Abstract
In medieval times the plague hit Europe between 1330 and 1350. The Italian novelist Giovanni Boccaccio, one of the exponents of the cultural movement of Humanism, in the introduction (proem) of his “Decameron” described the devastating effects of the ‘black plague’ on the inhabitants of the city of Florence. The pestilence returned to Western Europe in several waves, between the 16th and 17th centuries. William Shakespeare in “Romeo and Juliet” and other tragedies, and Ben Jonson in “The Alchemist” made several references to the plague, but they did not offer any realistic description of that infective disease. Some decennials later Daniel Defoe, in his “A Journal of the Plague Year” (1719), gave a detailed report about the ‘Great Plague’ which hit England in 1660, based on documents of the epoch. In more recent times, Thomas S. Eliot, composing his poem “The Waste Land” was undoubtedly influenced by the spreading of another infective disease, the so-called “Spanish flu”, which affected him and his wife in December 1918. Some decennials later, the French writer and philosopher Albert Camus, in his novel “The Plague”, symbolized with a plague epidemic the war which devastated Europe, North Africa and the Far East from 1937 to 1945, extolling a death toll of over 50 million victims. Those literary works offered a sort of solace to the lovers of literature. To recall them is the purpose of the present paper, in these years afflicted by the spreading of the Covid-19 Pandemic.
Highlights
Every catastrophic event hitting humanity on a large scale, such as a world war or a pandemic disease, has the power to lead people to a serious meditation on the precariousness of the well-established system of social relations in force prior to the occurrence of the event
Owing to the so-called Covid-19 viral disease, which hit the entire world toward the end of 2019 and whose devastating effects are not yet concluded, the author of this paper decided to turn his gaze to the field most familiar to him, that of Italian and English literature on the subject, in the hope to receive from the works of most celebrated authors an indication on how to best react to the psychological disarray caused by it
The present research is subdivided into six sections: Section 1 (Introduction), Section 2 (The Black Death: 2.1 Giovanni Boccaccio and the ‘Black Plague’, 2.2 Chaucer and the “Canterbury Tales”), Section 3 (Plague and Literature during the English Renaissance: 3.1 William Shakespeare, 3.2 Ben Jonson), Section 4 (Daniel Defoe and the ‘Great Plague’ of 1665), Section 5
Summary
Every catastrophic event hitting humanity on a large scale, such as a world war or a pandemic disease, has the power to lead people to a serious meditation on the precariousness of the well-established system of social relations in force prior to the occurrence of the event. Between the 16th and 17th centuries, in Elizabethan, Jacobean and post-Jacobean times, the bubonic plague returned to Western Europe in several waves: William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson made several references to it in their works. In the middle of the Second World War, the French writer Albert Camus composed “The Plague”, a novel where he described with great efficacy the spreading of a fictional pestilence which should have occurred in those years in the city of Oran, in French Algeria. The present research is subdivided into six sections: Section 1 (Introduction), Section 2 (The Black Death: 2.1 Giovanni Boccaccio and the ‘Black Plague’, 2.2 Chaucer and the “Canterbury Tales”), Section 3 (Plague and Literature during the English Renaissance: 3.1 William Shakespeare, 3.2 Ben Jonson), Section 4 (Daniel Defoe and the ‘Great Plague’ of 1665), Section 5
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