One year ago almost to the day, I sat on a stone bench under starlight, the buzz of cicadas and the occasional whooshing of passing cars a soothing background to the music and poetry on stage. It was the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s final performance of their 2019 season: Twelfth Night.
I leaned back, contented, my partner Taylor on my left, my best friend from college and his partner on my right. The day before we had hiked through Rocky Mountain National Park, then sat shoulder-to-shoulder at the Alamo Drafthouse eating cheese fries and laughing through a preposterous action movie. Tomorrow we would take the bus to Denver, lick melting ice cream from the side of cones, hold Dakota’s hand while he got his first tattoo. Right now, however, we were enthralled by Viola and Sebastian, by flirtation and disguises and zany schemes and happily-ever-after.
At the end of the play, after a standing ovation, every actor from the season’s company came on stage to perform a medley of Shakespeare’s verse, a summary and send-off until we met again the following year. The lead actor stepped forward, and recited a few lines of Prospero’s most famous soliloquy from The Tempest:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air…
(IV.i.148-150)
Seven months later, every Shakespeare performance in the world is cancelled.
The idea for the project comes to me suddenly and insistently, prompted mostly by the frantic, passionate, often confrontational opinions circulating in my Twitter feed. On March 14, Rosanne Cash tweets, “Just a reminder that when Shakespeare was quarantined because of the plague, he wrote King Lear.” The immediate, defensive rejoinder from Nick Martin: “This mindset is the natural endpoint of America’s hustle culture – the idea that every nanosecond of our lives must be commodified and pointed toward profit and self-improvement.” And finally, mockingly, an article by Rosa Lyster lampooning the fantasy that the pressure of quarantine is all that is separating the denizens of Twitter from otherwise creating a work on the level of King Lear.
At the same time, as events are cancelled and I start teaching online and every minute of every day seems to be filled with news reports and menacing bar graphs and murmurs about the end of the world, I (and so many others) keep thinking about Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel’s luminous, haunting novel about the aftermath of a deadly flu pandemic that destroys 99.9% of the world’s population. Mandel’s novel does not center, however, as so many dystopias and disaster narratives do, on an orgy of human suffering, on the spectacle of dead children or a tidal wave crashing over the Statue of Liberty. Rather, she focuses on Shakespeare: on the life of an actor, Arthur Leander, who dies of a heart attack while playing Lear the night the pandemic hits; and, twenty years later, on Kirsten Raymonde, a young woman who lives in an itinerant symphony and acting troupe, traveling from village to village of survivors performing symphonies and Shakespeare by candlelight, dressed in shabby wedding clothes scavenged from the closets of the dead. Painted on the troupe’s lead caravan is their motto, a quotation from Star Trek: Voyager: “Because survival is insufficient.”
At this point, in late March, I am still too nervous to want to reread Station Eleven: unlike other people who take comfort in staring their anxieties in the face, I studiously avoid movies like Contagion and Outbreak, never consider pulling out our copy of the board game Pandemic for an evening of thematic fun. At the same time, however, I can’t escape the unshakeable knowledge that the coronavirus pandemic is one of those events that will define a generation, that my children will read about at school and then come home and ask me about someday. It is also, for me at least, a simultaneous gift of time and retraction of space. As I stare down the length of a formless, lonely year with no defined end in sight, my world narrows to simple, repetitive elements. My 871 square foot apartment; the six block radius surrounding it that we walk daily; my inescapable laptop screen; our mischievous, smelly, lazy, immensely comforting cat; and my fiancé, Taylor, who – with the exception of grocery runs and lunchtime walks – is never more than ten seconds away.
I need a project: because a project will give the days and months shape, because a project will make me feel productive (and so much of my self-worth is built on that idea of productivity), because I want to create an archive of this time, my own record of living through something terrible and strange and important. I need a project because I am getting very tired of playing Breath of the Wild and watching old movies. I need a project because survival is insufficient.
