#thank you SO SO SO much for this ask tamber i am CRADLING it very close to my chest forever

[lapinlunaire-games]

hi jinx ❤️ you said you will NOT tag that article as about your shakespearian projects, but... how about being.... not so normal about here? like what did that article about the bubonic plague impacting shakespeare's works make you think about? what thoughts about your own projects did it lead you to?? 👀👀👀

hello tamber ❤️ hehehe the floodgates have been opened! warning for a long, Not Normal ramble ahead :D

So straight away the headline made me go "!!!" because Elsinore: After Hamlet started off as a final project for a class on the intersection of medicine and literature. This was spring 2021, dear old pandemmy was having a grand time wrecking everything, and in my everlasting wisdom and sleep deprivation, I decided to write an interactive personal essay that linked my personal fears and anger to literature (very original, yes). It went through a few transformations, but what's up on itch currently really does capture my mental state at that point in time.

It was interesting to think about in context of the article because she talks about how studying the plays today act as a kind of window into Shakespeare's time, and connect the text to us today - and that's the kind of mindset I went into the project with. But what really got me thinking is that if you play Elsinore now, you don't necessarily see into Shakespeare's time. You see directly into April/May 2021, and specifically into my brain at the time. You will see the specific things that kept me up at night - even when I go back and play it now, I find myself surprised at how much I feel separated from the narration, even though those were my thoughts and feelings and struggles just a year ago.

To actually answer your question lol, the article really got me thinking about how my game is a time capsule wrapped in another time capsule - when you play it, you look at Shakespeare's world through my eyes at a very specific point in time. It's like looking through a kaleidoscope, a little bit!

And as for Romeo and Juliet...traditionally, this is the play that academia recognizes the most as Shakespeare's "plague play", because it has that context in the setting! And the things in the article - class divides and how that changes who was affected and how by the pandemic, finger-pointing blame at convenient scapegoats - those are very core to both Elsinore and In the Beautiful Country, my cyberpunk post-R and J WIP. So that was validating to hear in a way, that it isn't just me sitting on the couch on my laptop and spiraling. Especially now that so much of society is treating the pandemic as a "done" thing when it just isn't, sometimes I feel a little in my head writing about how it's still affecting daily life.

Thinking about Romeo and Juliet as a plague play also just makes me love the text and working with it in a (to quote Ao3) transformative way even more: it's a love story, it's a tragedy, it's about sickness and poison and how things from the world get in your blood and in your brain, for better and for worse. Love is sickness and it's a cure, and sometimes it isn't enough to be both.