Shakespeare and the Coronavirus

This one is easy, because the plague was an ever-present threat to Shakespeare's London, and it shows up periodically in his plays. Now that the deadly coronavirus has emerged from Wuhan province in China, we can travel to fair Verona, where Romeo and Juliet's Friar Laurence found his entire plan to unite the Montagues and Capulets undone by the major infectious disease of his time.

First, let's have Frian Laurence explain his plot in his own words, and then we'll see how it was undone by the plague:

Friar Laurence: "...in my cell there would she kill herself.
Then gave I her, so tutor'd by my art,
A sleeping potion; which so took effect
As I intended, for it wrought on her
The form of death: meantime I writ to Romeo,
That he should hither come as this dire night,
To help to take her from her borrow'd grave,
Being the time the potion's force should cease.
But he which bore my letter, Friar John,
Was stay'd by accident, and yesternight
Return'd my letter back."

That was the plan, but Romeo and Juliet shifted from a comedy to a tragedy as a result of a postal service failure. Why exactly was that Friar John "staye'd by accident"? Here's the scene:

Friar Laurence: "This same should be the voice of Friar John.
Welcome from Mantua. What says Romeo?
Or if his mind be writ, give me his letter.

Friar John: "Going to find a barefoot brother out,
One of our order, to associate me,
Here in this city visiting the sick,
And finding him, the searchers of the town,
Suspecting that we both were in a house
Where the infectious pestilence did reign,                 
Sealed up the doors and would not let us forth,
So that my speed to Mantua there was stayed."

Friar Laurence: "Who bare my letter then to Romeo?"

Friar John: "I could not send it, — here it is again, —
Nor get a messenger to bring it thee,
So fearful were they of infection."

The rest, as they say, is history, or rather tragedy. Romeo, never learning that Juliet was in fact alive and only appeared dead as a result of a potion given to her by Friar Laurence, kills himself in her tomb.

It was a grim ending to a love that began with a sonnet that both lovers contributed to:

Romeo {taking Juliet’s hand}:
“If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.”

Juliet: “Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.”

Romeo: “Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?”

Juliet: “Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.”

Romeo: “O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do.
They pray: grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.”

Juliet: “Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.”

Romeo: “Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take.”
{He kisses her.}

Calling her hand a holy shrine, Romeo says that if he profanes that shrine with his own “unworthy” hand, he stands ready to make amends with his lips, which he likens to two blushing pilgrims. He doesn’t explain why his lips (blushing pilgrims) have a higher status than his hands (unworthy).

Juliet responds with encouragement – saints, by which she means the images of saints venerated by pilgrims, have hands that pilgrims’ hands may touch. And because the actual pilgrims of that time who went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land would return with a palm leaf, Juliet puns on the word “palm” to say that the holding of hands, the touching of palms, is the kiss of holy palmers (another word for pilgrims).

Seeing that Juliet has accepted his offer to take her hand, Romeo makes a further offer. Don’t saints have lips, too? Juliet slaps him down; saints may use their lips only in prayer. Romeo naturally then casts Juliet as a saint, and asks if lips may do what hands do (that is, pray).

Juliet answers that saints do not “move,” and that’s true, since she’s referring to the venerated images of saints, who have long since shed their human form. What she really means is that they don’t take the initiative, although they will grant prayers. Romeo takes the hint, and kisses her. Here what they say after kissing:

Romeo: “Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged.”

Juliet: “Then have my lips the sin that they have took.”

Romeo: “Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged!
Give me my sin again.”{He kisses her again.}

Juliet: “You kiss by th’ book.”

Shakespeare completes his fusion of romance and religion by having Romeo say that his sins have been purged by kissing his Saint Juliet. Juliet answers logically, and with theological soundness, that in that case his sins have now fallen on her. Romeo accuses her of urging him on, sweetly of course, to a second trespass, required in order to reclaim his sin and re-purify her in her sainthood.

While “You kiss by th’ book” sounds to modern ears like a gentle or even ungentle criticism, as if to say, “you kiss in too formal a manner,” it was most likely a straightforward compliment. Scholars seem to agree that at the time, by the book simply meant “expertly.”