And so I decide I am going to read a lot of Shakespeare. At first I am going to read all of Shakespeare’s plays, and then, thankfully, I realize that a) that is a lot of plays, and b) I don’t really care that much about Richard II. When I finally receive the news in May that I have received a grant to read a lot of Shakespeare, I am forced to commit to the project and give it shape. So I settle on a nice round number: ten plays, all chosen because they mention plague, or were written during the plague, or feel thematically significant to this present moment: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale.
I will read them in the order they were written (even this does not prove so simple). After Lear, I will pause, steel myself, and reread Station Eleven. The entire affair will be deeply profound and literary and thoughtful, as I transcend grief and loss and kitty litter and Netflix and spend slow, thoughtful time contemplating Meaningful Eternal Art. In order to commemorate this, on the day I begin I assemble a mis-en-scène on my kitchen table: coffee steaming in a Penguin Classics mug, a candle that smells like a library, a pile of books with the Wadsworth Shakespeare prominently displayed. It feels a little too on the nose – starting a project concerned with performance by performing intellectual depth and the artistic life – but it is also, fundamentally, a nice way to begin. My cat rubs against my legs. I take notes longhand, in a leather travel journal embossed with the words “Not all those who wander are lost.” In the background, the record player whirs and begins to play Mumford and Son’s Sigh No More, a Shakespeare-inflected album that will follow me throughout the entire project.
Two months later, I am sitting on the ground in Taylor’s office, wearing a stained t-shirt and sweatpants, forcing myself to finish Cymbeline with an old college trick: one Sour Patch Kid per completed page. It is my fourth play of the week: my deadline crept up on me and I am suddenly faced with a lot of reading to do in very little time. I keep checking my phone: Trump has started talking about postponing the November election, my educator friends are terrified about returning to their classrooms, and also I just discovered Poshmark and can’t stop window shopping. In the play, a nefarious Italian is stowing away in a chest in a lady’s bedroom so that he can win a bet and trick her husband into believing she’s cheating on him. Shakespeare has never felt less relevant.
As many commentators have already noted, the plague – with its mysterious wildfire spread, grotesque pustules and high fever, and overwhelming mortality rate – was a ubiquitous backdrop to Shakespeare’s world. His lifetime marked the midpoint in the staggering four hundred year “Second Pandemic,” the intermittent outbreaks of bubonic plague that haunted Western Europe between 1348 and 1750.
While the playwright himself never contracted the plague (that we know of), it shadowed his life. Prior to his birth, his parents had two daughters who both died of the disease: Joan, two months old, in 1558, and Margaret, age one, in 1563. A year later, the year William was born, an astonishing one-fifth of the population of Stratford-upon-Avon died.
Throughout Shakespeare’s life, major outbreaks appeared again and again: In 1582, 1592-3, 1603, 1606, 1608-9. Plague was especially dangerous in the context of the cramped quarters and inadequate sanitation of the rapidly growing capital of London – the waves of death required careful recordkeeping, marking the beginning of official health statistics. Whenever the city death rate exceeded thirty per week, theaters were shuttered and performances were cancelled, along with assemblies, feasts, archery contests, and other mass gatherings. Between 1603 and 1613, the Globe and other London theaters were closed for 78 months – a stunning 60% of the time. It was during the 1606 outbreak that Shakespeare is believed to have written three of his great tragedies: Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, and King Lear.
Unsurprisingly, Shakespeare turns to plague again and again in his language, indicative of what Stephen Greenblatt describes as his audience’s “deep familiarity, the acceptance of plague as an inescapable feature of ordinary life.” In Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio famously calls down “a plague o’ both your houses” as he dies (III.i.99-100). With dark humor, Much Ado About Nothing’s Beatrice quips that friendship with Benedick is more unavoidable – and more ruinous – than the plague: “He is sooner caught than the pestilence, and the taker runs presently mad” (I.i.87-8).
And, yes, plague appears in the language of King Lear, as a visceral metaphor condemning incompetence in government and the ignorance of the masses: “‘Tis the time’s plague, when madmen lead the blind” (IV.i.46).
