What did you do during COVID-19? -- March 19, 2020 column

By MARSHA MERCER

When plague shuttered London theaters, William Shakespeare wrote poetry.

COVID-19 has shut down just about everything. What are you doing?

It’s tempting – and depressing -- to obsess on the rising numbers of coronavirus cases and deaths. Bingeing on Netflix will get old. How many puzzles can you do?

Or, you could take a cue from Shakespeare.

“Tradition has it that Shakespeare wrote his two long poems, `Venus and Adonis’ and `The Rape of Lucrece,’ during a period of forced unemployment in 1592-94, when an outbreak of the plague closed London’s theaters,” according to Folgerpedia, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s encyclopedia.

The bubonic plague or black death, spread by fleas on rats and mice, was a recurring and devastating fact in Shakespeare’s time and in his personal life. He was born during a plague period of 1563-1564, and his three sisters died of plague. His son Hamnet also died of plague.

When the plague death toll rose to 30 a week in London, the government shut down the theaters. Shakespeare and others who could headed for the countryside.

In our time, we stay home. Lucky people are working from home; others face “forced unemployment.” For how long, no one knows.

Congress and the White House are working to ease financial hardship, but after years of wishing we had more time at home, many Americans are discovering we have too much time on our well-soaped hands.

In Washington, the Folger, Smithsonian museums, National Zoo, National Gallery of Art, Library of Congress, Capitol, Supreme Court and Arlington National Cemetery are all closed to visitors.

Most tourist favorites around the country have exchanged the “Welcome” sign for one that reads “Do Not Disturb.” Almost all diversions are suspended. Gyms are closed, and bars and restaurants are operating under shorter hours or take-out only.

Large gatherings are out, so you can’t go to the movies, see a play or a concert. Sports are on hiatus too. The Outer Banks has banned tourists as a precaution for residents.

But nobody said you must stay indoors – just six feet away from other humans.

National and Virginia state parks are open, although visitors’ centers are closed. National parks that charge admission fees are waiving them, an incentive to get outside. It’s a good idea to take your own water bottle and not drink from water fountains, experts say.  

Take up bird watching, gardening or another hobby you never had time for. Stuck inside? Bake bread.

Or watch an opera from the Met in New York, streaming free at 7:30 p.m. daily for as long as the Met is closed. You may find a crowd online, but each opera is up for 20 hours, so you can check back.

The Library of Congress has canceled its wonderful concerts and other programs for now, but its YouTube channel puts previous performances at your fingertips.

Or tour a museum through artsandculture.google.com, which offers an amazing array of cultural sites.

It’s worth remembering that most of us are not sick and won’t get sick, especially if we follow good hygiene and social distancing rules. We are being asked to change the way we live – for a while – to help our family, neighbors, community, nation and world.

It could be worse. In 1603, as plague again swept London, King James I issued orders to try to stem the disease. Houses where someone was sick were “to be closed up” for six weeks. Clothes, bedding and other items belonging to those infected were to be burned.

People were urged to avoid the company of others, and if they did leave home, they were to mark their clothes to warn others of their disease. Getting caught not obeying the rules could land someone in the stocks.

Shakespeare took up his pen and wrote. In his time, he was more known for his 154 sonnets than his 37 plays.

What’s that? You say iambic pentameter isn’t your jam? No worries.

Herbert “Tico” Braun, history professor at the University of Virginia, recently urged his students and former students to keep a record of this period in “one or more different forms of your own choosing, a journal, a blog, an e-portfolio, a film, a series of artworks,” Braun told UVAToday. 

“Each individual perspective is valuable, and adds to the whole,” he said.

Who knows, it might lead to something great.

 © Marsha Mercer 2020. All rights reserved.  

Shakespeare triumphs over time and place -- April 25, 2019 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Visiting America in the 1830s, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville discovered William Shakespeare in the unlikeliest of places.

“There is hardly a pioneer’s hut that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare,” de Tocqueville wrote in “Democracy in America.” "I remember that I read the feudal drama of `Henry V’ for the first time in a log cabin.”

Shakespeare would have celebrated his 455^th birthday this month, and people around the world ate cake.

Shakespeare was born around April 23, 1564, and left the earth 52 years, 38 plays and 154 sonnets later, also on April 23 – in 1616.

That we still read, argue over and perform his plays is remarkable for many reasons, not least because the First Folio of his plays wasn’t published until seven years after his death.

American settlers carried only two volumes on their travels west: a Bible and Shakespeare. What better company for their long, lonely journey?

Poet Walt Whitman, critical of Shakespeare as antithetical to the “pride and dignity of the common people,” ultimately came around and acknowledged his debt to the Bard.

“If I had not stood before those poems with uncover’d head, fully aware of their colossal grandeur and beauty of form and spirit, I could not have written `Leaves of Grass,’” Whitman wrote.

How much of our contemporary, throwaway culture will survive 400 years?

In our time of disposable tweets, we’re fortunate and grateful Shakespeare is alive and vibrant in towns and cities coast to coast.

I saw a rollicking performance of “The Comedy of Errors” last Saturday at one of my favorite venues for Shakespeare, the Blackfriars Playhouse at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton.

The performance was hilarious and totally engaging. Do yourself a favor and catch a play at this treasure of a theater, now in its 31^st year.

The theater will celebrate Shakespeare’s 455^th with a free, family-friendly party this Sunday afternoon.

On Broadway, the acclaimed actor Glenda Jackson is playing King Lear. 

Jackson at 82 is proof there are second – and third -- acts in life. The winner of two Academy Awards, she spent more than two decades as a member of Parliament before returning to the stage.

She, who first performed Shakespeare in 1965, also played Lear in 2016 at the Old Vic theater in London. She told The New York Times he “is the most contemporary dramatist in the world today.”

Shakespeare asks three questions, she said: “Who are we? What are we? Why are we? No one’s come up with sufficiently satisfying answers.”

The Times praised her “powerful and deeply perceptive performance” and said the play “has never felt more vibrantly responsive to the moment, to a crisis in global leadership.”

We wonder whose birthdays future moderns will celebrate. Will Shakespeare still be No. 1 in 2419? Will people in that age know any of our 20^th or 21^st century politicians, authors, composers or video game developers?

Don’t scoff. A new video game called “Play the Knave” uses virtual reality to perform scenes from Shakespeare. Players control avatars through motion capture cameras and speak lines of the play karaoke style. The game has not been released to the public yet, but teachers are already using it.

The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington invited the game’s co-developer, Gina Bloom, an English professor at the University of California, Davis, to give the Shakespeare Birthday lecture last Monday.

In the game, “The Tempest,” Shakespeare’s dramatization of the 1609 shipwreck on the magical island of Bermuda of the Sea Venture, an English ship bound for the Jamestown colony, presents the spirit Ariel as a digital avatar.

So, Shakespeare is constantly adapting and being adapted to new audiences.

The National Endowment for the Arts expanded its Shakespeare in American Communities program to provide grants to theater companies to bring Shakespeare to juvenile justice facilities.

“Evidence has shown that these programs provide positive rehabilitative outcomes and prevention for youth involved in the juvenile justice system,” Mary Anne Carter, acting chairman of the endowment, said. Shakespeare can even help reduce recidivism rates, she said.

Shakespeare truly was, as Ben Jonson wrote in his tribute: “not of an age but for all time.” And for all places.

©2019 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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