Representing the Plague in Early Modern England

Representing the Plague in Early Modern England

Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture

1. Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth-Century Theatre P.A. Skantze

8. Fictions of Old Age in Early Modern Literature and Culture Nina Taunton

2. The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson Mary Ellen Lamb

9. Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage Ayanna Thompson

3. Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture Lethe’s Legacies Edited by Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams

10. Women, Murder, and Equity in Early Modern England Randall Martin

4. Luce Irigaray and Premodern Culture Thresholds of History Edited by Theresa Krier and Elizabeth D. Harvey 5. Writing, Geometry and Space in Seventeenth-Century England and America Circles in the Sand Jess Edwards 6. Dramatists and their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood Authorship, Authority and the Playhouse Grace Ioppolo 7. Reading the Early Modern Dream The Terrors of the Night Edited by Katharine Hodgkin, Michelle O’ Callaghan, and S.J. Wiseman

11. Staging Early Modern Romance Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare Edited by Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne 12. The Uses of the Future in Early Modern Europe Edited by Andrea Brady and Emily Butterworth 13. Making Publics in Early Modern Europe People, Things, Forms of Knowledge Edited by Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin 14. Representing the Plague in Early Modern England Edited by Rebecca Totaro and Ernest B. Gilman 15. Prophecy and Sibylline Imagery in the Renaissance Shakespeare’s Sibyls Jessica L. Malay

For a full list of titles in this searies, please visti www.routledge.com

Representing the Plague in Early Modern England

Edited by Rebecca Totaro and Ernest B. Gilman

First published 2011 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2011 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Representing the plague in early modern England / edited by Rebecca Totaro and Ernest B. Gilman. p. cm. — (Routledge studies in Renaissance literature and culture ; 14) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. English literature—Early modern, 1500-1700—History and criticism. 2. Plague in literature. 3. Diseases and literature—England—History—17th century. 4. Diseases and literature—England—History—16th century. 5. Plague—England—History. 6. Diseases in literature. I. Totaro, Rebecca Carol Noel, 1968- II. Gilman, Ernest B., 1946– PR408.P62R47 2010 820.9’3561—dc22 2009049213 ISBN 0-203-85056-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN13: 978-0-415-87797-8 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-85056-5 (ebk)

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

vii 1

REBECCA TOTARO

PART I

Making the Plague Serve Form and Function, 1563–1666 1 Writing the Plague in English Prose Satire

35 37

WILLIAM KERWIN

2 Plague Space and Played Space in Urban Drama, 1604

54

KELLY J. STAGE

3 Physical and Spiritual Illness: Narrative Appropriations of the Bills of Mortality

76

ERIN SULLIVAN

PART II

Governing Bodies in Plague-Time 4 Contagious Figurations: Plague and the Impenetrable Nation after the Death of Elizabeth

95

97

RICHELLE MUNKHOFF

5 “Thinking to pass unknown”: Measure for Measure, the Plague, and the Accession of James I JAMES D. MARDOCK

113

vi Contents PART III

Performances, Playhouses, and the Sites of Re-Creation 6 “Sweet recreation barred”: The Case for Playgoing in Plague-Time

131

133

NICHOLE DEWALL

7 Shakespeare’s Dual Lexicons of Plague: Infections in Speech and Space

150

PAULA S. BERGGREN

8 “A plague on both your houses”: Sites of Comfort and Terror in Early Modern Drama

169

BARBARA H. TRAISTER

PART IV

Contemporary Turns 9 Plague in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Girardian Reading of Bottom and Hippolyta

183

185

MATTHEW THIELE

10 Dekker’s and Middleton’s Plague Pamphlets as Environmental Literature

201

CHARLES WHITNEY

Afterword: Plague and Metaphor

219

ERNEST B. GILMAN

Notes on Contributors Index

237 243

Acknowledgments

We would fi rst of all like to thank the contributors to this volume, each one originally a member or auditor of the 2008 Shakespeare Association of America seminar entitled “A Plague on Both Your Houses.” The provocative mix of papers and the responses to them that circulated in advance of our seminar meeting provided a platform for an engaging round-table discussion of the bubonic plague in early modern English literature and culture. Those initial exchanges demonstrated the need and desire for additional research in the area and for continued collaboration, the results of which, many months and conversations later, are here in this volume. A team effort from the start, this volume would not be possible were it not for the attraction of our contributors to this gruesome but intriguing subject and for their unflagging dedication. Our thanks also go to Lara Bovilsky and Laurie Shannon, who read drafts of the initial seminar abstract; Jonathan Gil Harris, who recommended seminar members and contributed to the seminar as an auditor; Lena Cowen Orlin for working with us to fill our seminar with engaging participants even past the deadlines; Margaret Healy, our seminar discussion facilitator; and Barbara H. Traister, who attended the seminar as an auditor and who has contributed an entirely new paper developed in response to the seminar. It is with special appreciation that we also thank our tireless Florida Gulf Coast University team of Linda Bolderson, graduate student editor, and Patricia Rice, colleague and editor extraordinaire; well versed in early modern plague literature, they offered insightful reviews that enhanced individual essays and the project as a whole. Thanks also to Lynne Garcia, Executive Secretary for the Department of Language and Literature, who managed our multiple hard copy exchanges. Support in various forms from The Shakespeare Association of America, the Folger Shakespeare Library, New York University, and Florida Gulf Coast University has made this work possible. Finally, we extend our thanks to our indexer Pat Rimmer and to Routledge Research Commissioning Editor Erica Wetter; Routledge Research Senior Editorial Assistant Liz Levine; our Copy Editor Nigel Peter O’Brien; and to the external, anonymous reviewers, whose constructive criticism was detailed, informed, and wise.

