Vol. 12, no. 1 (2020)

Long weeks of quarantine or isolation have marked our lives in the spring of this 2020. In the newspapers of the major Western countries, references to the relationship between literature and epidemics have multiplied, with Boccaccio and Manzoni at the head of the citations, and with interesting temporal excursions toward mythology (Oedipus), the classical authors (Lucretius) or the twentieth century of Camus, Brecht and Cormac McCarthy, to name only a few. In this search for literary vaccines for our tried psyche, probably not everyone remembers that Romeo and Juliet, in William Shakespeare's eponymous "most excellent and lamentable tragedy", die because of a quarantine. The central misunderstanding that will lead the two young Veronese toward the tragic finale is in fact born from a letter not delivered because of the restrictions imposed by the plague epidemic.

In the fourth act Friar Laurence suggests to Juliet the solution for not marrying Paris, chosen for her by her parents, but rather her beloved Romeo: a potion that will simulate the girl's death for forty-two hours, while Romeo is in exile in Mantua by the will of the Prince of Verona. The Franciscan friar is convinced he can weave a perfect plot, sending to Romeo, through his assistant Friar John, a letter in which he is warned of the apparent death of his beloved and of the possibility for the two young people to reunite and elope. But John is stopped at the gates of Mantua because of the quarantine for the plague epidemic and cannot deliver it. Romeo, believing his beloved truly dead, will go to kill himself beside her, sealing what for centuries to come will be romantic love par excellence.

"Time and mutability do not exist in the world of ideal love," writes the critic Brian Gibbons, "it has no local habitations and no names, it is free from Verona and the feud." And yet it will have to reckon precisely with the historical and sanitary circumstances that are both an exact reproduction of an era and a metaphor for the feud. Epidemics, in sixteenth-century Europe, are anything but rare. Because of wars and of the first true transcontinental movements, plague, syphilis, typhus and influenza decimate a malnourished population, which for the most part lives in hygienic conditions that are precarious to say the least. It will be a Veronese, the physician Girolamo Fracastoro, who elaborates, at the beginning of the century, a theory on the origin of epidemic diseases, locating it in the spread of the seeds, in his view the agents of contagion. Beyond the fanciful hypothesis, this reminds us how much medicine at the time was practised by a plurality of figures, among them apothecaries, barber-surgeons, itinerant empirics and charlatans. In light of this, Shakespeare's tragedy may also appear as an oblique accusation against the "concoctions" of a Catholic friar.

It is precisely in order to manage the effects of such proliferations that in Italy the first health offices are born, which from temporary become permanent. Hence the quarantines that restricted mobility between cities or specific areas, like the one placed at the fulcrum of the tragedy by William Shakespeare.

The Bard had direct knowledge of epidemics and of the consequent quarantines, although no character in his plays will ever die of contagion: Romeo and Juliet are in fact the fatal case most closely tied to an epidemic of any other protagonist of his theatre. Shakespeare had an awareness of it that was perhaps all too immediate, beginning with the very year in which he was born. A few pages after the description of his baptism in 1564, in the register of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon these words could be read: "Hic incepit pestis", here the plague began. It is not likely that this was already an outbreak of bubonic plague, whose worst epidemic struck England exactly a century later, but it was certainly a pestilential disease (pestis) due to the terrible hygienic conditions of the time. A few years earlier there had also been the last (though at the time they did not know that it would never return, and of course they feared it) terrible epidemic of sudor anglicus, or sweating sickness, a highly contagious and to this day mysterious disease that had claimed its victims with abundant sweating and often sudden death.

