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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

#61

Post by tomcam »

jfengel wrote: post #22
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…

I get that, and it's a challenge for me as a Shakespeare actor and director. I often work with these "flawed" characters, and early in the process there's this question of "do I really want to tell the story about this person?" I've got only limited patience for people being stupid and/or mean. Can't we tell stories about good and smart people? Those stories exist, but they're depressingly rare. I have ways of turnin…

What repertory do you work with?

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

#62

Post by ekianjo »

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.

Except that we have way better mitigation tools like medicine/hygiene compared to middle-ages. It's not a one variable comparison.

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

#63

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#64

Post by rococode »

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…

One particularly crucial difference, I think, is public knowledge about diseases in general. During the plague, people were blaming every minority they could find. Can't really stop the spread of a disease if the extent of your knowledge of epidemiology is "God is punishing us because of you!". No "stay at home", no "wash your hands", no "don't cough on people".

We may have a disease that'll be just as lethal, but this time nearly everyone in the world knows the basics about diseases. The global response to COVID hasn't been particularly heartening, but I think that's because it's in that "sweet spot" (more like sour spot...) range where the fatality rate is low enough that many people are not sufficiently cautious and allow it to spread widely, but high enough that it does kill a lot of people.

If we someday have a much more serious disease, like with a black death fatality rate of 30%, I think it's likely to disappear very quickly unless it has an extremely long contagious incubation period. It might to do some serious damage at ground zero, but people will freak out and hide at home if a huge, visible percentage of people die. And this time, (I hope) people won't be running around pointing fingers and spreading the disease in the process.

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

#65

Post by GhostVII »

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…

I think we would have fewer deaths from a second black death than COVID. If the death rate is that high, people will be willing to go to drastic measures to contain it, and it is much easier to tell if someone is infected.

For example, look at how we have handled Ebola outbreaks - despite it being incredibly infectious and deadly, we've never had an outbreak kill even a fraction of the number COVID has.

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

#66

Post by thaumasiotes »

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.

>> The reality is if a black death like disease hit the modern world civilisation would likely more or less totally collapse.

Ehhh, depends what you mean by "like". The bubonic plague itself is not rare today; it is more or less expected in wild armadillos, for example. But it is not the calamitous disease to us that it was to medieval Europeans. Modern whites have seen a certain amount of selection for resistance to the plague.

> Why do believe that? It didn't collapse medieval European civilization.

On the other hand, I can't support this. The plague very much did collapse medieval European civilization; the accepted structure of society completely disintegrated. Wages for poor laborers skyrocketed. Panicked nobility passed new laws forbidding peasants from leaving the land they worked, and the peasants ignored them. The total loss of so much of the labor force meant that those who survived were much richer -- wheat fields didn't suffer from the plague! -- and radical adjustments to society followed quickly.

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

#67

Post by rusk »

briefcomment wrote: post #44
edmundsauto wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I understand reality is nuanced, but I want to be exposed to ideals when I read. I'm not too interested in recreating reality. I want to see what to strive towards. I recall the Hardy Boys with a lot of fondness. They meant a lot to me as a child.

Sometimes you need the flaws to show the ideals in relief

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

#68

Post by rusk »

mav3rick wrote: post #16
libraryofbabel wrote: post #8

Note: the assertion that the experience of plague caused Shakespeare to change the ending of King Lear is really just speculation by one scholar. The evidence is circumstantial in the extreme. We know rather little about Shakespeare’s biography or inner life, and after two centuries of people combing over every scrap of archival evidence they can find we are not likely to discover much more. Which is fine by me reall…

Can you suggest a plain English adaption of his works ?

Check out Baz Luhrman’s Romeo & Juliet with Leonardo do Caprio ... it’s all original language but in a modern setting, it’s really very good!

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

#69

Post by publicola1990 »

mav3rick wrote: post #16
libraryofbabel wrote: post #8

Note: the assertion that the experience of plague caused Shakespeare to change the ending of King Lear is really just speculation by one scholar. The evidence is circumstantial in the extreme. We know rather little about Shakespeare’s biography or inner life, and after two centuries of people combing over every scrap of archival evidence they can find we are not likely to discover much more. Which is fine by me reall…

Can you suggest a plain English adaption of his works ?

One short work of good repute, though it might have been intended for children, would be Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare.

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

#70

Post by billfruit »

lou1306 wrote: post #55
ZacharyPitts wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How I was amazed by the pace and energy of 'Betrothed', not one boring minute in all of its 700+ pages. The translation by Bruce Penman available from Penguin is an exhilarating read.
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