Creative Discovery
In the midst of a lengthy second round of lockdown restrictions we are once again faced with the idea of isolation and what that might mean. A lot of creative stuff has happened in past isolations throughout various plagues etc, and I decided to do a little research into the subject. Here are some works that standout in particular.
The Decameron by John William Waterhouse
Giovanni Boccaccio
Going right back in time - Giovanni Boccaccio lay low and escaped the plague in 1348 by camping out in Tuscany. Inspired by events, he wrote The Decameron about group of friends, seven women and three men, who get through quarantine in those plague ridden times by telling each other hilariously inappropriate stories about seduction, adultery and laugh-out-loud misunderstandings and wild happenings. Each person tells one story a day over 10 days making a total of 100 stories. Each day is ended off with a canzone (song), which includes some of Boccaccio’s finest lyric poetry. The Decameron is infused with a medieval sense of mystical and numerological significance. Could prove an interesting book to explore.
King Lear and the fool (Act III scene II) by William Homes Sullivan
William Shakespeare
There were several bouts of plague during Shakespeare’s lifetime and during the plague of 1606 he wrote King Lear. The story goes that after the death toll exceeded 30 in a week, the death knoll rang and things shut down including the public playhouse. which in 1606, meant most of the year. (sound familiar). So Shakespeare got to work on King Lear , a bleak and despairing tragedy, quite often considered too dark to perform.
“Tis the times’ plague, when madmen lead the blind” - William Shakespeare, King Lear
Two other plays Shakespeare wrote during isolation, were Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. It is interesting to note that during a previous plague outbreak in June 1592, theatres also closed for around six months. During this period Shakespeare made the most of the time available to him, and wrote his long narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.
Side note: In Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet, the messenger, deliverer of all vital info, was quarantined due to the plague. This messenger was carrying news to the bereft Romeo, that Juliet was not as he thought, dead, but alive. But alas, the message never reaches poor Romeo. From then on, as we know, it all goes rather pear shaped, tragedy indeed.
Newton experimenting with light, painting by Jean Leon Huens
Isaac Newton
Moving on….during the bubonic plague in England of 1665, Isaac Newton, 23 at the time, was attending classes at Cambridge University. Having retreated to his family estate nearby, Newton experienced a burst of energy and insight and produced some of his best works during the quarantine. It was at this time that he began writing papers that would become early calculus and also when his theory of gravity germinated. Newton further studied optics and showed that white light is comprised of all components of the spectrum. Described in a letter to the Royal Society in 1671, Newton’s theory is so simple it can be done at home with sunlight and a couple of prisms. Worth experimenting.
Portrait of Mary Shelley by Richard Rothwell
Mary Shelley
During a cholera epidemic in the United Kingdom in 1816, Mary and her future husband Percy Shelley isolated themselves near Geneva, Switzerland with Lord Byron and physician John Polidori. They read horror stories to each other to pass the time. Byron set a challenge whereby they would each write their own ghost story. Mary based hers on a dream and the story ultimately lead to the birth of her novel Frankenstein. Interesting times indeed.
Side note:-
Lord Byron’s poem Darkness was also written in 1816, inspired by the strange weather and darkness caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia that year.
John Poldidor’s contribution written in Geneva, The Vampyre, is said to have influenced Bram Stoker’s Dracula
“Self portrait with Spanish flu” by Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch
Norwegian artist, Edvard Munch is well know for his 1893 painting, “The Scream” . Munch painted a lot of spooky and dark pieces that can evoke feelings of isolation or anxiety. Maybe this had something to do with the fact that his mother and sister both succumbed to tuberculosis while he was only young. After surviving the Spanish Flu in 1918 Munch kept on painting and produced some great artwork including - “Self-Portrait with Spanish Flu”.
Mark Twain
Mark Twain visited Italy in 1867 during a cholera outbreak and needed to quarantine which he wasn’t too happy about. During this time more than 113,000 Italians died of cholera. It is interesting to note that although Twain felt the containment measures were overblown, he changed his mind when he contract cholera whilst visiting Demascus. His book Innocents Abroad was published two years later.
Twain wrote “It surprises me sometimes to think how much we do know and how intelligent we are. What a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be, if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges”