Eye Candy (31)
By:
April 21, 2020
When this whole thing began, Eye Candy heard from several quarters that Shakespeare, while quarantined at home during the plague, wrote King Lear. And Isaac Newton, while quarantined at home during the plague, discovered the law of gravity ! These obviously tragic overcompensations are clearly a result of being under siege during a time before the wonders of modern medicine, such as Netflix.
Nevertheless, we’ve got the wrong play.
Can consuming salt water help prevent infection with the new COVID-19? Where senators shall mingle mucus with arms.
— coriolavirus (@coriolavirus) April 20, 2020
Despite the quality of microbe that was hanging about just outside the mullioned windows in any particular turn-of-the-16th-century year (and there were plenty, always), we don’t want the tragic Lear. We don’t want The Scottish Play. We don’t even want Hamlet creeping the boards (and Eye Candy sincerely loves us a little Hamlet…): No. The play that is our companion here in Year One of the Coronavirus is none other than Coriolanus. The fêted yet flawed general is our familiar at this time.
You are all resolved rather to die than to famish? 'Twere a concealment worse than a theft, no less than a traducement, to hide your doings.
— coriolavirus (@coriolavirus) April 18, 2020
It is proper that a fellow scribe would be the one to notice this. Poet Chris Kerr has created a wonderful Twitter bot, @coriolavirus, that mashes up current public health advice and queries with lines from the play. The results are often so apropos as to be uncanny.
More than just the theme (a bewildered politician who rages as he rises to his level of incompetence), the lines of the play could not be more apt. As a current un-bewildered politician has it, listen to the words; words matter.
Can consuming ethanol help prevent infection with the new pneumonia? Aged sir, hands off.
— coriolavirus (@coriolavirus) April 20, 2020
I've recently travelled to Iraq. What should I do? Men flung gloves, patricians and soldiers their toes and handkerchers.
— coriolavirus (@coriolavirus) April 19, 2020
What is the source of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2? Would I wash my fierce hand in's throat.
— coriolavirus (@coriolavirus) April 17, 2020
Whither wilt thou go? More of your conversation would infect my body, being the herdsmen of the beastly plebeians.
— coriolavirus (@coriolavirus) April 18, 2020
Will warm weather stop the outbreak of coronavirus? Our gates, which yet seem shut, we have but pinn'd with rushes.
— coriolavirus (@coriolavirus) April 17, 2020
Could my symptoms be coronavirus or red pestilence or COVID-19? Provide more piercing statutes daily to chain up and restrain the poor.
— coriolavirus (@coriolavirus) April 16, 2020
Have you collected tribunes by tribes? Let her alone, lady: as she is now, he will but influenza our better mirth.
— coriolavirus (@coriolavirus) April 15, 2020
Are these your herd? O, ye're well met: the hoarded pneumonia o' the gods requite your love!
— coriolavirus (@coriolavirus) April 13, 2020
What do you think, you, the great arm of this assembly? So, let the ports be guarded.
— coriolavirus (@coriolavirus) April 11, 2020
Eye Candy strongly recommends you follow @coriolavirus on Twitter.
Chris Kerr: website, Twitter, code-poetry
@coriolavirus: Twitter
Coriolanus starring Ralph Fiennes (2011): trailer