What Shakespeare can – and can’t – teach us about Covid-19 (opinion)

Editor’s Note: Kate Maltby is a broadcaster and columnist in the United Kingdom on issues of culture and politics, and a theater critic for The Guardian newspaper. The very plot of “Romeo and Juliet” turns on an outbreak of this plague: returning from his failed mission to tell Romeo of Juliet’s survival, Friar John laments that: Going to find a bare-foot 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, Seal’d up the doors and would not let us forth, So that my speed to Mantua there was stay’d. As Ernest B. Gilman, one of the leading writers on early modern plague in literature, tells us: “if we seek a ‘plague discourse,’ we will find it… fundamentally in the belief in Reformation culture that plague is itself a form of utterance, and a form of writing that inscribes itself in the natural world, in the body politic, and in the ‘tokens; to be read on the bodies of the afflicted.” Coronavirus does not write this form of text across the pages of our bodies. When Romeo feels like he’s going mad with love, he feels like he is “bound more than a mad-man is, shut up in prison”; he insists to Juliet that “stony limits cannot hold love out,” while she in turn frets that her lover’s initial appearance may be deceptive, like “vile flesh… fairly bound in a gorgeous palace.” Eventually Juliet finds herself buried alive in a stone mausoleum, “poor living corpse, closed in a dead man’s tomb.” These should feel like familiar anxieties to anyone immured indoors during quarantine; Juliet never sees natural light again after she drinks the Friar’s potion. But what really shows us that Romeo and Juliet is taking place in a society shaped by the plague is the moment when Romeo spots Tybalt’s body in the Capulet mausoleum, not buried in a tomb but exposed in his “bloody sheet.” As Vanessa Harding, an expert on early modern death, has pointed out, during plague outbreaks in early modern Europe the dead began to be buried only in winding sheets or shrouds, as the price of coffined burial had rapidly risen.