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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?
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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?
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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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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.
That said... two of the films I mentioned are of plays considered barely better than these. Titus is literally a horror play, but Julie Taymor was the director of the Broadway Lion King, and turned it into achingly beautiful and horribly tragic art. The Coriolanus is less of an artistic achievement, but they resolved the play's terrible pacing problems to make it a thrilling political action movie.
The real reason the plays I listed are rarely performed isn't the plot, but the fact that there isn't anything else great to recommend them. They don't have great poetry or engaging characters. They're just kinda limp.
But who knows? Maybe they just need somebody to find the magic in them. A couple of years ago I had a wild success with a production of Timon of Athens, a kind of reverse Chrismas Carol where the Scrooge starts off as a good, generous man who spends the whole second half of the play complaining about how badly he got screwed over. Then he kills himself. I edited it to keep the pace up, found the dark comedy in it, and people said that they didn't know why it's not performed more often.
So any of these plays could have a great rediscovery at some point and change how people think about them. But we're also very aware that even the best of Shakespeare's plays have deep flaws, both intrinsically and in the way expectations have changed in 400 years. We find that they mean something to us, and even the terrible ones contain something that adds to the work as a whole. I can report what most people think, but the real wins come when somebody takes a fresh look.
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>"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.
Well, the plots are really bad, even by Shakespeare's standards. Cymbelline is a mess of mistaken identities and increasingly arbitrary subplots that require a literal deus ex machina to resolve: Jupiter himself shows up and just tells everybody how to end the play. Pericles started life as a collection of unrelated short stories, crammed together haphazardly. The Winter's Tale has a terrible main character, so the p…
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> 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 nobility still remained the nobility for centuries afterward. The church retained most of its power for another century, until the reformation. Standards of living declined for some time but not that long. A collapse (to me) would have been rather more drastic.