After the Plague

WILL:
When the theatre reopened, the audience came in carrying private funerals.

They had lost parents, children, friends, patrons, rivals.
They had seen doors marked.
They had heard carts.
They had watched the city grow quiet.

So when they watched tragedy, they were not merely entertained—
they were rehearsing mortality in public.

GEORGE:
That aligns with scholarship arguing that early modern tragic drama helped audiences imagine and process mortality—that theatre became one of the culture’s instruments for dealing with death. 

WILL:
Yes.
And comedy served them too—because laughter was proof they were still alive.

But here is the key:
grief made them better listeners.

GEORGE:
Better listeners.

WILL:
Yes.
When you’ve buried someone, words change weight.
A threat sounds sharper.
A reconciliation sounds holier.
A betrayal sounds personal.

The audience did not hear with leisure.
They heard with history.

Transcript

“After the Plague: Memory, Amnesia, and the Rush Back to Normal”

After  month months and months of funerals 
After a plague, people say a sentence like it’s a spell:
“Let’s get back to normal.”

They say it because they need it.
They say it because they’re tired.
They say it because grief is heavy and normal sounds like relief.

But “normal” is not a place you return to.
It’s a story you rebuild—
often too quickly…
and sometimes by forgetting what you learned.

WILL (dry):
Humanity’s second great talent, sir, after survival:  
amnesia.

(Music sting.)

2:30–4:00 Rule of the world
GEORGE:
Quick reminder: my Shakespeare can look back from today—films, scholarship, modern claims—
but he cannot predict the future. No prophecy.

WILL:
Memory, yes.
Foresight, no.

4:00–7:30 Setup: what “after the plague” really means
GEORGE:
Today we’re not talking about the peak of panic.
We’re talking about the strange middle period afterward—
when the doors reopen, the streets fill, the theatres start again…
and the grief is still in the air.

WILL:
Yes.
The plague ends, but sorrow does not obey proclamations.

GEORGE:
And here’s what you asked me to emphasize:
what grief did to Shakespeare’s audience.

Not to Shakespeare “the writer” only—
but the people who stood shoulder-to-shoulder to hear a story after months of funerals.

WILL:
Ah.
Then we must speak of the crowd as a wounded thing.

7:30–16:00 THEN: The reopened theatre and the audience’s hidden wounds
GEORGE:
Will—take me to opening week after a closure.
The playhouse doors open again.
What does the crowd feel?

WILL (slow):
They feel hungry.

Not only for amusement—
for company.

A plague teaches the body to flinch from bodies.
So when people return, they are brave simply by arriving.

GEORGE:
And they arrive carrying ghosts.

WILL:
Yes.
A widow sits where her husband would have sat.
An apprentice laughs too loudly because if he stops laughing, he’ll remember.
A man in the yard hears a joke and suddenly tastes grief in it—
because the friend who loved that joke is gone.

GEORGE:
That is exactly the angle I want listeners to feel:
the audience itself is altered by grief.

WILL:
And that alters what they demand from theatre.

Some want comedy—clean comedy—because their minds are bruised.
Some want tragedy, because tragedy gives shape to what they’ve lived through.

GEORGE:
This matches a powerful scholarly idea: that plague shaped early modern England’s “crisis of death,” and that tragic drama became one of the ways the culture “reinvented” how it understood mortality. 

WILL:
Yes.
Tragedy is not merely entertainment.
It is a public language for private terror.

16:00–22:00 READING #1 (THEN): “First day back”
GEORGE:
Reading One: dramatized.
This is the reopening of a theatre through the eyes of a grieving crowd.

SFX (optional): distant crowd, coins, a door opening, murmurs rising

GEORGE (reading, narrative tone):
“The sign is up again.
The doors are open again.

People arrive as if returning to a church they didn’t know they missed.
They carry pennies, and they carry names they will not speak out loud.

A boy jostles through the crowd—too young to understand—
and an older man flinches, because the sound of a jostle resembles the sound of a cart at night.

Inside, the air is warm with bodies.
For a moment it feels dangerous—
and then it feels miraculous.

When the actor enters, the crowd does not only watch him.
They watch themselves watching.
They test whether they can be human in a crowd again.

Someone laughs—sharp, startled.
Someone else laughs and then covers their mouth, ashamed.
A woman wipes her eyes and pretends it’s dust.

And the play begins,
not as an escape from grief,
but as a place where grief can sit down without being asked to leave.”

(Pause.)

WILL (soft):
Yes.
That is true.

A playhouse after plague is not just a building.
It is a room where the city tries to remember how to breathe.

22:00–29:00 NOW: COVID “reopening” and the awkwardness of joy
GEORGE:
Now our century.
When COVID restrictions eased, many people rushed back to restaurants, gatherings, trips—
and the mood was complicated.

Some felt relief. Some felt guilt.
Some felt rage at lost time.
Some felt numb.
Some felt a delayed grief they couldn’t name.

WILL:
Your people discovered a strange truth:
joy can feel suspicious after catastrophe.

