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A happy ending for King Lear? Trauma of plague caused Shakespeare to change it

theguardian.com

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Re: A happy ending for King Lear? Trauma of plague caused Shakespeare to change it

#51

Post by bboreham »

kshacker wrote: post #28
barnacled wrote: post #20

I am seeing a trend recently of comparing the plague to covid 19 and it is rather frustrating. The case fatality rate of the black death was 30-60% pretty much across the board for the bubonic variant. Covid 19 is 0.4% and really that is heavily skewed by those over the age of 70 and especially 80. Covid 19, while enormously disruptive due to its infectiousness and tendency to put a big chunk of people in hospital, d…

Wow you got me thinking. 30-60% case fatality rate. Imagine living in those days after the disease was widespread and well known but not understood and one morning just feeing a little sick and you knew wow is this the end. Wonder if there is a 'good' novel on those days?

Hence “bless you” after a sneeze. Could be the last thing you say to that person.

Re: A happy ending for King Lear? Trauma of plague caused Shakespeare to change it

#52

Post by bogomipz »

jfengel wrote: post #23
ghaff wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shakespeare had some plays that had at least tragic elements--Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale. Maybe The Tempest.--with happy or happyish endings. But he mostly didn't do "Hollywood Endings" on his tragedies. So the something may simply have been "great source material but that ending has to go."

The first three plays you mention are rarely performed, and for good reason: they're kind of a mess. Not everything fits neatly into Comedy/Tragedy/History, but his most widely regarded plays were all tragedies where everybody ends up dead. It's a trope he wrote well. So I concur with you. I haven't read the original King Leir, but I have read Nahum Tate's happy-ending rewrite of Shakespeare, and the ending just read…

>"The first three plays you mention are rarely performed, and for good reason: they're kind of a mess."

A mess in which sense? Theatrical? Could you elaborate. I'm genuinely curious.

Re: A happy ending for King Lear? Trauma of plague caused Shakespeare to change it

#53

Post by lou1306 »

triceratops wrote: post #46
barnacled wrote: post #20

I am seeing a trend recently of comparing the plague to covid 19 and it is rather frustrating. The case fatality rate of the black death was 30-60% pretty much across the board for the bubonic variant. Covid 19 is 0.4% and really that is heavily skewed by those over the age of 70 and especially 80. Covid 19, while enormously disruptive due to its infectiousness and tendency to put a big chunk of people in hospital, d…

> The reality is if a black death like disease hit the modern world civilisation would likely more or less totally collapse. Why do believe that? It didn't collapse medieval European civilization.

Supply chains on the middle ages were extremely short compared to ours. Good luck feeding a city of, say, 3-million people during a plague that's comparable to the Black Death.

I mean, mankind would probably soldier on, but civilization would take quite a hit.

Re: A happy ending for King Lear? Trauma of plague caused Shakespeare to change it

#54

Post by winstonewert »

triceratops wrote: post #47
winstonewert wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of the black death date rate was due to lack of medical knowledge? Would we really have the same terrible outcome if a similar disease hit today?

I think GP was hypothesizing an epidemic that had a black death rate even with our present medical knowledge.

ok, but then the crucial question becomes: are we likely to see that? I tend to think that those scenarios aren't possible anymore, but maybe I'm being overly optimistic.

Re: A happy ending for King Lear? Trauma of plague caused Shakespeare to change it

#55

Post by lou1306 »

ZacharyPitts wrote: post #35
kshacker wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow you got me thinking. 30-60% case fatality rate. Imagine living in those days after the disease was widespread and well known but not understood and one morning just feeing a little sick and you knew wow is this the end. Wonder if there is a 'good' novel on those days?

Absolutely, The Decameron by Boccaccio, written in 1353 just a few years after the plague struck Italy in 1348: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decameron Rather than a novel, it is a collection of 100 short stories of people during the plague. Enjoyable to this day.

Also, the Betrothed (1827) by Alessandro Manzoni, which is set during the 1600s plague. In a very famous chapter, one of the characters finds out he's got the plague, which is pretty close to what the GP describes.

