Is King Lear A Plague Play?

Bradford Cover

Artistic Director

The internet can be a strange place, and it is easy to feel like a stranger in it. The past few weeks have indeed been a strange time, as we have all come to rely on the internet for so much and perhaps feel a little less odd in our dealings with it.  I am from a generation that well remembers the time before this technology, and I find myself being grateful for it, while sometimes still longing for the simplicity of pre-internet days.   

During the unrest of the last two weeks I kept receiving messages and seeing posts on social media about Shakespeare writing King Lear during the London Plague of 1606, and I couldn’t help wondering if this was in fact the case.

 It turns out, as with practically everything biographical about Mr. Shakespeare…we don’t really know, but we have some educated guesses.  The years of 1605 and 1606 were a turbulent time in London. Between the plague outbreaks, an attempt to blow up the entire government, and the ensuing trial and execution of the conspirators, things must have been tense. And while Shakespeare didn’t write plays that related directly to current events (he laws at that time forbade it) we can still look at a play’s historical context as a way of thinking about the play and, perhaps, as a way of enlightening our own strange moment in history. 

 But it is only a guess. This leads me to think of the current COVID-19 pandemic. One of the more difficult facets of this crisis is, in fact, the not knowing. We don’t know exactly where the virus is. We don’t know how long the wait will be until things start to open again.  We don’t know what the world will look like after they do. In Shakespearean terms we have been banished to ourselves, along with the people we live with perhaps—our loved ones—and instead of feeling like we are on a journey someplace in the world, we have gently stepped into stillness, contemplation, the occasional outing,  doing our work online, but really a deep, perhaps long-neglected, visit into our relationships, our minds, and even our imagination.  

 In our current circumstances, we are also deprived of certain elements that make up a typical Shakespeare play. We can’t escape to the Forest of Arden like Rosalind and Celia in As You Like Itor run into the woods like the lovers in Midsummer Night’s Dream. King Lear is certainly on the move throughout the course of that play, and eventually runs out into the wilds and yells at a storm (perhaps some of us feel like doing that right now). Even Hamlet gets sent off to England for a little while.  

 We are at home. We are concerned about the people we know who are sick, and susceptible to the virus. We are worried about finances, about jobs, about the stock market, and a myriad number of things that we are afraid of losing or having compromised in some way. The world has been turned upside down, but we must stay where we are, and like King Lear, we are quite unaccustomed to having such a state of affairs thrust upon us.

 Was Shakespeare in the same state of isolation when he wrote the play?

 We know a few things about Shakespeare during the time we believe he wrote King Lear. We know for instance that he rented rooms on Silver Street (near Muggle Street; ah, hello Harry Potter) in a house owned by Christopher Mountjoy, a French Huguenot and maker of tyres (women’s head gear) who had a wife named Marie and a daughter named Mary. I can’t resist mentioning that the name of the French Herald in Shakespeare’s Henry V is Montjoy. Coincidence?  We don’t know, but it seems so appropriate for Shakespeare to have named him after his landlord.

 The dates of Shakespeare’s residency on Silver Street are a little unclear, but 1603 to 1606 is commonly mentioned by researchers. Years later in 1612 Shakespeare testified in a court case having to do with Mary’s dowry. When he was their tenant, Marie Mountjoy had asked Shakespeare to witness the betrothal and dowry agreement of her daughter Mary to Stephen Bellott, a young man who worked for the Mountjoys. Bellot claimed that Christopher Mountjoy had agreed to a dowry of £50, and that it was never paid. Speaking on the stand, Shakespeare says he was indeed a witness to all this but couldn’t remember the amount.

 The record of this court case is one of the only times we see something Shakespeare said in life written down—and it went unnoticed until the 20th Century. Charles and Hulda Wallace were an American couple deeply interested in Shakespeare. In 1907 they went to London and meticulously reviewed documents in the Public Record Office for the following nine years. They discovered some very interesting tidbits regarding Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, the most amazing of which was the record of this court case involving Shakespeare and The Mountjoys. Bill Bryson has an excellent entry on this in his short and amusing book, Shakespeare: The World as Stage, which I highly recommend.

 So, we have a sense of where Shakespeare was during this period. We also know how hard and how often the plague hit England in the early 1600s. 

 Bubonic Plague was an awful blight during a long stretch of English history and it didn’t completely disappear in England until around 1679 (the World Health Organization kept it on an active list of pandemics up till 1959). It wouldn’t be until the 1890’s that it was discovered to have been carried by fleas, and a recent study has shown that human to human contact may have played a wider role in its transmission than previously thought. 