The Tempest and Puerto Rico

What would Shakespeare have thought of the news from Puerto Rico? It seems that the people there discovered that the local government was concealing hurricane relief supplies in some warehouses. The local anger is so great that Puerto Ricans are erecting guillotines in the public squares.

As with so much else, Shakespeare was already there, in a passage from The Tempest, where the townspeople attacked Sycorax, a witch who was Caliban's mother in a kind of villagers-attack-the-Frankenstein-monster scene.  Let's have a look:

Prospero: Where was she born? Speak. Tell me.

Ariel: Sir, in Argier.

Prospero: Oh, was she so? I must
Once in a month recount what thou hast been,
Which thou forget’st. This damned witch Sycorax,
For mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible
To enter human hearing, from Argier,
Thou know’st, was banished. For one thing she did
They would not take her life. Is not this true?
This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child
And here was left by th' sailors.

They were ready to take her life but thankfully (and let's hope for the same result for the governor of Puerto Rico) for one thing she did they would not take her life.

Specifically, Sycorax became pregnant with Caliban. Of course, she did this not out of love, but to avoid being killed by the people of Algiers, who had had enough of her sorcery and witchcraft. I'm not sure the governor of Puerto Rico can secure his constituents' sympathy in the same way.

Prospero's most famous speech comes at the end of the play, when he imagines something like the end of the universe as predicted by modern physics:

Prospero: Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

Let's hope that, in the interim, we deliver to each other more justice and kindness than seems to have been delivered recently by the government of Puerto Rico to its people.

Hamlet and Jeffrey Epstein Have a Chat

Hamlet deserves to keep better company, but seeing as Jeffrey Epstein died recently, and his death was ruled a suicide, and Hamlet has given the most famous speech in the language contemplating suicide, we have to wonder what the two of them might talk about in the afterlife.

Hamlet: I'd prefer not to keep company with a man credibly accused of serial sex crimes with children. Honor was central to my life.

"Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honor's at the stake."

Epstein: Good stuff. Not my cup of tea though. I hobnobbed with the great and powerful, and word has it that after supplying them with underage partners, I blackmailed them. Nice work if you can get it.

Hamlet: And yet here you stand, dishonored and dead, having taken your own life. You really weren't facing what I was facing, though, when I contemplated doing the same:

"To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them."

I had a sea of troubles. My dead father told me my uncle, now king, killed him, and the only way to exact revenge was to kill the king, which not even a prince may do. And how to show his guilt to Denmark, in order to preserve my own honor?

Epstein: Not my circus, not my monkeys.

"To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd."

Hamlet: I suppose Mr. Epstein, that your feelings were running along those lines.

Epstein: Well, actually...

Hamlet: Let's look at more of the speech. It really is good. When you're under stress, sometimes the best stuff comes out:

"To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life."

The mortal coil means your body. I understand yours was wrapped in a bedsheet, or at least your neck was. You must have been desperate.

Epstein: Well, actually, Mr. Hamlet...

Hamlet: Let's go on:

"For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?"

A bodkin is a knife, but you didn't have one available in the prison cell.

Epstein: No, but that's not really the point...

Hamlet: A fardel is a bundle, but I use it here to mean a burden. And, you know, "Who would fardels bear" is just the old-style word order. Today it would be "Who would bear fardels." Also bourn means journey, or journey there. Listen:

"Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?"

Well. you're in the undiscovered country now, Epstein.

Epstein: I preferred my undiscovered island.

Hamlet: You harmed so many people.

Epstein: You drove Ophelia to death, caused the death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and killed Polonius, Claudius, and Laertes outright.

Hamlet: They were all fictional characters. I don't deserve to be stuck in a conversation with you.

"Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action."

By conscience I meant consciousness, though I can't prove it from my current address. My enterprise of great pitch and moment was supposed to be the wise governance of Denmark. Your enterprise was something evil and vile. No wonder your conscience, and consciousness, caught up with you, and you decided...

Epstein: No, they didn't catch up with me, and as I've been trying to say, I didn't kill myself.

Two-Hour Tours has been launched

The Two-Hour Tours of Shakespeare series launched this week with our first eight titles, and we have plenty more in store. This blog is where we will filter modern life through a Shakespearean prism to see how it might have looked to the bard.