During the pandemic I become obsessed with archives: the ones we return to publicly and often; the ones that exist but have been buried or obscured; and the empty space where archives should exist but are missing. I return to personal archives – baby pictures, photos of field trips in high school and parties in college – clinging to their simultaneous distance and comforting normalcy. I dive deep into clothing history, spending hours reading about eighteenth century underwear and fabric production and the feminist legacy of pockets. I spend hours on the FEC database looking up every name I can think of, curious as to who I know supported Elizabeth Warren and who was a secret Trump voter. I don’t find any surprises: everyone I know is more than happy to loudly proclaim their politics.
In late May, months of pent-up energy and frustration explode into nationwide protests organized around the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, demanding that America reckon with the legacy of violence, racism, and brutality built into its DNA. Every day comes with video of armed riot police beating down peaceful protestors, with body cam footage of the shooting of unarmed citizens, with horrifying images of anonymous, militarized operatives in camouflage and carapaces of body armor pointing tear gas grenade guns at children or standing grimly on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. While doing research for my dissertation, I trace American Christianity’s essential role in sanctifying racism, violence, and genocide from Columbus to the 2016 election. Again and again I hear people denying this history, or helplessly asking why they didn’t know. Again and again I see people replying: this archive was always here. You just didn’t want to see it.
While everything else is happening, I read Carmen Maria Machado’s electric memoir, In the Dream House, the aftershocks of which resonate backwards and forwards throughout the rest of my year. The memoir, which recounts Machado’s relationship with an abusive girlfriend through a kaleidoscopic lens of genres, begins with an introduction about archives. To live a life without recorded precedent, she argues, to be haunted by circumstances that others insist do not, cannot exist, is to be vulnerable and lonely, cut off from history. “How do we do right by the wronged people of the past without physical evidence of their suffering?” she asks. “How do we direct our record keeping toward justice?” (5).
In her landmark feminist essay A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf famously points to another missing archive, as personified by the figure of Judith Shakespeare, William’s imagined sister who was just as talented as he was but was spit out by the world and lost to a pauper’s grave. How much brilliance, Woolf speculates, has been lost, squandered, or obscured because it belonged to a woman? When we read about a woman being burned as a witch, or possessed by devils, or driven mad, “then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to” (49). A catalogue of fragments, a palimpsest of missed opportunities, squandered talent, and truncated lives.
The trouble with this project from the onset has been its reliance on the works of William Shakespeare as an eternal, ever-relevant archive: Ben Jonson famously claimed that “he was not of an age but for all time.” We still read and discuss and perform Shakespeare because we believe that his work matters, can speak to us, can give us language for our fear and rage and joy. I took on this project in part because of the idea of Shakespeare: if Shakespeare could write King Lear during a plague year, then I could find something meaningful and transcendent in this pandemic too.
But here is my confession: I did not like King Lear. The most prominent experience I had while reading King Lear – indeed, while reading most of the plays – was frustration and anger. Anger at the way women were sidelined and silenced, disbelieved and ignored, mocked and abused. Exasperation as Caesar and Brutus ignored their wives’ council and came to ruin. Indignation as men in Lear, Much Ado, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale cast aside the women they claimed to love and then were welcomed back and too easily forgiven. Exhaustion as Juliet and Miranda were manipulated as prizes to be won, Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra were condemned as unnatural and emasculating for their ambition, and the rare voices of reason were reprimanded or ignored. What I did not expect while rereading these plays is that I would return, again and again, to the angry women of Shakespeare: Lady Macbeth plotting treason because, as a friend of mine once put it, she just wants a job. Paulina furiously condemning King Leontes for his destruction of his family, refusing to let him forget even sixteen years later that he was the one who murdered his wife.
