Shakespeare in the time of SARS-CoV2 Coronavirus – Apr 17, 2020

William Shakespeare – fractured cubist face on the cover of Samuel Schoenbaum's book, ‘Shakespeare’s Lives’

For the first time KRG held a session using videoconferencing software to get around the problem of meeting during the SARS-CoV2 coronavirus lockdown. We used the application called Zoom, known to have several security and privacy hazards. Since the free application allows only 40 minutes for a meeting, we had to hold three successive Zoom meetings to get though the material of fourteen readers – a full house record in recent times.

Our experience with Zoom was poor, probably on account of the weak 4G connections on the mobile phones employed by half the readers. Each screen display requires ~2Mbps of bandwidth, and the bandwidth measured with Speedtest.net came to about 13Mbps Upload and 1Mbps download for a typical 4G connection on a mobile phone. This is quite inadequate to support the 12 screens we had; besides, 4G connections are quite unstable, varying in speed, latency, and signal strength. As a result the sound (the most important factor for intelligibility in conferences) was constantly disrupted by scratchy noises and squeaks. If we hold a Zoom conference in future we should squelch the Video except for the one person holding the floor for hiser reading, and similarly for the Audio.

In this time of the SARS-CoV2 coronavirus crisis, Joe mentioned that he chose the play Coriolanus because it does have a glancing image of deaths from the plague. However, Shakespeare did not introduce an actual plague scene in any of his plays. Talitha, ex-member of KRG and Shakespeare enthusiast, was our invited guest from Thiruvananthapuram. In her commentary she gives a more complete review of plagues during Shakespeare’s working life, and the few indirect references there are to them in his plays.

One of the curses in Romeo and Juliet, uttered by Mercutio when he is stabbed fatally by Tybalt in a street fight is memorable:
A plague o' both your houses! 

When Romeo arrives he notices Tybalt and Mercutio are fighting, and tries to break it up; just then Tybalt delivers a fatal stab to Mercutio's chest

More powerful still is the censure Lear casts on his daughter Goneril:
thou art a boil,
A plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle,
In my corrupted blood.
(Act 2 Scene 4)

A cartoonist on Twitter, Mya Lixian Gosling, has provided amusement for readers to show how every tragedy of Shakespeare could have been averted if only people stayed at home and practiced self-isolation:

Shakespeare in a time of Coronavirus cartoon (click to enlarge)

Remembering Thomas Duddy, poet and friend

Tom Duddy came for tea on May 26, 2012

Tom Duddy precipitates a rush of memories.  It began in 2012 when KumKum found him sitting on an upturned boat, reciting sonnets to the bystanders on Fort Kochi beach. Perhaps, he was just exercising his lungs and giving breath to the sonnets of William Shakespeare. Tom has always maintained that both the human voice and the printed word were required to impress the Sonnets emphatically on the modern world, four hundred years after they were written. To this end he had memorised as many of the 154 sonnets as he could. You can refer to his talk on the occasion of KRG’s celebration at David Hall of Shakespeare’s 450th birth anniversary in April 2014. He selected six sonnets and drew out their pith, eloquently explaining wherein lay their strong appeal to us, far removed though we are from Elizabethan England.

Tom was a relatively young man of 82 when he delivered that lecture. His customary morning regimen was to get up, make coffee, and go to work on a long poem he was writing at the time called A Wedding Song in which he hoped to fuse the wedding of his parents with subsequent events culminating with the current scene in Kerala. After spending the creative hours of the morning, ringing with the furtive cries of koels in the bush, he would step out for a walk. In times past his walk would weave along Palace Road, a crowded thoroughfare, toward Jew Town in Mattancherry and on his way back he would stop for vadas and sambar at a little restaurant. Then he would wend his way to the fruit stands opposite Koker’s on Amaravathi Road to buy apples, his favourite fruit.

Tom Duddy and Joe on Jan 14, 2020 – Michal, our daughter, took this pic at his apartment 

I used to encourage Tom to complete his poem so we could read it privately at least, even if he was not keen on publishing. His standard response was that everything was in the act of writing; that was where the pleasure and the pain lay. Next day when he would gaze at what he wrote he would be surprised and annoyed in equal parts. ‘Ah that was good! Just right and it held a surprise.’ More often he was pained that such banal stuff had issued from his pen, and that he had actually thought it good at the time … what a let down! These were Tom’s daily struggles. 

My chagrin is that in spite of all the urging, and his promise that by May 2014 he would complete it, he didn’t. Much worse, his ancient Apple MacBook crashed, and A Wedding Song went poof! I wish I had helped him make a backup before the computer died. I pleaded he should have the disk crash analysed and the data possibly recovered, but he never agreed. He didn’t mention the disaster any further – he went on to his next long poem. But I chaffed him by writing this for his 84th birthday

Poet goes walking,

trailing Wedding Song behind — 

Poem unending …

A sidebar. Why do people write epic length poems, when we are short-lived mortals living in an era when a tweet of 140 characters (now 280) is as far as the attention span of a modern goes? Why not a sonnet? Why not several sonnets, each just 14 lines? It begins, you develop the thought, usher in the crucial volta after the octet, and if you can devise a punchy couplet at the end, you’re done. A finished poem. But that was not Tom. He loved the sonnets of WS, but his own short form was the haiku, of which he was something of a master. The most famous one I liked and quoted back to him many times was this, inspired by the china-valas of Fort Kochi. It began his intended long poem, A Wedding Song:

O fished-out fishnet 

Poetry's your only catch

And blood-red sunset 

Chinese Fishing Nets in Fort Kochi