During his life, the writer had to observe a considerable number of quarantines, and it is therefore no surprise that disease as metaphor (as the American Susan Sontag would theorise some centuries later) returns often in the Shakespearean theatre. It can be a curse, like the one the dying Mercutio hurls precisely in Romeo and Juliet, when he wishes the plague on both Veronese families, the Capulets and the Montagues, whose mutual rancour is the cause of his end and, even before he knows it, of the death of the archetypal lovers. In this case the metaphor is absolutely transparent: the plague of mutual hatred has already infected the two families and will claim not a few victims. But it is in King Lear, a tragedy written during the plague quarantine of 1606, that the writer makes the most terrible juxtaposition, that of a father who compares his own daughter to the plague. After wishing his daughter Regan and her husband Cornwall "vengeance! Plague! Death! Confusion!", he prostrates himself before her, asking her for board and lodging, old and alone as he finds himself to be. "Age is unnecessary", he tells her, in the grip, he himself does not even know, either of madness or of a senile dementia that has made him err action after action in his relations as family man and as ruler. But Regan denies him help, and he apostrophises her with the harshest words of the play. If toward the other ungrateful daughter, Goneril, he had invoked "infected airs" and "blisters upon her beauty", this one he confronts directly, flinging at her the words: "thou art a boil/ A plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle,/ In my corrupted blood".

There returns, then, the imagery of bubonic plague as a representation of the diseases of the soul of these characters, eroded and corrupted by vanity, by selfishness, by falsehood and by greed. If to us readers of today it sounds disturbing, the king's line must at the time have provoked not a few shudders of disgust and fear, as well as looks of suspicion among neighbouring spectators. This metaphorical use of pestilence is indeed significantly preponderant in King Lear, written during a quarantine caused by the outbreak of an epidemic in the summer of 1606. Although no certain data on the composition of the various works are available, it is highly probable that the poet was working on this text during that period of isolation, since the play was performed for the first time on St Stephen's night in 1606.

Younger, when all the theatres of the nation were closed because of another epidemic from 1592 to 1593, uncertain whether they would ever be reopened, William changed literary genre and wrote the poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Fortunately, the theatres reopened, but between 1603 and 1604 another outbreak once again forced the English into a social distancing that prevented the official celebrations for the coronation of the new king, James I. At the time, the historians recount, one Londoner in five died of the epidemic. As one of the foremost scholars of the Bard, Emma Smith (This Is Shakespeare, Pantheon Books, 2020), has suggested, during this other quarantine Shakespeare in all probability devoted himself to writing his masterpiece of indictment of corruption, Measure for measure, in which the disease does not appear but rather its worst civic symptom, namely economic deceit.

The immediate historical context does not find much space in Shakespeare's works. Today's reader who might be interested in contemporary descriptions of epidemics should turn his gaze to another playwright, Ben Jonson, who in The Alchemist, dated between 1610 and 1611, brings onto the stage a house in which the lockdown caused by an epidemic has left the servants alone, while the master is elsewhere. The domestic subversion that ensues is a mirror of the age. Or he should recover from oblivion the lampoons and pamphlets of Thomas Dekker, who between 1603 and 1606, he too often during the quarantines, wrote abundantly of bubonic plague (News from Gravesend and The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary). Shakespeare, by contrast, for inspiration, passed from the Italian Renaissance or medieval novellas to stories of pre-Christian Britain, as in King Lear. Plague and other diseases are omnipresent in his work, but in an oblique way. In his by now classic study A Theatre of Envy, 1991 (in Italian Shakespeare, il teatro dell'invidia, Adelphi, 1996), René Girard notes how in Shakespeare the singularity of the plague is that it annihilates every form of singularity and makes everyone equal before their own errors, before hatred, before sins and before death.

But from Shakespeare we can also borrow another perspective, that of the imagination in moments of total isolation, that fantasy which becomes the best passport toward reality. When King Lear believes he can resolve his own situation by ending up in prison with the only daughter who truly loves him, confinement in a cramped space, a punishment, appears to him as a blessing: "Come, let's away to prison:/ We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage/ … / 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 wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones,/ That ebb and flow by the moon".

Alessandro Clericuzio teaches Anglo-American Language and Literature at the University of Perugia. He works mainly on twentieth-century American theatre, poetry and fiction, as well as on popular culture and the relationship between cinema and literature. Among his recent works, Tennessee Williams and Italy. A Transcultural Perspective, Palgrave, 2016, "La poesia Beat in Italia: uno studio translocal" ("Annali di Ca' Foscari", 52, 2018), and Italia e Stati Uniti nella Grande Guerra, Carocci, 2018.