It is no surprise that my favorite play of the project – my enduring favorite among all of Shakespeare’s plays – is Much Ado About Nothing: a play about men eager to disbelieve women at the first sign of trouble. At the center of Much Ado is a love story in which Benedick and Beatrice meet as equals, in which he proves his love for her by believing her and Hero when all other men forsake them. In Beatrice’s furious words I find an echo of my own anger and helplessness: “O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market-place” (IV.i.306-7). In the sudden viciousness of her desire I feel my own helpless, sobbing fury from the last few months: at a nation turning on its own protesting citizens, at a megalomaniacal president leading an incompetent, cronyish administration who openly care more about their bottom lines than the lives of their constituents; at the way that the selfishness and willful ignorance of people around me pushes safety and a return to normal further and further into the future. Furthermore, in the specificity of Beatrice’s complaint – O God, that I were a man – I find recognition that injustice does not strike everyone equally, whether today or in the Elizabethan Era.
Thousands of people routinely starved to death when the harvest failed. In 1577, an estimated 10,000 homeless vagrants wandered the country’s roads, not including the numerous resident poor in towns and villages. Despite the fact that the monarch was a woman, she did very little to advance gender equality.
Women – often impoverished widows and old women – worked as nurses for plague victims, risking their lives in exchange for a living wage to feed themselves and their children. Today, an estimated 1 in 3 American women are essential workers, and the majority of essential workers are people of color. Seventy-seven percent of nurses are women.
Records from a 1579-80 outbreak in Norwich reveal that 4,193 people died in one season, a quarter of the population. Half of them were immigrants and refugees. In 2020, crowded prisons and squalid immigrant detention camps have become hotbeds of coronavirus, the enforced lack of hygiene and privacy allowing the virus to run rampant.
The plague overwhelmingly affected poor people living in cramped conditions, who did not have the opportunities to escape to the countryside away from crowds and unsanitary conditions. According to data from the CDC released in June, death rates from coronavirus are much higher among Black and Hispanic people than those among white people in every age category.
Not of an age, but for all time.
A fundamental characteristic of most Shakespearean tragedy is that it centers upon great men, men who are in a position to achieve wonders but are undone but their own fatal flaw, a hamartia. Hamlet’s is indecision, Macbeth’s his ambition, Lear’s his pride. While other, lesser people – faithful servants, soldiers, wives and daughters – may die along the way, at the end of the play the protagonist is finally, justly punished for his error, and those who remain begin the work of restoring their world: a fundamentally moral universe in which evil receives its just deserts. As Frank Kermode writes in his introduction to Macbeth, it is a play about the “temporary [emphasis mine] triumph of evil; when it ends, virtue and justice are restored” (1355). At the core of this structure are two assumptions: that suffering is the result of one’s actions, and that certain lives and deaths are more important than others.
When faced with violence, pain, and death, we invariably look for a purpose. We see this in conspiracy theories claiming coronavirus is caused by foreign spies or nefarious billionaires or 5G networks; we see it in pronouncements that a pandemic is a wake-up call from God or a test of our faith. We see it in the almost comical logic of street preacher and pamphleteer T. White, proclaiming in 1577 that “The cause of plagues is sin, and the cause of sin is plays.” If there is someone to blame, then there is a reason for our suffering, a sense of control or at least smug authority to separate oneself from the nameless, faceless statistics.
Shakespeare’s tragedies do not promise a world without suffering, but they do suggest one where suffering has a cause, where evil does not escape unpunished. We can read this as an attempt to imagine a reality less senselessly, unrelentingly numbing than that of the plague. The plays are full of murder, suicide, poison, war, madness, drowning, and death by heartbreak, but they are curiously free of plague. As Stephen Greenblatt notes, the only play where plague appears within the plot directly is Romeo and Juliet: The friar tasked with delivering the crucial information about Juliet’s feigned death to Romeo is quarantined against his will after being exposed to illness, and thus cannot deliver the message in time. “The plague, which is hardly represented in the play,” Greenblatt writes, “does not cause their deaths, but the profound social disruption it brings in its wake – conveyed in the rush of seemingly irrelevant details – plays an oddly significant role.”
