How Shakespeare wrote some of his best writings during the plague

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

He was the greatest Western playwright of all time. His plays are still engraved in cultural memory and are performed all over the world. But, unfortunately, William Shakespeare left practically nothing after himself: no letters, no documents, not everything that could fully tell about him. That is why his life still remains a mystery, full of secrets, guesses and assumptions. However, as is the great honor of his amazing works, written not in the best and most favorable times.

Shakespeare's early plays were written in the generally accepted style of the time, with complex metaphors and rhetorical phrases that did not always naturally coincide with the plot or characters in the story.

However, William was very resourceful, adapting the traditional style to his own purposes and creating a freer flow of words. With slight variations, Shakespeare mainly used the metric scheme of iambic pentameter lines to compose his plays. At the same time, there are passages in all plays that deviate from this and use forms of poetry or simple prose.

With the exception of the tragic love story of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare's first plays were largely historical. Henry VI (parts I, II, and III), Richard II, and Henry V dramatize the devastating results of weak or corrupt rulers and are interpreted by drama historians as Shakespeare's way of justifying the origins of the Tudor dynasty.

Julius Caesar depicts a coup in Roman politics that may have resonated with audiences at a time when the aging English monarch, Queen Elizabeth I, had no rightful heir, thus creating the potential for future power struggles.

Shakespeare also wrote several comedies in his early life: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night and many others.

It was in a later period of his life that he wrote some of the most outstanding tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. In them, William's characters present vivid impressions of a human temperament, timeless and universal. Perhaps the most famous of these plays is Hamlet, which explores betrayal, retribution, incest, and moral failure.

In the last period of his life, he wrote several tragicomedies. Among them - "Cymbelin", "Winter's Tale" and "The Tempest". Although they are more serious in tone than comedies, they are not dark tragedies compared to King Lear or Macbeth, because they end in reconciliation and forgiveness.

It was no stranger to William to pursue his craft in difficult conditions. He was working in London when the bubonic plague surfaced in 1592 and again in 1603, the last particularly deadly outbreak that claimed more than thirty thousand local lives.

In 1606, as England recovered from a nearly complete assassination attempt on King James, the plague returned to devastate Londoners again. But Shakespeare knew how to handle this situation, threats of royal coups and debilitating illness did not prevent him from completing three of his great tragedies - "King Lear", "Macbeth" and Antony and Cleopatra."

In November 1605, authorities discovered three dozen barrels of gunpowder beneath London's Westminster Palace in an attempt to assassinate King James and the House of Lords. Although the gunpowder conspirators were caught, as Shakespearean James Shapiro noted in the year of King Lear, their trial and executions carried a haunting reminder of their encounter with anarchy in 1606 and clearly conveyed the dark dramatic mood of the storyline of Lear's tragic fate, blind to nature. their daughters.

The play Macbeth, which tells the story of a nobleman driven to madness by his bloodthirsty desire to seize the Scottish throne, was no exception.

That summer, William and his contemporaries were distracted from recent events concerning the monarchy, when the black death again unexpectedly overtook the townspeople. The 1603 outbreak led to a privy council directive that closed theaters when the number of deaths from disease per week exceeded more than thirty people. And then William had no choice but to remain alone with himself and his own thoughts, completely surrendering to the power of pen and paper. This is how another tragedy was born called "Antony and Cleopatra".

The story tells of Mark Anthony, a Roman military leader and triumvir, who is passionately in love with Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt and former mistress of Pompey, and Julius Caesar. Summoned to Rome after the death of his wife Fulvia, who openly confronted his colleague the triumvir Octavius, Antony smooths out the residual political division by marrying Octavius's sister, Octavia. Cleopatra is furious at the news of this event. However, the renewed quarrel with Octavius and the desire of Cleopatra make Antony return to the arms of his beloved. When the rivalry escalates into war, Cleopatra accompanies Antony to the Battle of Actium, where her presence is disastrous from a military point of view. She returns to Egypt and Antony follows her, pursued by Octavius. Antony's friend and loyal officer Enobarbus, anticipating the end result, leaves him and joins Octavius.

In Alexandria, Octavius eventually defeats Antony. Cleopatra, fearing for her life in the course of Antony's conflicting actions, sends a false message about her suicide, which prompts Antony to mortally wound himself. Carried away by his soldiers to the Queen's cache in one of her monuments, he dies in her arms. Instead of submitting to the Roman conquest, a grief-stricken Cleopatra orders the delivery of a poisonous snake to her in a basket of figs. Accompanied by her loyal servants Charmian and Iras, she kills herself.

Even though it was a difficult time, Shakespeare went to great lengths to continue writing that has given the world many amazing works that have been discussed over the centuries.

Shakespeare's life was and remains a real mystery. Around his biography, there are many myths that have laid the dubious foundation for the fact that he is far from the author of his own works. About that - in the next article.