Eliana Willis

OXFORD, England — Twitter has been taunting us: When he was in quarantine from the plague, William Shakespeare wrote “King Lear.”He had an advantage, of sorts: Shakespeare’s life was marked by plague. Just weeks after his baptism at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, the register read, “Hic incepit pestis” (Here begins the plague). Mortality rates in the town were four times that of the previous, plague-free year. Shakespeare, the son of the town’s glover, survived it and many further outbreaks. Much of his work was composed, if not in lockdown, then in the shadow of a highly infectious disease without a known cure.While the theaters were closed for an epidemic in 1592-3, the fledgling playwright produced his hugely successful narrative poems “Venus and Adonis” (a piece of beautiful erotica in which the goddess Venus throws herself at the unwilling Adonis) and “The Rape of Lucrece” (a queasily voyeuristic poem about sexual assault).Again in 1603-4, when plague prevented the coronation celebrations for the new king, James I, and one in five Londoners succumbed to the disease, Shakespeare was probably writing his study of civic corruption, “Measure for Measure.”In the plague outbreak of the summer of 1606, Shakespeare may well have been working on “King Lear,” given that the tragedy’s first performance was at the Palace of Whitehall, the main London residence of Tudor and Stuart English monarchs, “on St Stephen’s night in Christmas holidays” the same year.The impact of the disease on the play, though, is oblique. There are references to plague which have lost their specificity over time, but which must then have caused a shiver. Lear curses his daughter Regan and her husband Cornwall with “Vengeance, plague, death, confusion,” and berates her as “a plague-sore or embossed carbuncle / In my corrupted blood.”“Plague-sore” refers to the inflamed lymph glands that were such a feared symptom of the disease — it’s not something any parent should wish on their child. Perhaps the play’s particular violence on the younger generation allegorizes that of the plague itself: The disease was most rampant among those in their 20s and 30s.Shakespeare seems to have been able largely to shut out his immediate context. The plague is everywhere and nowhere in his work. In the language of “King Lear” and other plays it is ubiquitous — but otherwise it’s almost entirely absent.Men and women, to be sure, die in any number of inventive ways. In “Othello,” Desdemona is smothered in her bed. In “Titus Andronicus,” the rapists Chiron and Demetrius have their throats cut and are baked in pastry. John of Gaunt dies of old age exacerbated by the absence of his exiled son in “Richard II.” In “Hamlet,” Ophelia drowns.But no one in Shakespeare’s plays dies of the plague. Romeo and Juliet, who die because the friar’s letter is held up by quarantine measures in northern Italy, are the nearest his work comes to plague fatalities.Just as Shakespeare never set a play in contemporary London, neither did he address directly the most prominent cause of sudden death in his society. Documentary realism was not Shakespeare’s style.It is to other literary forms and authors — in particular Shakespeare’s contemporaries, the dramatist and pamphleteer Thomas Dekker, who wrote a series of feverishly inventive, sardonic prose pamphlets on the plague, or the poet and playwright Ben Jonson, whose play “The Alchemist” captures the manic energy of a house during a plague lockdown left in the hands of the servants while the master is away — that we must look to find the direct effects of plague on 17th-century society.Shakespeare does something different. René Girard, the French critic, wrote in a famous essay that “the distinctiveness of the plague is that it ultimately destroys all forms of distinctiveness.” Mass burial pits for plague victims were one visible symbol of the way the disease erased social, gender and personal difference.Mr. Dekker noted that in the communal grave, “Servant and master, foul and fair / One livery wear, and fellows are.” Plague was indifferent to the boundaries erected by society, and its appetite was ravenous. Thousands of husbands, wives and children were led to the grave, Mr. Dekker recalled, “as if they had gone to one bed.”The imagery common in late medieval culture — known as the “danse macabre,” or dance of death — depicted death, personified as a skeleton, moving obscenely among the living. He is with them, unseen, in the bedroom, at table, in the street, in the counting house.While grimly terrifying, the depiction also domesticates death: Death cares about our particularity enough to stalk us as we go about our daily business. Shakespeare’s tragedies share this intimacy. Their response to plague is not to deny mortality but rather to emphasize people’s unique and inerasable difference.The paradox of tragedy is that it underscores the significance and distinctiveness of the individual even as it moves him inexorably toward his end. It does not defy death; it re-endows it with meaning and specificity.Elaborate plots, motives, interactions and obscurities focus our attention on human beings. No one in Shakespeare’s plays dies quickly and obscurely, thrown into a communal grave. Rather, last words are given full hearing, epitaphs are soberly delivered, bodies taken offstage respectfully.Shakespeare is not interested in the statistics — what in his time were called the bills of mortality. His fictions reimagine the macro-narrative of epidemic as the micro-narrative of tragedy, setting humane uniqueness against the disease’s obliterating ravages. His work is a cultural prophylactic against understanding disease solely in quantitative terms, a narrative vaccine.“King Lear” does this, too: It deliberately sets aside numbers and scale to resolutely focus on individuals. When Lear realizes, in the storm on the heath, that he has ignored the plight of his people, it’s less the discovery of an ancient British noblesse oblige and more the realization that indiscriminate plague should remind us of our shared humanity:Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are / That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, / How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, / Your looped and windowed raggedness defend you / From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en / Too little care of this.The king’s own misery makes him see, for the first time, that other people’s lives have meaning, too.Maybe our misery now, like Lear’s, will help us to see the meaning in the lives of others. Maybe, like Shakespeare, we should focus not on statistics but on the wonderfully, weirdly, cussedly, irredeemably individual.Emma Smith (@OldFortunatus) is a professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford and the author, most recently, of “This is Shakespeare.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

Our stage was always a sofa — the long one that faced the fireplace. It could easily seat four or five, but my mother and I would huddle at one end, sunk into extra cushions, with our books on our laps.And my 12-year-old self might say to her, “Now, mother, what’s the matter?” And she would answer, “Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.”That’s from “Hamlet,” of course, the scene where the title character confronts his mother in her chamber about her unholy marriage to his uncle. We were, I should hasten to add, too caught up in a cracking, plot-propelling confrontation — and the gorgeous language in which it was expressed — to be consciously thinking about how it might mirror any tensions between a real-life mother and son in the 1960s.No, the play always was truly the thing, a fascinating story that you understood better on every occasion you read it aloud. Though we went through “Hamlet” at least several times together — as we did with “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Twelfth Night” — it always surprised us.We’d read an act or two at a time, and there’d always be a certain point when the words would make sense in a new way. I’d feel so privileged to be saying them myself, with my voice, and hearing my mother answer me in the same language. And I’d start to feel a hum of undiluted contentment, pitched at the level of a cat’s purr, that was so very rare during my adolescence.Those moments have been much on my mind in this time of shuttered theaters and social isolation, when a drama critic is deprived of his livelihood and memories have a way of surfacing amid the silence. Though I have yet to coax my partner into picking up a script with me, reading plays aloud is a tradition I’d love to revive — and one I would highly recommend to those looking for ways to find magic in empty hours.I can’t recall exactly when my mother and I started reading plays aloud together, or which of us first suggested we do so. Her father, an English professor, specialized in Shakespeare, so the canon had always been part of our lives. Though my mom, like my dad, became a newspaper journalist, she had loved acting in college and community theater productions when she was a young woman. And, by the age of 8, I was taking acting classes and appearing in local shows in Winston-Salem, N.C., where we lived.We’d select works not only by Shakespeare, but also by Kaufman and Hart, Oscar Wilde, Noël Coward, Philip Barry and occasionally something grittier — Eugene O’Neill, say, or Clifford Odets. We weren’t reading scripts to flex our muscles as thespians or to show off for each other. (OK, maybe I was, a little.) This was just our version of stress-free, parent-child bonding, an activity that took us out of ourselves for an hour or so, while confirming our mutual love of theater and words.You don’t have to be a Meryl Streep or a Mark Rylance to enjoy this pastime, any more than you have to be Tom Brady to play touch football. All that’s really required is the ability to read and to speak — and, well, a willingness both to suspend critical judgment and to let whatever you’re reading take over your imagination enough that self-consciousness retreats.Remember that plays — even those lofty classics that show up on college reading lists — are meant to be spoken and heard. And saying their lines aloud, no matter how clumsily, helps you hear the music and cadences in them. This is true not only of Shakespeare, but also of linguistically rich latter-day writers like August Wilson, Caryl Churchill, Edward Albee, Suzan-Lori Parks and David Mamet.If play reading at home captures your fancy, here is a list of suggestions. Because times are grim, I’m mostly sticking to works that are easy to follow and fun to read — and driven more by dialogue than visual effects or physical interaction.‘Macbeth’This is my choice for a first dive into Shakespeare out loud. It’s sinewy and relatively short, and moves as fast a Scottish warrior’s steed on a battlefield. It is also irresistibly lurid, with lots of opportunities to go over the top in interpretation. (Those witches!) It also seems fair to say that all of us these days — who have become weary experts in hand-washing — are prepared to take on Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene, in which she endlessly scrubs at hands she imagines are permanently bloodstained.‘Our Town’Thornton Wilder’s portrait of small-town American life in a cosmic context is written in plain and forthright prose that grows in power in the recitation of it. Perfect for those who would just as soon avoid flashy histrionics, and a good choice for families. (An alternative could be O’Neill’s uncharacteristically sunny domestic comedy, “Ah, Wilderness.”)‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’This one’s definitely not for children. But Albee’s immortal, four-character look at marriage as a blood sport (which was to have been staged on Broadway this season, with Laurie Metcalf) has a fierce momentum that can be ridden like a roller coaster. This is the play that the woman I lived with my senior year of college and I would trot out for postprandial entertainment when we had guests for dinner. And no, I do not want to think about what this says about my character at that age.