I’m fascinated by the fact that the plague appears in Romeo and Juliet, that rare tragedy that centers not great men in power and their evil, but rather the collateral damage that collects around them. In high school, the play was taught as a cautionary tale against passion and impulse – “these violent delights have violent ends” – but upon rereading it, it strikes me as a seething indictment by Shakespeare of the generational trauma wrought by old, powerful men’s selfishness and pettiness. Every young person except for Benvolio dies, in a cascade of avoidable loss that rushes through not only the Montagues and the Capulets but also the Prince’s household. Every member of the older generation except for Lady Montague – who dies offstage of grief – survives, forced to end the play with the full knowledge of their complicity in the total devastation of their future: “Poor sacrifices of our enmity” (V.iii.303). The old and wealthy plot and feud, and children are the ones who pay the price.
Near the end of July, Taylor and I spend a few days at an Air BnB in the mountains to celebrate his birthday. It is a strange mixture of escape from our daily lives and constant reminders that this isn’t an ordinary vacation in an ordinary year. When we grill brats on the deck, drink coffee in the morning with a backdrop of towering firs, or stand triumphantly after a long hike at the summit of Chief Mountain taking in the rolling colors of the Continental Divide, it is the freest my mind has felt in weeks. When we get takeout instead of eating on a patio watching the sun set, sanitize our hands after buying gas, and don our masks whenever we pass other hikers on the trail, however, the claustrophobia returns.
On the first night of our trip, after dinner, we decide to explore the historic Idaho Springs Cemetery, which is just across the road, close enough to be visible from our bedroom window. The cemetery, which dates back to the 1870s and the height of Idaho Springs’s gold-mining boom, is built into a steep hillside, gravestones and monuments jutting from the earth like barnacles on an upturned hull. I’ve never seen such a wild, haphazard cemetery. Some crumbling monuments are shored up with slabs of concrete or wire mesh in an attempt to keep them from tumbling down towards the road; other stones are completely unreachable, swallowed up by a tangle of knee-high grass and brambles. Even amongst the tamer sections there are signs of age and forgetting: inscriptions weathered to unreadability, spindly wooden crosses peeling paint and sinking into the ground, headstones missing pieces or split in two. As we walk east, things become more well-maintained: rows of neat, identical white tombs belonging to World War II veterans; a flower-bounded plot set aside for the local chapter of the Lion’s Club.
I come to the cemetery hoping to discover Spanish Flu graves, but I don’t find any. What I do find is a host of ordinary, forgotten tragedies: The lamb-topped headstones common in any historical cemetery indicating scores of lost babies and children, lives so devastatingly short that they are noted down to the month and the day. A woman who was either a black widow or fantastically unlucky, commemorated with the trailing last names of four different husbands. The son lost in his early twenties, a football player etched on his headstone, plastic dump trucks and animals strewn among the artificial flowers.
That night, back in our room, we google the cemetery and discover that we had walked right by its most famous tomb: a monument to Shadrach Gale, a local miner who died in 1912. After visiting his parents back in his hometown of Cornwall, England, he and his brother Harry booked second-class tickets home aboard the RMS Titanic. Their bodies, of course, were never recovered.
For the rest of the trip, whenever I look at that hillside full of miners’ bones, I think about the strangeness of Shadrach Gale and his grave. That cemetery was no doubt full of people who lost their friends and lovers young, who died in mining accidents and wars and outbreaks of measles and cholera, but he was the only one whose death became a tourist attraction.
Two years ago, while backpacking through Great Britain with my best friend Jillian, I made the pilgrimage to Shakespeare’s grave in Stratford-Upon-Avon. It’s a small town: we learned the hard way that bus service stops at 7, and ended up having to hike the two miles from the train station to our hostel in the dark and the rain. Nearly everything in the town today centers around its most famous resident, a man who spent the majority of his career in London. As we wandered the cobblestone streets waiting for visiting hours to begin at Holy Trinity Church, we laughed at the blatant attempts to capitalize upon the Bard’s legacy. “This pub has been here since the 1500s,” one plaque declared, “so it was probably a familiar sight for young William Shakespeare as he walked to school!” At 10 o’clock we paid our fee to go inside the church and see where Shakespeare was baptized, married, and laid to rest. Above the grave is his epitaph – a curse:
Good friend for Jesus sake forebear,
To digg the dvst enclosed here.
