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!