The ghost of life: Desire is death

Today’s the day we mark the Big Gun of English poetry, William Shakespeare. Much of Shakespeare’s life would have been spent amidst pestilence; smallpox, typhus, cholera were just some of the diseases swirling about. It’s surprising that his works aren’t more drenched with catastrophic events beyond the making of man.

King Lear was first performed for James I in 1606, following a summer in which bubonic plague ravaged the country and closed down much of the entertainment venues and shops in London. We don’t know that this influenced Shakespeare, but the landscape of Lear is a blasted wasteland for much of the play, so…

As per usual, Lear’s downfall is of his own making, but, man, does he take half the cast with him into madness and death. About halfway through the play, when the deposed king is wandering the moors, he rages…against ingratitude.

Huh.

King Lear, Act III, Scene 2

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!

You cataracts and hurricanes, spout

Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!

You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,

Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world,

Crack Nature’s moulds, all germains spill at once,

That makes ingrateful man!

Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!

Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters.

I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness.

I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children,

You owe me no subscription. Then let fall

Your horrible pleasure. Here I stand your slave,

A poor, infirm, weak, and despis’d old man.

But yet I call you servile ministers,

That will with two pernicious daughters join

Your high-engender’d battles ‘gainst a head

So old and white as this! O! O! ’tis foul!

Frankly, I’ve always thought that—more than other Shakespearean tragic heroes—Lear pretty much deserved what he wrought. I mean—the guy couldn’t see Regan and Goneril for what they were; or Cordelia, for that matter. The tragedy was that—because he was king—his follies turned into tragedy for everyone around him.

Anyhow, as is my custom for Shakespeare day in National Poetry Month, here’s one of his sonnets, in which he compares love to disease. ‘Nuff said.

“Sonnet 147”

My love is as a fever, longing still

For that which longer nurseth the disease,

Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,

Th’ uncertain sickly appetite to please.

My reason, the physician to my love,

Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,

Hath left me, and I desperate now approve

Desire is death, which physic did except.

Past cure I am, now reason is past care,

And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;

My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,

At random from the truth vainly expressed:

    For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,

    Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.