The AIDS era, 1606 London — a crisis can reshape the arts
There are those who say the coronavirus pandemic is a temporary headwind. But many economists are declaring this to be a earth-shaking juncture, a time when forces that usually move independently, and at glacial speeds, are all making massive shifts at once.
“There are rare moments when the world economy seems to be reconfiguring itself beneath our feet,” wrote economics analyst Neil Irwin in The New York Times on March 9. “These can be startlingly fast bursts, not obvious to people who are just going about their business, but glaringly so to those who interpret the moves of financial markets.
“March 2020, it is now abundantly clear, is one of those moments.”
Art and culture aren’t the same as the bond or oil markets. But those worlds too can make sudden, drastic shifts. History suggests this might be one.
Take what happened in 1606, the year that William Shakespeare wrote “King Lear,” “Macbeth” and “Antony and Cleopatra.” In James Shapiro’s book about that year, the Columbia University historian argues that this colossal burst of creative activity was a result of Shakespeare’s engagement with a “fraught cultural moment” and a “troubled national mood.”
Hence the surfeit of great plays focused on “regicide, civil strife and anarchy.”
That sounds a lot like the Chicago theater shows I’ve been reviewing these last few months, and you could say much the same for the stuff on TV. Regicide might be going too far (unless, like me, you are a fan of HBO’s “Succession”), but most playwrights and screenwriters have been obsessed with the historicism of civil strife: a reaction, self-evidently, to the clash between the ideology of the presidential administration and progressive artists.
But in July 1606, the bubonic plague hit and, suddenly, the theaters were closed.
Comparisons between the Elizabethan version of the plague and the coronavirus are problematic, although they have been cropping up these last few days. The plague meant near-certain death, and its appearance that year wasn’t sudden or even a great surprise. The threat of pestilence was part of life — 30,000 people had died in Britain just two years earlier.
But Shapiro’s book notes that London theaters were engaged in some pretty gruesome on-the-ground decision-making,
“Regicide, civil strife and anarchy” tend to be replaced with great writers musing on the existence of God or the utility of religion ... and they start to see that there are forces in the world that level us all.
responding to a City Council decree that performances should cease when the number of deaths in a week exceeded 30. We’re not at that point yet, thank heavens.
Since it was a for-profit entity, just like Broadway, Shakespeare’s Globe had a powerful economic incentive to keep going; to stop meant no income for artists and orange sellers. To cancel was to put people out of work, to allow poetry to languish unspoken, to bring costs of its own.
You can see those same forces at work now as America tries to decide what must be canceled and at what cost: Government leaders, who have much to lose if they are perceived as indecisive or complicit, are far more conservative than business owners, who have more to lose if they go kaput. It all follows a timeless logic.
But back to Shapiro’s arguments about the consequence. Plague, he points out, was weird in its trajectory, devastating some neighborhoods and sparing others entirely (not unlike the wildfires that spread through the hills of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, a few years ago). Shakespeare’s home was in a lucky neighborhood at first but eventually succumbed, with the deaths including the Bard’s own landlady.
Now it’s always tricky to draw too tight a connection between what happens in a writer’s life and what happens in their imaginative acts. Not everyone who writes sad movies is depressed; comedy writers are often survivors of tough circumstances.
But it’s still interesting, and relevant, to note that Shakespeare made the shift from the big tragedies to plays such as “Pericles,” a drama obsessed with our individual vulnerability, or “The Tempest,” which is about the resolution of a shipwreck. And then there is “The Winter’s Tale,” a play that seriously asks the question of whether it is possible for a person thought dead to come back to life.
In other words, he skirted away from “regicide, civil strife and anarchy” and toward mortality. In times of crisis, the common enemy can change fast.
Now you can’t divorce politics from a health crisis: Healing resources reflect existing inequalities, and it is far easy for some to survive disruption than others. And governments have a sworn duty to protect us. If they are widely seen as derelict in their duty, they hardly can complain if they find themselves replaced.
Still, as was the case during the AIDS crisis and in the months following the Sept. 11 atrocities, “regicide, civil strife and anarchy” tend to be replaced with great writers musing on the existence of God or the utility of religion, as Tony Kushner did in “Angels in America,” and they start to see that there are forces in the world that level us all.
And the marketplace tends to reward those writers. In this era, people quickly become frustrated with works that rip us apart and seek out storytelling that reminds us of our common humanity. Heroes and saviors, outmoded these last three or four years, come roaring back.
You can already see the impact of this change on the political landscape, with its reassertion of the center. The cultural playbook is being upended too. Right now.
It will just take a while for all of this to become clear.