Emma Smith
It says something about the apocalyptic tone of lockdown that the go-to literary text has been King Lear. Tweets admonishing us to be more like Shakespeare and use this unexpected time productively-the playwright possibly wrote Lear during plagueinduced quarantine in 1606-expanded into numerous articles about the relation between plague and creativity. That Shakespeare’s bleakest play seemed to be born of disaster corroborated our implicit sense that tragedy is the inevitable aesthetic response to human mortality. But another look at Shakespeare’s career might suggest otherwise.