 One of the worst outbreaks came in 1665, years after Shakespeare’s death. Called The Great Plague of London, it was shortly followed by The Great Fire of London in 1666, during which most of the city was destroyed. King Charles II supported a major re-building effort that led to a flourishing of the arts, sciences, and notably architecture. If you’ve ever been to London you been shown many a baroque government building and church designed by Christopher Wren, architect and official Surveyor of The King’s Works, whose designs played a major role in putting London back together after all the devastation.   

 There were many plague outbreaks during Shakespeare’s life.  He barely survived his infancy due to an outbreak in Stratford, and his career in London was impacted by outbreaks half a dozen times. 

 Theatres were of course the first thing that got shut down in times of plague. Actors would either find other kinds of work or sometimes go on tour to areas of the country less severely impacted by the disease. Wealthy Londoners and royalty would flee the town for their country houses.  People living in houses that contained plague would be quarantined, and only allowed to send one person out now and then for supplies. This person was required to carry a symbolic red staff, so nobody got too close to them.  Economic activity would slow considerably, and suffering and death would have its way until conditions slowly improved. The poor suffered the worst of it. All of this is painfully familiar to us right now.

 On Silver Street in the fall of 1606 as the number of dead in London was reaching its highest point, (there’s that curve we hear so much about) tragedy struck the Mountjoys. Marie Mountjoy was buried in the local church yard, St. Olave’s.  We don’t know if she had caught the deadly disease, but many scholars think so. Was Shakespeare in residence on Silver Street during that time?  It’s hard to imagine he wasn’t with his family at New Place in Stratford during times of plague, when the theatres were closed, and during a period when he was acting more as a playwright and producer than an actor. We do know that he stopped renting rooms from the Mountjoys that year, and it’s commonly held that Mary’s death was a factor.

 King Lear is believed to have been first performed at court on Boxing Day December 26, 1606, so clearly conditions had improved enough for the king to throw a party. Shakespeare was no doubt in attendance as his play was performed before James I as part of the holiday festivities. The king apparently liked to have many plays performed on these occasions.  His appetite for them surpassed Queen Elizabeth’s.  We do know that King James like to have a good time and liked to spend money, eventually leading to bitter disagreements with Parliament over his finances.

 How much the plague or the isolation imposed by plague conditions influenced the play is a subject many have speculated about. In his wonderful book The Year Of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, James Shapiro, who I had the great pleasure of speaking with recently on another topic, writes extensively on possible influences that could have played a part in its creation. One of the most interesting he mentions is the ongoing campaign by James I to officially unify England and Scotland and preside as the ruler of  a newly formed “Great Britain” –an idea that required Parliament’s approval, and which wasn’t getting any traction. Distrust between the two countries ran deep, and the English Parliament also feared this combining of the two nations was an attempt by James to take more power for the crown and undermine the power of the legislature.  Ultimately James would fail in this quest, and England and Scotland remained separate nations for another century. 1606 was the year James was hoping to get this accomplished, and a story about a ruler dividing his kingdom would have been very timely indeed.

 King Lear is a heartbreaker. I recently re-watched “Slings and Arrows” – a wonderful TV Series about a Shakespeare festival in Canada that first came out in 2003. (If you haven’t seen it go directly to AcornTV and add it to your social distancing watch list. You are in for a treat.) Each season is centered around a Shakespeare play, the third being Lear. William Hutt’s performance as the older actor who plays Lear is deeply moving, and it struck me how susceptible I am to stories about actors. Lear is indeed a play about loss and having all the things that define you taken away. Something that we can all relate to right now. The play also asks us to think about aging and death and feels remarkably pertinent as we see the elderly in our society become so vulnerable to this terrible virus. And it is not just the elderly who are at risk.

 Any article about this time in Shakespeare’s life would be remiss if it didn’t mention The Gunpowder Plot and its ramifications. One year before Lear was performed at court, Guy Fawkes was found in the undercroft of Parliament with 36 barrels of gunpowder and the means to ignite a massive explosion. A modern-day reenactment of the explosion has shown that James I, his two sons, all the heads of state, the heads of the church, and all others who were attending the opening of Parliament would definitely have been killed. 

 Shakespeare will write another play in this period—Macbeth. This play, a deep investigation into the origin and nature of evil, contains the assassination of a monarch, and has many other clear parallels to what was going on in England at the time.

