Drama in Quarantine: Exploring the Traumatic Impact of Plague on William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

Abstract

The contemplative reader of literature realizes that natural and social calamities, which inflict colossal sufferings on human beings, are best portrayed within its major genres. Examples of such calamities are wars, natural disasters and infectious diseases. In light of these critical circumstances, men of letters in general and playwrights in particular have not stood idly by. Rather, they found themselves more fervent to dramatize such calamities in their writings. William Shakespeare is the best to cite here. To everyone‟s surprise, Shakespeare composed most of his masterpieces during the quarantine period initiated by the "Plague" or “Black Death,” which first struck England in the fourteenth century. Examples of Shakespeare‟s plague plays are Romeo and Juliet , Hamlet , A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, besides many others. In one way or another, such plays bear some allusions to the traumatic anxieties and fears caused by the plague experience at that time. The present study is conducted to explore the traumatic impact of the Plague on Shakespeare‟s Romeo and Juliet . It seems that almost every aspect in the fictitious world of Romeo and Juliet has been touched by the plague, both literally and symbolically. Throughout Romeo and Juliet , the reader could encounter only two scenes that explicitly mention or dramatize the plague. However, Shakespeare proves to be a skillful master in blinding the plague and quarantine themes into several symbolic and figurative motifs. Shakespeare could achieve this through employing a symbolic language saturated with traumatic plague allusions to account for the tragic endings of his characters.