Shakespeare’s Plays and the Plague @guardian

An article by Vanessa Thorpe in the Guardian examines how repeated outbreaks of the plague might have affected the way William Shakespeare wrote some of his plays, including how he crafted their endings. She writes,

The ravages of the plague are the true source of the dark sorrow driving Shakespeare’s later work, a leading authority on the playwright has claimed – and were even behind his decision to change the traditional ending of the King Lear story for his own play.

Read the rest of the article here. 

Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World (Norton, 2004).

Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet (Knopf, 2020).

Emma Smith, This Is Shakespeare (Pantheon, 2019)