‘The Piano Lesson’Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winner from 1987, set in Pittsburgh during the Great Depression, turns the classic domestic drama into an exploration of the legacy of slavery. It’s the most immediately accessible — and family-friendly — of his plays, and it has a poetry all its own that approaches Shakespearean heights.‘Private Live’Another favorite from my college days, Coward’s peerlessly urbane tale of a couple who can’t live together and can’t be apart provides an occasion to put on plummy English accents and arched eyebrows. Just the sort of thing to read in a dressing gown, with a dry martini or two at hand. (An alternative: Neil Simon’s “Plaza Suite,” a series of comic vignettes set in the hotel of the title, which had been scheduled to open on Broadway this season with Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick.)‘The Little Foxes’Lillian Hellman’s great potboiler about greed and chicanery in small-town Alabama in 1900 allows plenty of opportunity for camping it up wickedly, and with a Southern drawl to boot.‘Waiting for Godot’For those who are feeling that life is indeed an endless waiting game these days and are brave enough to take on the ultimate literary evocation of that feeling. Not exactly escapist fare, but a lot funnier than you may remember. (An alternative: Parks’s Pulitzer Prize-winning two-hander “Topdog/Underdog.”)‘The Mousetrap’ and ‘Witness for the Prosecution’For the British mystery lover, these theatrical adaptations of Agatha Christie novels are equal parts cozy and creepy. And the reassuringly stock characters require no special actorly finesse to bring to life. (Ayn Rand’s “The Night of January 16th,” a longtime favorite of high schools, could be an alternative. I played the gangster my junior year.)Most of these plays are available for download online. One warning: This kind of project can affect the way you talk. So don’t be surprised if you find yourself saying “methinks” (if you’re doing Shakespeare) or calling people “dahling” (if you’re reading Coward). But, really, what’s wrong with bringing a little flash to everyday conversation at a time of stay-at-home monotony? More

The arts administrator Jennifer Schantz has been named executive director of New York Public Library’s Performing Arts Library, one of the country’s leading repositories relating to music, theater and dance.Ms. Schantz, 51, currently the executive vice president and chief operating officer at the New-York Historical Society, will take up the position in May. She succeeds Jacqueline Davis, who has led the library for two decades.The performing arts library, located in Lincoln Center, is one of the New York Public Library’s four research divisions, with a collection of some 8 million items that extend far beyond books to include manuscripts, photographs, scores, ephemera, sheet music, stage designs, costume designs, video and film.Among its collections are its vast archive of recorded sound, which includes everything from symphonic recordings to radio plays to political speeches, and its renowned Theater on Film and Tape Archive, which includes some 7,000 recordings of Broadway, Off Broadway and regional theater productions. (The archive, which has inspired similar efforts at other institutions, received a special Tony Award in 2001.)During her 13 years at the historical society, Ms. Schantz helped extend the reach of its collections through a traveling exhibition program and citizenship classes, which since 2017 have helped more than 3,000 green card holders prepare for the United States citizenship test through a curriculum based on items at the society.Ms. Schantz, who studied flute and piccolo in the pre-college program at Juilliard, said that among her top priorities in her new job would be to further the library’s efforts to extend its reach.“The New York Public Library is all about access, and I believe strongly in that as well,” she said. “It’s important that we continue to broaden exposure to our collections, not just to existing audiences but to new ones.”The performing arts library, like virtually all of the city’s cultural organizations, is currently shuttered because of the coronavirus pandemic. But the crisis, Ms. Schantz said, only underscores the importance of the library’s mission.“The performing arts can act as a beacon of hope, which is why they are so important,” she said. “And in the library community, we’re resourceful. We will do whatever we can to make sure people and collections come together.” More

Around the country, leading regional theaters have given up on spring.Now one of the nation’s most prominent theater festivals is giving up on summer, too.The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, one of the oldest and largest American nonprofit theaters and a popular travel destination, said on Friday that it would lay off 80 percent of its 500 employees, cancel half of this year’s productions and postpone any live performances until after Labor Day.The reason is obvious: the coronavirus pandemic, which is wreaking havoc with much of the economy, including nonprofit cultural organizations.“We’re trying to make sure we have enough cash to regroup and come back,” said Nataki Garrett, the artistic director of the festival, which in ordinary seasons has about 800 performances attended by about 400,000 people. “Without money coming in from ticket sales for current shows or future shows, we have to say we have this much cash, and it will last us this long.”Garrett is in a challenging position: She has been in the job only since August, part of a wave of new leaders of American regional theaters who are still getting to know their institutions and their audiences but are now facing an enormous, and unexpected, challenge. Garrett took the job imagining all kinds of ways she would make her mark on the venerable festival; now, she said, “I can’t even think about what course we were on before this thing happened, because it so swiftly shifted.” More