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

نوع المستند : المقالة الأصلية

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Egypt

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Abstract:
Over its history, literature has proven to be the mirror through which our surrounding world is best reflected with its ups and downs, ebbs and flows. The contemplative reader of literature realizes that both natural and social calamities are best portrayed within its major genres, including poetry, prose and drama. Examples of such calamities are wars, natural disasters and infectious diseases. Since 2019, the whole world has been astonished by the COVID-19 pandemic, which imposed a state of quarantine on all aspects of life. In these critical circumstances, men of letters have not stood idly by. Rather, they found themselves more fervent to dramatize such calamities in their writings. They took of William Shakespeare and his likes their role model. To everyone’s surprise, Shakespeare composed most of his masterpieces during the quarantine period initiated by the "Plague" or “Black Death,” which struck England in the fourteenth century. Examples of Shakespeare’s plague plays are Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, besides many others. In one way or another, such plays bear some allusions to the traumatic anxieties caused by the plague experience at that time. The present study is conducted to explore the traumatic impact of 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, Shakespeare has employed a symbolic language saturated with traumatic plague allusions to account for the fair endings of his characters.

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