William Shakespeare knew about pandemics and shutdowns as deadly outbreaks of the plague occurred in England throughout his life (1564-1616).

But Shakespearean scholar Helen Whall noted that the Bard of Avon did not spend his time idly when the theaters had to be closed.

“What did you do during the lockdown? He wrote ‘King Lear.’ That’s an impossible bar to live up to,” said Whall.

And yet Shakespeare only wrote about the plague directly once, as a plot device in “Romeo and Juliet,” Whall noted. Instead she said that he invoked the plague as metaphor, particularly in some of his darkest plays such as “King Lear.”

Whall will explore the topic as most theaters remain closed in the United States and Europe during an online talk, “Shakespeare at the Time of the Plague,” on Oct. 7 at the annual meeting of the Friends of the Shrewsbury Public Library via Zoom. There will be a brief business meeting at 6:30 p.m. followed by the main program featuring Whall’s talk at 7 p.m. The event is free. To register for the program, click on the online calendar: http://www.eventkeeper.com/mars/xpages/S/SHREWSBURY/ekp.cfm?curOrg=shrewsbury. Those who register will receive the Zoom link the day before the event.

The talk will discuss how a recurring pandemic affected English theater and how Shakespeare used the dark days that were reflected in his work. The topic has surfaced recently as people look at what is happening to theater here with COVID-19. As Whall was speaking during a telephone interview, it had just been announced that the Metropolitan Opera had canceled all performances for its 2020-21 season, saying the coronavirus pandemic remains too great an ongoing health concern.

Wahll taught Shakespeare and Renaissance drama at the College of the Holy Cross for 41 years, retiring in 2017. She has published extensively both on early modern and modern drama, written commentary notes for Trinity Repertory Theater in Providence and served as a review’s editor for Theatre Journal. Since her retirement she has been teaching Shakespeare and modern drama in the WISE program (Worcester Institute for Senior Education).

The second plague pandemic, as it is officially known, started with the Black Death, which reached Europe in 1348 and killed up to a half of the population of Eurasia in the next four years. The plague recurred regularly, and in England that was particularly the case at the time of Shakespeare and beyond to the Great Plague of 1665-66. The town of Stratford-upon-Avon suffered a big outbreak of the plague in 1564, just after Shakespeare was born there. He had been predeceased by two brothers.
 
Running an ironically close parallel to the plague in the late 16th/early 17th century was the rise of popular public theater in England.

“The first successful English public playhouse opened in 1576,” Whall said. “It was named, just to make its claim abundantly clear, ‘The Theatre’!”

Meanwhile, “the plague started to become cyclic.”

Shakespeare was in London in 1592 and establishing himself as a playwright when the theaters had to be shut down, Whall said.

“What does he do? He writes poetry. It’s dedicated poetry. He gets patronage.”

In 1593 and 1594 he published two narrative poems, “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece,” and dedicated them to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton.

Around this time Shakespeare was also probably writing “Romeo and Juliet,” Whall said.

The play is the one time in Shakespeare’s works when the plague is addressed directly and used in the story. A messenger who has been entrusted to give some key information to the exiled Romeo is quarantined because his companion may have been visiting people sick with the plague. Romeo never gets the message and tragedy ensues.

Whall said the plague is also used as a metaphor in the play when Romeo’s friend Mercutio, dying from his wounds in a duel with Juliet’s cousin Tybalt, exclaims, “A plague o’ both your houses!”

That far more common metaphorical use by Shakespeare has the plague as the equivalent of something.

In “King Lear,” Lear rages at his evil and deceitful daughter Goneril, “Thou art a boil, A plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle, In my corrupted blood.”

However, “the plague killed 20 million Europeans, one third of the population. People were dying such horrible deaths. People were left to die on their own. Why didn’t he (Shakespeare) talk about it?” Whall asked.

“It’s almost as if writing about the plague is unbearable.”

There was a very bad outbreak of the plague in London in 1603 and again in 1606, the latter killing Shakespeare’s London landlady and forcing him to vacate the premises. The theaters were constantly being closed, including Shakespeare’s venue the Globe Theatre.

“So little was known other than getting together in groups was a bad thing,” Whall said of scientific knowledge at that time.

The Globe Theatre was a three-story, open-air amphitheater that could house about 3,000 people. A modern restoration, although with a smaller capacity, indicates that people would have been “stacked like cordwood,” Whall said. That was too much for the authorities.

With the theater closed, it’s possible that Shakespeare not only wrote “King Lear” but also “Macbeth” and “Antony and Cleopatra.”

“King Lear” and “Macbeth” are probably the bleakest plays that Shakespeare penned, with the horrors of the former resembling “the promised end” of the apocalypse, “or image of that horror.”

Still, “the good news is he (Shakespeare) made it through, and so did theater,” Whall said.

Twenty-first-century technology means that Whall will be giving her Zoom talk from her home in Worcester. There will be time for a Q&A at the end. “I think there could be a lot of good questions,” she said.

Asked what Shakespeare might have done in the COVID-19 pandemic, Whall said, “I don’t know what Shakespeare would do with our technology. I’ve always wondered what he would do with a movie camera.”

Widespread fascination with Shakespeare has been evident throughout Whall’s time teaching.

“I have had the luckiest career. Although there has been a general decline of interest in the humanities since 2008 as a practical matter, I always had full classes at Holy Cross,” she said.

That continues at WISE (where Whall said Zoom has kept classes going), and it’s not just the students who are learning more.

“Every time I go back to the plays I see something I haven’t seen before,” Whall said.