셰익스피어와 팬데믹: 그의 삶과 작품과 극장에 미친 역병의 영향

Abstract

William Shakespeare was never free from the specter of the pandemic that swept across Europe from his birth to the end of his life. Despite this, his works seem to lack direct references to the contemporary pandemic, and researchers have not considered the relationship between Shakespeare and the plague a significant issue for more than four centuries. The term “plague” in his works has mostly been seen as representing external elements of the plot, such as exclamations, curses, expressions of anger, or descriptions and metaphors of negative situations. It seems unusual that Shakespeare, who had a profound understanding of human suffering, sorrow, life, and death, did not express concern about the pandemic that dominated the lives of people in his time. For modern readers who have experienced the COVID-19 pandemic, this is an intriguing question. Therefore, this paper aims to uncover traces of the plague in his works and reevaluate the correlation between Shakespeare and the pandemic by analyzing the content related to the plague from a new perspective. Additionally, the paper seeks to discover the impact it had on the author's life and works, and examine the changes it brought to the British theater. In doing so, the paper asserts that the pandemic is not merely a problem confined to Shakespeare's era but remains a common concern that resonates in the current era experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic. This exploration becomes a task of discovering and expanding Shakespeare's universality from a literary perspective.