प्लेग, शेक्सपिअर, आणि वर्तमान ....What's "like the tokened pestilence"?

 James Shapiro हे त्यांच्या गाजलेल्या 'The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606' ह्या पुस्तकात प्लेगचा कसा परिणाम १७व्या शतकाच्या सुरवातीला इंग्लंडमधील समाजावर आणि नाटकांवर झाला याची १४व्या, 'प्लेग' नावाच्या,  प्रकरणात चर्चा करतात. 

हे पुस्तक लिहले गेले २०१५ साली आणि मी वाचतोय २०२१ साली त्यामुळे ते प्रकरण वर्तमानातील घटनांमुळे मला खूप अस्वस्थ करते. 

त्यातील काही गोष्टी उद्धृत करतो:

In late July 1606, in the midst of a thrilling theatrical season that included what may well be the finest group of new plays ever staged, the King’s Men lowered their flag at the Globe and locked their playhouse doors. Plague had returned to London.

In any case, by late July 1606, with the number of plague deaths well over that figure and rising week by week, public playing was finished, for the summer at least. 

To reduce the size of crowds, funeral attendance was limited to six, including the pallbearers and minister, though these and other rules were often ignored. 

The councilors had complained that too many Londoners were washing off the red crosses painted over the doors of infected households; the Lord Mayor promised that steps would be taken to use oil-based rather than water-based paint to prevent that. 

The theater, which provides such insight into almost every other aspect of daily life, disappoints when it comes to plague. Dramatists of the day delved into almost every troubling or taboo subject; playgoers saw rape victims stagger onstage and flinched as throats were slit and eyes gouged out. But one thing they never saw depicted were plague victims or their symptoms. Even a passing mention of plague is rare. Was this because it was bad for business to remind playgoers packed into the theaters of the risks of transmitting disease or because a traumatized culture simply couldn’t deal with it? Glancing allusions to plague’s devastation in Shakespeare’s works, when they do appear, are that much more striking. The most haunting is surely the dense one in Macbeth that alludes to the ringing of church bells for the dead and dying, so incessant that people no longer ask for whom the bells toll. 

आता शेवटचा आणखी एक परिच्छेद पहा:

Four centuries later, we have lost much of the shock audiences must have felt when hearing a furious Lear call his eldest daughter, Goneril, a “plague sore, an embossed carbuncle in my / Corrupted blood” (7.381–82) or when in Antony and Cleopatra, a soldier, asked which side is winning, replies that the situation is hopeless, “like the tokened pestilence, / Where death is sure” (3.10.9–10). For playgoers in 1606, all too familiar with plague sores and God’s tokens, these terrifying images were more than metaphoric and more terrifying than they can ever be for us.

आज २०२१ मध्ये मात्र हे म्हणता येणार नाही. ६ वर्षांत इंग्लंडमधील आणि इतरत्र जग प्रचंड बदलेले आहे. कोविडच्या रुपाने आपल्याला आजवरच्या सर्व साथींच्या रोगाचा एक प्रमुख बघायला मिळाला आहे. त्यामुळे शेक्सपिअर च्या नाटकातील प्लेग आजच्या मानव जातीला जास्त खोलवर जाणवेल ... 

“Lord Have Mercy on Us,” from Thomas Dekker, A Rod for Runawayes (1625)

तळटीप :

वि. वा. शिरवाडकर, 'नटसम्राट', अंक पहिला, १९७१-२०११:

"... जर तुम्हीच ओतलं असेल कृतघ्नतेचें जहर 

जर या कारट्यांच्या काळजामध्ये ..." ... अशा संवादामध्ये “plague sore, an embossed carbuncle in my / Corrupted blood” (7.381–82) ह्याची मजा अजिबात नाही!

Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine's Hardboiled Hero....Ludwig Wittgenstein@132

#LudwigWittgenstein132   Today April 26 2021 is 132nd birth anniversary of Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philip K. Zimmerman, ‘The Philosopher and the Detectives: Ludwig Wittgenstein's Enduring Passion for Hardboiled Fiction’, September 2020 :

“…Wittgenstein’s central question, the conundrum that haunted him throughout his life, was what can and cannot be said. With time his position on this question changed, but even at his most expansive, he remained skeptical about the ability of words to capture, or even explore, universal truths—precisely what most philosophers believe their words to be doing. The young Wittgenstein thought it was impossible to say anything truly meaningful about God, the soul, ethics, the nature of being or virtually any of the other subjects that philosophers go on about. His claim was not that these things don’t exist but merely that words can’t touch them.

…And in fact the hardboiled hero is a model he embodied with admirable consistency, in his own intellectual way. Sangfroid, indifference to popular opinion, contempt for authority, unflinching determination to face our human limits—these were all hallmarks of his personal style. Wittgenstein, we might say, was a hardboiled thinker. Like a hardboiled hero, he was obsessed by right and wrong but only on his own terms, and he refused to preach about it. Like a hardboiled hero, when faced with the choice between misunderstanding and silence, he chose silence. His primary loyalty was to himself and his work—which in the final analysis were the same thing.

In 1951, aware he was dying of cancer, Wittgenstein was still writing intense, original and penetrating philosophy. He was also still reading Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine.”

 

Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein; Logicomix, 2008 

Apostolos Doxiadis, illustrated by Alecos Papadatos

अनंत पै, बेनेट कोलमन आणि महाबली वेताळ...Anant Pai Suggested The Phantom to Bennett, Coleman & Co.

 माझ्या ह्या ब्लॉग वरती महाबली वेताळ असलेल्या दोन चार पोस्ट झाल्या आहेत. 

मी जानेवारी २२ २००८ च्या पोस्ट मध्ये लिहले होते:

"... When I grew up, no one (yes, including Shivaji) captivated me more than Phantom, Mahabali Vetal महाबली वेताळ in Marathi. I read and re-read exploits of Phantom and Mandrake, published as part of Indrajal Comics series by Bennett, Coleman & Co

Those heroes’ families became mine.

Bheem of Mahabharat was strong as Lothar, Mandrake as clever as Shivaji. When Princess Diana died I felt sad because she had the same name of Phantom’s wife!

Kolhapur had many attractions for me. One of them was my cousin’s collection of Phantom and Mandrake books. I knew by heart all those books. They were translated in Marathi with some chutzpah.

I have never understood why Phantom comics books were not published in Marathi later.

I wish I had the help of Phantom to learn Newton’s laws and Diana’s help to understand working of the United Nations!

Marathi newspaper Sakal सकाळ on January 18, 2007 reported: “अल्लाद्दिन, टारझन, मोगली आता मराठीतून 'बोलणार'!” (“Aladdin, Tarzan, Moguli now to ‘speak’ in Marathi”)

Poor Sakal. It doesn’t even mention the rich world of Phantom in Marathi that came to pass...."

Kevin Patrick, ‘The Phantom Unmasked: America’s First Superhero’, 2017: "... Anant Pai (1929 – 2011) was a junior executive in Bennett, Coleman & Co.’s book-publishing division at the time when his supervisor, P. K. Roy, remarked that the company’s printing presses lay idle after orders were met for India’s calendar production season. Roy thought they could be used to print comic books to keep them operating at peak capacity, and initially suggested that Superman would be a suitable title. Pai, however, recommended the company choose The Phantom instead, on the grounds that its “steamy tribal . . . milieu” would be more familiar to Indian audiences... "

 courtesy: copyright holder(s) of the image