Bleste be ye man yt spares these stones,
And cursed be he yt moves my bones.
Scholars speculate Shakespeare chose the inscription because, already aware of his legacy, he was afraid his body would be exhumed for examination or moved to Westminster Abbey to rest alongside other poets and kings. Did he suspect already that four hundred years later people would still be visiting his tomb daily? Did he want them to?
On May 24, the same day I begin my project, the New York Times commemorates the first 100,000 Americans dead in the pandemic – “an incalculable loss” – by printing 1,000 tiny obituaries, a mere 1% of victims. They fill up the entire front page and spill over onto more, each entry a name, an age, a location, and a single line describing the person, culled from newspapers and funeral homes across the country. “They were not simply names on a list,” the Times insists. “They were us.” That day I try to read through all of the names, but it is too overwhelming. I have to stop after only a few lines. One obituary, though, sticks with me: “Fred Walter Gray, 75, Benton County, Wash. Liked his bacon and hash browns crispy.”
You couldn’t get any further from Shakespeare, but every time I think of it, that tiny human detail summing up a life, it breaks my heart.
When I first conceived of this project, I hoped to be able to bring some new and profound insight to the public, make a novel observation, say something new about Shakespeare. A quick search, however, reveals that of course other people have already made this connection, and said wiser and more informed things than I ever could. “Stephen Greenblatt already wrote about this,” I scrawl in my notebook. “What could I possibly have to add?”
As a PhD candidate in English, I am more familiar with the works of Shakespeare than the average person. I can ace any Jeopardy! category about him, pick up allusions in song titles and TV shows. I have a Shakespearean insult mug. But I am not a Shakespeare scholar. What I do study is memoir: the ways that people narrate their lives, how they find meaning in larger, shared narratives, from the Bible to The Lord of the Rings to, yes, Shakespeare.
For me, reading Shakespeare in a plague year has mostly been about memory. There’s my tenth birthday, seeing my first play at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, The Taming of the Shrew set in the Old West with gun battles and a winking Katherina at the end promising us she doesn’t really mean it when she submits to Petruchio.
There are the countless productions I saw in Chicago in college: a raucous Merry Wives of Windsor where Stephen, who was sitting in the front row, had a pair of silky bloomers thrown onto his face. The opera “Otello” and the hip-hop musical “Othello: The Remix,” within a year of each other. The production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a park one summer that I dragged my parents to, where we walked sixteen blocks through unfamiliar neighborhoods to find it, and Puck stole an audience member’s sunglasses and wore them through the remainder of the play.
There’s the plays I’ve seen here, in Boulder, in an outdoor amphitheater only a stone’s throw from my office: that Twelfth Night, and Julius Caesar with my parents days after I moved to Colorado, and Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac with my family and my partner just after we got back from driving to the Grand Canyon.
When I am reading Macbeth, I hear Lady Macbeth’s lines in the voice of my high school English teacher, pacing manically back and forth in front of the whiteboard, sweating profusely: “Even as the baby was smiling up at me,” he shrieked, “I would have plucked my nipple out of its mouth and smashed its brains out against a wall!” The three witches’ chant was ours, my two best friends and I, practicing our double-double-toil-and-trouble at lunch and after school. Later, there would be Macbeth and Macduff’s climactic sword fight between Aaron and AJ, with meter sticks and red yarn for blood.
I do not have anything novel or world-changing to say about Shakespeare. All I can tell you is what Shakespeare has been for me. These plays have given me conversations about the Panopticon on school buses and amateur productions of Richard III dressed as Captain Hook. Shakespeare means drinking Jarritos from a bodega while sitting in the grass and wearing a tiara on my tenth birthday. I have been immensely privileged – not just in my access to theater, but also in how theater has shaped me. Shakespeare has helped me define who I am: someone who believes in the arts and revels in performing and builds my communities around stories.
