SHAKESPEARE AS DILLI’S MIGRANT WORKER

How would Shakespeare cope with this year of pandemic in Delhi? Jonathan Gil Harris, former president of Shakespeare Society of India and professor of literature in Ashoka University, gives us his take.

“Shakespeare was no stranger to pandemic. It shaped his thinking, his language and his career in ways that might seem uncannily familiar to us here in India. Picture this: an epidemic is ravaging the capital. Healthy people fall ill with fever, aches, and dry coughs; many die within a matter of days. A migrant worker, one of many in a city swollen by people desperate for economic opportunity, faces a difficult decision. His livelihood has disappeared overnight: the place where he has worked, has shut down, and his company has disbanded. He has to find another source of income. And that means walking back to his village, about sixty kilometres from the city – or finding employment elsewhere in the countryside.

A Dilli worker from UP? A Mumbai labourer from Bihar? No. This migrant worker was Shakespeare, who arrived in London from his native Stratford just two or three years before the devastating plague of 1592-3, which killed maybe as many as 10% of London’s population.

Shakespeare survived, obviously. His forced relocation led him to find new employment as a poet for hire. Under the patronage of the Earl of Southampton, he wrote and published his first works: two poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. These helped gain him money and some reputation. But all his subsequent work bears the silent imprint of the trauma wrought by the pandemic. Many of his plays – Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest – speak of the horrors of sudden, enforced exile; others – Merchant of Venice, Timon of Athens – address the trauma of the sudden loss of income. Shakespeare prospered. But the pandemic left him with a lasting sense of the fragility of life, livelihood, and home.”