 Long before our current dealings with this invisible virus I had come up with an idea to depict the witches in Macbeth as a disease. (Somebody, somewhere may have already done this in a production, and if so please let me know about it.)  It has always made sense to me that in an exploration of evil we are searching for something that we cannot see or touch. Good and Evil are invisible. They are concepts created by humans to bring some order and understanding to the confusion of human existence. In my imaginary production the witches would inhabit dead bodies, soldiers, doctors, and other characters. We would never know what they looked like.

 As COVID-19 spreads across the planet, it can feel as if this virus, that originated in a bat (the witches would approve), possesses some kind of intelligence or purpose. Of course, it is only following the laws of nature that it contains in its DNA – its mission to replicate.  However, these words from the witches in Macbeth do come to mind:

Her husband's to Aleppo gone, master o' the Tiger:
But in a sieve I'll thither sail,
And, like a rat without a tail,
I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do.

The single-mindedness of purpose at work is striking here, along with the witch’s pandemic-like global reach. 

 In Lear, Shakespeare’s attitude towards Good and Evil is more complex. The ruthless Edmund would say all such categories are nonsense. When he speaks to the audience, we certainly can feel his cold single-minded desire, but also his refusal to be labeled anything as lofty as Evil, with all the moral and religious connotations that word contains. Edmund explains his thinking to us in the following remarkable soliloquy:

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit of our own behavior,--we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the dragon's tail; and my nativity was under Ursa Major; so that it follows, I am rough and lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. 

 Edmund says it is just his nature. It is who he is. The natural world itself, which Shakespeare spent a lot of time dissecting in his plays, does indeed contain many similar examples of this simple determination to kill and survive, and we usually glorify it and are awestruck by it. Today we are afraid of it, and like the monster in a well-made horror film, we can’t see it.  

 Looking into the etymology of the term “Corona Virus,” reveals some interesting language. Scientists named these viruses “corona” from the Latin word for “crown.” When viewed under a microscope these viruses have a crown-like aura that surrounds them similar to the sun’s corona we see during a solar eclipse. The name for this family of virus was adopted in 1968. It’s amazing to consider how long these viruses have been with us. I couldn’t help but also notice that in Latin the word “virus” means “venom,” and so if we break it all down we come up with the “Crown Venom.”  I think Shakespeare would have liked that. 

 Most productions of Lear place a crown of flowers on Lear’s head in the scene where he seems to have lost his mind and encounters Edgar and Gloucester. The stage directions, which may or may not be Shakespeare, read as follows. 

Enter KING LEAR, fantastically dressed with wild flowers

 Lear’s speeches in this scene are some of the best Shakespeare ever wrote. Alternating between broken verse and prose, Lear talks to imaginary characters, and ruminates on nature, and what it means to be a king, and a human. The image of Lear wearing a crown of flowers brings together many of the themes discussed here. The laws of nature and of man have merged, and we are asked to think about which it was that brought this unfortunate man to this painful moment. Is the venom in the crown or in ourselves?  If the venom in the play is Edmund, he makes it very clear right at the beginning of the play in his characteristic straightforward language.   

Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moon-shines
Lag of a brother? 

Edmund employs an interesting choice of words when he mentions the “plague of custom.”  To him the traditions and laws of men are the actual plague. Yet he will indeed become the plague in Lear, spreading fear and hatred, like a virus.  We must also recognize that Lear himself has some virus in him when he speaks these lines and sets up the ridiculous contest between his daughters. 

Which of you shall we say doth love us most?

 However, right now it’s the final lines of the play that keep running through my mind.

The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

On a personal note, I just lost a friend in New York to complications from COVID-19.  He was an actor, and 69 years of age. I thought I had more time with him, and his death is hard to accept. I’m very much feeling the weight of this sad time, and I keep hearing Shakespeare’s words, clearly his instructions to the audience, “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”           

I’m feeling the loss of my friend. It is a strange experience to have been devouring so much information about this virus from news reports, and then to have it hit home so suddenly. It’s as if the virus is whispering to me, and saying, “I’m close.”   

No doubt when we come out of this crisis we will all feel a great need to connect with each other in person as opposed to a video screen, and celebrate our relationships and our humanity. We can dream that after this calamity we will see a leap forward in the arts and sciences—a Charles II-like rejuvenation of our artistic endeavors.  There will be a recovery period once this crisis is past, and we will need the arts to help us understand what happened, and how to move forward.

We really are much more reliant on each other than we ever realized, and Shakespeare’s story about a king who loses his state, his army, his family, his friends, and his mind speaks directly to that truth. The virus is using our love of, and dependence on, interconnectedness to its advantage. To fight this beast, we must give up the thing that we most need and cherish, and when we win this battle, we will hold it all the closer to our hearts.