The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
If Shakespeare had caught coronavirus…
From plagues to poxes, the playwright never shied away from the medical crises of his day, says Kathryn Harkup
It must be extremely stressful being a playwright in a city where disease is spreading through the population, claiming lives and threatening your livelihood by shutting theatres. Do you write gripping dramas about the fear of contagion? Or do you avoid the topic and write something completely different as a form of escapism? Four centuries ago, when plague was devastating the population of London, playwrights certainly took the latter option. Will their modern counterparts respond to the coronavirus outbreak in a similar way?
It may seem remarkable that, at a time when London was experiencing a golden age of theatre, no one appears to have written a play about plague (or certainly none that have survived). Perhaps the reality of hundreds dying and hundreds more quarantined in their homes was all too real. No one wanted to watch that acted out on a stage when they could see it in real life on the streets around them.
That is not to say that plague was completely taboo in the theatre. In the 16th century, to show your dislike of someone you might literally wish them ill – “make him/ By inchmeal a disease!” (The Tempest) – and the worse the disease, the greater the insult. Plague, being the most dreaded of all diseases in the Renaissance, was reserved for anything that provoked real hatred, from drums (All’s Well That Ends Well) to pickle-herrings (Twelfth Night), but mostly people – “a plague o’both your houses!” (Romeo and Juliet).
A significant proportion of Shakespeare’s huge stock of insults are disease-based. In fact, he made more medical references than the rest of his contemporary playwrights put together. Scattered throughout his plays and poems are dozens of what may seem like superficial or offhand remarks but are often sophisticated references to medical theories of his day. Every type of medical practitioner can be found in his plays, and he generally had very high praise for them, though he could be scathing about the treatments they doled out: “throw physic to the dogs!” (Macbeth).
Shakespeare was living at a time of huge advances in medicine, and he made sure he kept up to date. In Julius Caesar he hinted at the new theory of circulation of the blood – “the ruddy drops/ That visit my sad heart”. And in All’s Well That Ends Well he satirised contemporary debates about health: ‘‘Tis the rarest argument of wonder.” Here he joked about the rivalry between the established theory of humours, where illness was caused by an imbalance of the four humours (black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm), and the new theory put forward by Paracelsus, that involved remedies derived from plants and minerals. But, “Of all the learned and authentic fellows”, none were able to cure the king.
All of Shakespeare’s plays, and quite a few of his poems, contain some reference to disease, but since the infections that frightened the Tudors were very different to those that concern us today, his medical learning can be missed by modern audiences. Here are just a few examples.
‘MALADY OF FRANCE’ – HENRY V
One disease has more mentions from the Bard than any other. In fact, there are so many references to the disease, its symptoms, methods of transmission, as well as treatment, it has led people to speculate that Shakespeare was writing from bitter personal experience. The disease came with many names – “infinite malady” (Timon of Athens), “the hoar leprosy” (also Timon) and “pox” (in a total of 15 plays) – but we know it today as syphilis.
The first major outbreak of pox was in Naples in 1494 and it soon spread. As the bacterial infection reached new territories each country blamed its neighbour. In China it was called “the Canton rash”, in Japan “the Chinese ulcer”. The Russians blamed the Poles, the Poles blamed Germans, the Germans blamed the Spanish. The French and Italians blamed each other.
The first sign of the disease was an ulcer on the genitals or an “embossed sore” (As You Like It) but then it would disappear, leaving the infected individual thinking they were cured. However, they were not. Over the following years and sometimes decades the disease
Death by Shakespeare by Kathryn Harkup is published by Bloomsbury at £16.99
As we approach the 75th anniversary of V-E Day, we also approach the 75th anniversary of one of the most magnificent films made in Britain about the war, during the war: The Way to the Stars. Its origins were in Terence Rattigan’s 1942 play Flare Path, which the playwright turned into a film over the summer and autumn of 1944, when it became clear that the Allied victory over the Nazis was only a matter of time. Rattigan had served in the RAF and the story was based on some of what he had observed during his service. By relaying those experiences in his customary understated style, which caused him in the Fifties and Sixties to be vilified by second-rate playwrights of the John Osborne school but which was actually the mark of his greatness, Rattigan created a screenplay of utter conviction. Those alive during the war described the film as portraying exactly how things were. Film is not intended to be a historical document, but sometimes it inevitably becomes one. This is one such film.
It tells an entirely human story regrettably all too believable to those who came through the war, of loss and sacrifice but also of humour. It begins in 1940, with the arrival at an RAF base of a new pilot, Penrose, played by John Mills, who had in civilian life been a schoolmaster. He encounters hardened and experienced professional airmen – notably his squadron leader, played by Trevor
Howard in his first credited screen role, and the flight lieutenant assigned to show him the ropes, Archdale, played by Michael Redgrave. Almost immediately, we feel the inevitable wartime toll of death and destruction, with the squadron leader the first to be killed.
