Social distancing? Self-quarantine? I've been practicing for this for years. All the fun, convivial people are freaking out as my eye scans, lasciviously, the bookcase. Finally, alone with you guys. School's not out till almost 4.
But then, before the fun can begin, school cancelled indefinitely and I'm called back to the world: for example, IT support for online learning assignments, just the kind of work English majors can expect to get. The coronavirus giveth, and the coronavirus taketh away.
Rosanne Cash, also standing at the intersection of books and pestilence, tweeted:
Just a reminder that when Shakespeare was quarantined because of the plague, he wrote King Lear.
— rosanne cash (@rosannecash) March 14, 2020
Well over a quarter million likes and more than 50,000 retweets. I got tired of scrolling through 3,000 comments to see whether anyone questioned her source. Here is Frank Kermode in The Riverside Shakespeare:
King Lear was entered in the Stationers' Register on November 26, 1607, and the entry mentions that it was performed "uppon S. Stephens night at Christmas last," that is, December 26, 1606. The lower limit is March 1603, when Samuel Harsnett published his Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, a work from which Shakespeare took the names of Edgar's devils, and which he also remembered at some other points [in the play].
And there follows more learned discussion, narrowing the date of composition to 1604, possibly leaking into 1605. We don't know much about Shakespeare's daily habits, but there would have been no reason for him to be quarantined in 1604. The previous year, 1603, had been a bad one, 30,000 dead of plague in London, but it was not enough for the theatres to close, as they had for the seasons of 1592 and 1593, to which years belong Shakespeare's long narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. But who wants to say we owe those almost unknown poems to Shakespeare having been under quarantine? No one reads them except scholars, and scholars only read them because Shakespeare wrote them. Shakespeare's grocery lists would probably be the subject of PhD dissertations if they were extant, but they aren't.
I love Rosanne Cash, and it's sort of a romantic notion to think of Shakespeare writing a play about the end of the world during a pestilence—maybe that's why she thinks it happened that way, but it didn't. He didn't need to be under quarantine to get things done. Besides writing plays, he acted in them, was a shareholder in the acting company that performed his works (as well as the works of others), and owned a 10% interest in the theatre in which these works were performed. Actor, playwright, businessman, litigant—for, on at least two occasions, he sued people who (he claimed) owed him relatively small sums of money. A real multitasker but, I'm afraid, a disappointment to people with gushing feelings about how artistic geniuses likely live. Of all the penetrating commentary included in The Riverside Shakespeare, the one sentence that sticks in my mind, from Harry Levin's General Introduction, is: "The figure of Shakespeare as a practical man of affairs, though well attested by the evidence, seemed rather too modest to occupy the lofty pedestal reared by the Bardolaters."
But, followers of Rosanne Cash, by all means, write more great songs while you're social distancing. I hope your kids don't distract you. Shakespeare's, by the way, were almost certainly a hundred miles away with their mother in Stratford-on-Avon when, toward the end of Lear, with chaos and dissolution encroaching, their dad made the old king say to his loving daughter:
. . . Come, let's away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too—
Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out—
And take upon 's the mystery of things
As if we were God's spies; and we'll wear out,
In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by th' moon.
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