Re: A happy ending for King Lear? Trauma of plague caused Shakespeare to change it

#56

Post by JNRowe »

svat wrote: post #49
tehnub wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also interesting is George Orwell's critique of Tolstoy's critique! https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/lear/english/e_ltf

Wow this is great, thank you! As someone with a reasonably positive opinion of all three here (Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Orwell), I must say Orwell's clarity is remarkable. > It is a mistake to write Tolstoy off as a moralist attacking an artist. […] But his main aim, in his later years, was to narrow the range of human consciousness. One's interests, one's points of attachment to the physical world and the day-to-da…

Dorian Lynskey's Orwell biography The Ministry of Truth spends a chunk of its time on interactions between Huxley, Wells and Orwell. I found much of that fascinating, picturing these esteemed authors critiquing each others works(sometimes over supper).

Full recommendation for the book, even if only for the Zamyatin chapter collapsing everyone from Rand to George Lucas in to twenty pages or so.

Re: A happy ending for King Lear? Trauma of plague caused Shakespeare to change it

#57

Post by rurp »

winstonewert wrote: post #43
renjimen wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, all of it was due to the lack of medical knowledge. The bubonic plague hardly kills anyone anymore. The point the parent is making is that we shouldn't compare the societal effects of COVID19 today with that of the bubonic plague when it was at its worst.

But his conclusion seems to have been: we need to worry about what happens if a disease like the black plague hits again: which, well, no we don't. If we need to worry about a future pandemic its one which is quite different the plauge and thus one we are defenseless against.

I believe the point was that we need to worry about a pandemic that is as bad as the black plague was, not that we just need to worry about that disease specifically. The OP even mentioned bird flus as one class that could cause similar devastation.

Re: A happy ending for King Lear? Trauma of plague caused Shakespeare to change it

#58

Post by throwaway894345 »

winstonewert wrote: post #43
renjimen wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, all of it was due to the lack of medical knowledge. The bubonic plague hardly kills anyone anymore. The point the parent is making is that we shouldn't compare the societal effects of COVID19 today with that of the bubonic plague when it was at its worst.

But his conclusion seems to have been: we need to worry about what happens if a disease like the black plague hits again: which, well, no we don't. If we need to worry about a future pandemic its one which is quite different the plauge and thus one we are defenseless against.

Why do you think that? We could work to improve our ability to rapidly develop vaccines and stockpile PPE. Those two things would go a long way. Analyzing our supply chains and finding critical points of failure would be another conceivable step.

Re: A happy ending for King Lear? Trauma of plague caused Shakespeare to change it

#59

Post by winstonewert »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #58
winstonewert wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But his conclusion seems to have been: we need to worry about what happens if a disease like the black plague hits again: which, well, no we don't. If we need to worry about a future pandemic its one which is quite different the plauge and thus one we are defenseless against.

Why do you think that? We could work to improve our ability to rapidly develop vaccines and stockpile PPE. Those two things would go a long way. Analyzing our supply chains and finding critical points of failure would be another conceivable step.

Why do I think what exactly?

Re: A happy ending for King Lear? Trauma of plague caused Shakespeare to change it

#60

Post by tomcam »

edmundsauto wrote: post #39
briefcomment wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need more writing where people are the best they can be. Imagine the good Shakespeare could have done by making his characters the best role models. People imitate, and Shakespeare has incredible reach. As I get older, I have little patience for flawed characters, and love it when I see someone act good all the time in fiction. Edit: Tintin, for example, is one of my favorite fictional characters of all time. He i…

Another perspective: when I was younger, I liked Hardy Boys and Tom Swift because of their earnest niceness. As I get older, I realize that the world is a complex place and people (characters) are nuanced. Reduction to black/white (good/bad) squeezes the nuance and thus the humanity. For similar reasons, I don't enjoy reading about the good works of (Western) holy people. (Buddhism and Hindu stories, the small exposu…

Yes. I get enough real life in real life, thank you very much.
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