But the life of the servicemen is not shown in isolation. Rattigan gives us an entirely credible picture of English middle-class life through the neighbouring small English town, with an idyllic ivy-clad Georgian coaching hotel (with, to give real authenticity, its resident pub bore, played by Stanley Holloway) where the officers congregate when off duty. The hotel’s manageress, Toddy, played by Rosamond John – one of the great cinema actresses of the Forties who gave up the profession far too early – marries Archdale, and is widowed with a small child when he, too, is killed in action. One of the hotel’s residents, faultlessly played by Joyce Carey, has as her companion a niece whom she tyrannises. Iris, the niece (Renée Asherson) wants to marry Penrose; but seeing the stultifying effect widowhood has had on Toddy, Penrose avoids her. In the end, it is they alone who are destined to live happily ever after.
In his screenplay, Rattigan added the arrival of a US squadron to take over the RAF base. They have much the effect on the local community that was familiar all over England after 1942; but they are, as was generally the case, welcomed warmly and integrated into local life. They also display their heroism just as their RAF comrades have done: the climax of the film sees Johnny, an American pilot (Douglass Montgomery) fly his plane into an empty field when a bomb is stuck in its bomb doors, to stop it crashing on the local town. His crew have baled out; he and his plane are blown to smithereens.
The result is an acutely observed vignette of wartime life. In the John Osborne era, such films were often ridiculed; few could believe an upper lip could be so stiff, and as it became fashionable to mock Britain’s past – even those aspects of it that most would consider unequivocally glorious – it became easy to dismiss The Way to the Stars as sentimental propaganda. But the film was not designed as propaganda. It begins with a prelude set after the war; it was never going to come out until Hitler was defeated. Rather than serving a political purpose, it only shows how a people in their darkest hour coped with the horrors of war.
Anthony Asquith, the director, used the lightest touch. There are no contrivances, no dramatic licence, merely normal events in an abnormal time shown without histrionics or exaggeration. The audience of the era, most of whom had lived through the events depicted, would have had no complaint with it. No representation of the Second World War in the cinema today could be one tenth so credible or effective. The Way to the Stars remains one of our greatest films.
them, saying: “Welcome to Bangkok.” Video footage then shows a livid Björk pounce on Kaufman and wrestle her to the ground in front of a crowd of press photographers. Kaufman can be seen trying to defend herself with her microphone before Björk is pulled off her and led away. She would later claim that Kaufman had directed the greeting at Sindri and had been pestering her for days. The fracas was reported around the world.
“I was gobsmacked by that,” Bernstein tells me, stressing that the singer was the one under attack. “It was like ‘Whoah!’ In front of her kid. It hit us all… an attack’s an attack.” Björk, he says, was “in bits” about the incident. She later apologised to Kaufman who chose not to press charges.
That autumn, things took an even bleaker turn. On September 12, Ricardo
López – an obsessional fan said to be angry that Björk was in a romantic relationship with drum and bass musician Goldie – filmed himself in his Florida apartment preparing to send a homemade acid bomb concealed in a hollowed-out book to her London address. On his return from the post office, López started filming again. Standing naked in front of the camera, with Björk’s music playing in the background, he placed a revolver in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Police found his body four days later. In the UK, officers intercepted and detonated his explosive device.
Speaking to reporters outside her London home afterwards, visibly shocked, Björk said it was a “very sad thing when somebody shoots their face off ”. She urged fans not to get involved in her personal life and reportedly sent flowers to López’s family.
For Björk, everything had changed. “It wasn’t just the letter bomb. Things were happening all around me, and I realised that I’d come to the end of the extrovert thing,” she would say. She left London, moving first to Spain and then back to Iceland, saying, “I had to go home and search for myself again.” As Bernstein puts it, “It was time for her to regroup and reassess what was going on.”
On a 1997 documentary, Björk says she felt that releasing those first solo albums had put her “in extreme danger”, such was the rollercoaster rush of what followed. “When you’ve gone to that speed of living – like, 9,000mph – you don’t exactly fade down,” she says. “I think you sort of explode really and crash. That’s what I did.”
If Post was, in Massey’s words, the sound of “a flower opening”, Homogenic was an examination of that flower’s roots – sparser, colder, more isolated. It was the sound of an artist retreating inwards. Björk continues to release intriguing, acclaimed music today. But, after Post’s traumatic stress, she would never return to its carefree, carnival world. The messy events that followed signalled the end of innocence for Björk. The party was over.