GEORGE:
And public memory started to wobble quickly.
Even with such a huge event, history suggests societies can forget surprisingly fast.

There’s been a lot written about how the 1918 influenza pandemic faded in collective memory—and how that could happen again with COVID. 

WILL:
Because forgetting is not always stupidity.
Sometimes it is self-protection.

GEORGE:
Right. But forgetting has a cost: if we forget the lessons, we repeat the vulnerabilities.

29:00–33:30 SCREEN CORNER: “Return to normal” montages
SFX (optional): projector click

GEORGE:
Screen Corner.
In films and TV, “after the plague” is often a montage:

doors reopen

people hug

music swells

the camera rises above a city reclaiming itself

But what does the screen usually skip?

WILL:
The empty chairs.

The screen loves crowds, sir—
but it rarely counts who is missing from the crowd.

GEORGE:
So the montage lies by omission.

WILL:
Yes.
And it also skips the moral injuries—
the friendships broken, the trust eroded, the exhaustion baked into the bones.

33:30–46:00 SCHOLAR’S CORNER: “People always learn lasting lessons from pandemics”
SFX (optional): page flip + quill scratch

GEORGE:
Scholar’s Corner.
Here’s today’s modern claim:

“People always learn lasting lessons from pandemics.”

In other words, suffering automatically produces wisdom.

Will—reaction?

WILL (immediate):
That is a comforting fantasy.

GEORGE:
Say more.

WILL:
A pandemic teaches lessons, yes—
but it does not guarantee the lessons are remembered.

The human mind prefers the story where pain becomes profit:
“I suffered, therefore I grew.”

But sometimes suffering simply… hurts.

GEORGE:
Modern research on collective memory and public forgetting backs this up: scholars discuss “collective amnesia” about pandemics and why they can be hard to remember as coherent stories. 

And there’s research specifically analyzing how public forgetting can limit policy learning after disasters, including COVID—what some call “structural amnesia.” 

WILL:
Yes.
Because remembering requires effort, and effort requires peace.

When people are exhausted, they do not build monuments in the mind—
they build doors they can close.

GEORGE:
So the healthier version of the claim is:

Pandemics can teach lessons,

but without intentional memory—ritual, art, documentation, policy—
those lessons fade. 

WILL:
Exactly.

And now—your request, sir—
the effect of grief upon my audience.

GEORGE:
Yes, let’s put a spotlight on that.

WILL:
When the theatre reopened, the audience came in carrying private funerals.

They had lost parents, children, friends, patrons, rivals.
They had seen doors marked.
They had heard carts.
They had watched the city grow quiet.

So when they watched tragedy, they were not merely entertained—
they were rehearsing mortality in public.

GEORGE:
That aligns with scholarship arguing that early modern tragic drama helped audiences imagine and process mortality—that theatre became one of the culture’s instruments for dealing with death. 

WILL:
Yes.
And comedy served them too—because laughter was proof they were still alive.

But here is the key:
grief made them better listeners.

GEORGE:
Better listeners.

WILL:
Yes.
When you’ve buried someone, words change weight.
A threat sounds sharper.
A reconciliation sounds holier.
A betrayal sounds personal.

The audience did not hear with leisure.
They heard with history.

GEORGE:
That’s one of the strongest “Will lines” in the whole series.

46:00–52:30 Human story segment: the two urges—forget and remember
GEORGE:
So after a pandemic, two urges fight:

the urge to forget (to survive)

the urge to remember (to learn)

And art sits right between them.

WILL:
Yes.
A society needs forgetting to keep moving,
and remembering to keep from becoming foolish.

GEORGE:
And theatre does something unique: it remembers without being a textbook.
It makes memory emotional.

WILL:
It makes memory communal.

A man can forget alone.
But it is harder to forget in a crowd—
especially when a story names what you felt.

52:30–55:00 READING #2 (NOW): “The first hug—and the guilt”
GEORGE:
Reading Two. Modern, dramatized: reopening emotion.

SFX (optional): restaurant ambience, then soften

GEORGE (reading):
“The door opens, and people cheer like the world has been repaired.

Someone hugs someone and then freezes—
because the body remembers rules even after the rules have changed.

A laugh erupts at a table, bright and defiant.
And then, in the space after the laugh, a name appears in the mind—
someone who isn’t here to laugh with them.

For a moment joy and grief stand in the same room,
looking at each other.

And the person realizes:
‘Normal’ isn’t the absence of grief.
‘Normal’ is learning to carry grief
without dropping it on everyone else.”

(Pause.)

WILL (soft):
A wise discovery.

GEORGE:
Next episode: “The Audience of Survivors.”
We’ll stay with this theme and ask: how repeated outbreaks trained Shakespeare’s culture—audiences included—to respond to sudden reversals, betrayal, exile, and loss.

WILL:
And I shall speak as one who wrote for the living—
who were always surrounded by the dead.

GEORGE:
See you next time.

(Music out.)