Mostly, reading Shakespeare in a plague year has reminded me of everyone I miss.
Amongst all those conversations back in March about writing King Lear and playing Animal Crossing, people around the world became – seemingly inexplicably – obsessed with sourdough. My Instagram and Facebook feeds were filled with images of bubbling starters, rising dough, fallen and misshapen or perfect and golden loaves. Other friends kept buying plants, seeding vegetable gardens, tending their succulents, landscaping their yards. Bread and roses, at the end of the world.
In her essay “This Is Not the Apocalypse You Were Looking For,” Laurie Penny deconstructs our cultural imagination of the apocalypse as violent and independent, filled with carnage and gritty men with guns protecting their families from zombies and scavengers. Our collective expectations around disaster are large, and dramatic, and they do not have space for the quiet, steady work this pandemic has brought, for the mundane endurance of childcare and cooking and cleaning, for the loneliness of just staying home. “The people on the front line are not fighters,” Penny writes. “They are healers and carers…Nurses, doctors, cleaners, drivers. Emotional and domestic labor has never been part of the grand story men have told themselves about the destiny of the species – not even when they imagine its grave. In the end, it will not be a butchery. Instead, it will be a bakery, as everyone has apparently decided that the best thing to do when the world lurches sideways is learn to make bread.” The wonderful thing about sourdough is that it does not require genius. It requires steadiness and commitment: feeding your starter every day, being patient, paying attention.
Since the pandemic started, I have not produced any great art. I have not written the Great American Novel or recorded an indie-folk album or composed my own King Lear. But I have created, at a furious pace. Every night we cook dinner from scratch, learning how to make sushi and margherita pizza and crepes. For more than two months this spring we become bake ninjas, ringing our friends’ doorbells and leaving pies and cookies and cream puffs on their porches under cover of darkness. I buy seven balls of emerald-green baby alpaca yarn to knit myself a sweater. I’m building an eighteenth-century gown from the inside out, and I am hand-embroidering flowers onto the detachable linen pockets. And I am sewing, like I have never sewn before: dresses and silky camisoles and pajamas and linen pants, pillow covers for Jillian’s new house and a stuffed d20 for a friend’s baby boy, and of course, mask after mask after mask. Despite the fact that I rarely leave my apartment, sewing connects me to people around the world. I document each step of my projects on Instagram and end up talking to classmates I haven’t spoken to in years. I find a whole community of crafters who create everything from hand-woven Medieval tunics to intricately beaded wedding gowns. I start thinking about who made my clothes, about the obscured archive of people who make $15 dresses possible. I do not create any great art, but when I take my morning walk wearing pants I made myself – pants with wonderful, enormous pockets – there is a little more spring in my step.
One sunny afternoon in June, I have a doctor’s appointment, the first time I have been back to campus since school closed. After my appointment I walk back to my office to collect a few books, and on my way there I pass the Mary Rippon Amphitheater, home of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Normally the area would be cordoned off, buzzing with activity ahead of that night’s performance, banners with play titles and sponsors’ named draped on the brick walls of the building. This summer, however, it is empty and silent. I have been in the amphitheater before on ordinary days, of course – eating lunch when it’s sunny, attending an orientation – but today the theater feels eerie, haunted by dreams for the season that never was. I walk out onto the stage, survey the rows of empty stone seats, imagine myself performing on that stage. Feeling a little silly, a little solemn, I pull out my phone, look up a speech from King Lear, and read aloud:
We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage;
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too –
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out –
And take upon ‘s the mystery of things.
(V.iii.9-16)
And then I put my phone away, and I head home, to hug my cat and make dinner with Taylor and play D&D over Zoom. Because survival is insufficient. But ordinary life, lived together, rich with food and care and loving attention, is its own kind of art.
This project was made possible due to a microgrant from University of Colorado Boulder's Center for Humanities & the Arts