultural drought, is recovery a matter of picking up where we left off, with the work that had to be canceled or interrupted? Or does the energy arising from the experiences of 2020 - the sorrows unleashed by this pandemic, the agony sparked by the killings of Americans - lead us in entirely new directions? In other words: Does the great work begin?
I raise these questions out of curiosity about what goes on creatively at a time when very little is going on in the world. In his mid-century novel The Plague, Albert Camus describes in stunning detail the torpor of a city - Oran, Algeria - as it seals itself off from the world to try to contain the bubonic plague. The story concerns a doctor, Bernard Rieux, as he ministers to the stricken population. But, through another character - Joseph Grand - the author delves into a kind of imaginative stasis brought on by the epidemic that borders on the absurd: Grand, a city clerk, is writing a novel and cannot seem to get beyond the opening sentence.
He worries that line to death, obsessing for pages of Camus’s novel over every word. “Next he showed some anxiety about the adjective ‘handsome,’ ” Camus notes, suggesting in Grand’s equivocations a case of terminal writer’s block - a shutdown, if you will, of the creative mind.
Not that the times when public gatherings present health risks necessarily have to be devoid of inspiration. Consider the perseverance of Shakespeare during those outbreaks of plague and what might have been going through his mind. Although he alluded poetically to the epidemics, most famously in dying Mercutio's curse - "A plague o' both your houses" in "Romeo and Juliet" - experts note that the impact on Shakespeare of those disasters cannot be known.
It is clear that his personal life must have informed what he wrote. We have no idea what Shakespeare was feeling at any point other than extrapolating from his works, which steered clear of the plague for the most part, despite how profound the impact of it on his life.
Still, his life and extraordinary productivity remain fair game for enlightened guesswork. Earlier this year, novelist Maggie O’Farrell published Hamnet, a work of historical fiction in which she posited that Shakespeare’s young son of that name died of “the pestilence.” “The father cups a hand to the son’s chill cheek,” she writes. “His fingers hover, trembling, over the bruise on his brow. He says, No, no, no. He says, God in heaven. And then, crouching low over the boy, he whispers: How did this happen to you?”
One is allowed to imagine in such highly speculative accounts that the pestilence would have enveloped Shakespeare profoundly in anguish, of a sort that might have found expression in his plays. A half-out-of-his-mind Lear raging on the stormy heath at the injustices he has suffered comes readily to mind. “Now all the plagues that in the pendulous air / Hang fated o’er men’s faults light on thy daughters!” Lear exclaims. It would be hard for a father to come up with a more terrible wish for his children.
In “Lear” and “Macbeth,” the grotesqueness of the violence - conjured in grief, perhaps? - is unmatched in his other great tragedies: “Macbeth” features the slaughter of Macduff’s children, and in “Lear,” Gloucester’s eyes are gouged out onstage by Cornwall. A plague on Gloucester’s house, indeed. In some productions, his suffering is so graphically depicted that audience members avert their own eyes.
The frenzied eruptions in Shakespeare would find a concordant fury centuries later in massively influential works such as Kushner’s "Angels in America" and Larry Kramer’s scathing drama "The Normal Heart." Both were written in the 1980s and early ’90s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic. The conservative Reagan administration’s lassitude in addressing the disease fueled their incendiary prose. The ring of ineffectual, even detrimental, official action in response to an epidemic is familiar, no? One wonders what artists of all stripes will have to say about this, and where the concurrent plague of white supremacy will figure in, as well.
What have people dreamed up during this current pandemic? Who knows what new novel, play or musical work will emerge from this pandemic once we arrive on the other side?
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