Introduction Rebecca Totaro

Shakespeare provided us with one of the most memorable literary lines from plague-time England: “A plague on both your houses,” hurled out by a dying Mercutio as he discovers he is soon to be “a grave man.”1 Giving words to Mercutio that would enact the sense of judgment attendant upon such visitations, Shakespeare immortalized Mercutio and the two houses that according to the fi rst line of the prologue are “both alike in dignity.” By the end of the play, the houses are also alike in affliction; the letter telling Romeo that Juliet is only asleep cannot be delivered. The messenger, Friar John, explains: Going to fi nd a barefoot brother out, One of our order, to associate me, Here in this city visiting the sick, And fi nding him, the searchers of the town, Suspecting that we both were in a house Where the infectious pestilence did reign, Seal’d up the doors, and would not let us forth, So that my speed to Mantua there was stay’d. .................................... I could not send it—here it is again— Nor get a messenger to bring it thee, So fearful were they of infection. (5.2.5–16) Friar John’s explanation often goes unexamined; the tragedy that will ensue is of greater concern to audiences and scholars than the details of this accident whereby the friar is unnecessarily quarantined in Mantua. The plague ruins Friar Lawrence’s plan for the reunion of the two lovers, which leads to their suicides, but the plague also tampers with the everyday essential activities on which people depend: with travel, with communication, and with care for the ill.2 Shakespeare’s original audiences understood all too well that when the plague visited, all metaphorical houses were shaken at their foundations.

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Like the rest of Europe, England had by this time developed a repertoire of medical, religious, civic, and professional methods for dealing with disease. When they failed—as was nearly always the case for bubonic plague— people turned to a variety of sources of comfort and cure available in what medical historians now refer to as the early modern medical marketplace where licensed and unlicensed practitioners, from apothecaries and barber surgeons to wise women, physicians, charlatans, and nurses, made their skills and goods available to consumers. 3 More than this, as Andrew Wear explains, “It would be a mistake to think of medical provision only in terms of the commercial medical marketplace”4 when so much of the practice of healing took place in the home and in the local community of neighbors, relatives, church leaders, and coworkers. Oral tradition offered a rich repository of preventive and curative treatments, often free for the having if one knew whom to ask. Church leaders and their wives then as now provided counsel on bodies and souls, prescribing prayer and repentance side by side with health regimens. City and town leaders as well as heads of guilds and small shop owners likewise took an interest in the well-being of their community members and employees; in London, for example, many counted on overlapping spheres of support provided within the religious community of the parish, the local government of the precinct, and guild structure. As Steve Rappaport and Ian W. Archer have demonstrated, these various layers of economic and social support likely made it possible for London to avoid the larger flare ups of rebellion experienced in Continental cities during similar periods of crisis.5 In England’s more populated areas on which this volume focuses, health was not a private matter but a shared one: it was not easy to hide illness but at the same time, one was certain to fi nd many, expert and quack alike, ready to recommend remedies. These remedies differed by practitioner, as a nurse might advise treatment that a surgeon would not, and so on; they also differed by region. As Mary J. Dobson explains, “The instability of death was, certainly, a ‘normal’ characteristic of early modern society but it was an instability which imprinted on different environments in different ways and to different degrees.”6 The suburbs and the city, the midlands and the coast—these regions experienced disease differently based on climate, geography, and poverty levels; moreover, by the early modern period, “global travel and exploration were already beginning to unite and diversify the epidemiological settings of temperate and tropical lands, continental and island populations”(6), contributing to the varied experiences with disease recorded in early modern diaries, letters, parish registers, physician’s notebooks, and the bills of mortality. Dobson cites over 200 distinct causes of death recorded in these sources during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (237–39). With so many forms of potentially mortal suffering and incomplete knowledge of their true causes, people were in many ways their own best sources of medical knowledge, aware of changes in their bodies, in the

Introduction 3 air, in their water and food, in their sleeping habits. They knew enough basic Galenic theory to believe in general that the body was a permeable container, directly influenced by things external to it, especially those they called “non-naturals”: air, exercise, food, drink, sleep, coitus, and affections of the mind, which could alter the body’s internal condition, elevating or depleting its heat and its moisture and leading to increased or decreased health. One should strive for balance, and this directive was part of what made Galenic medicine an easy fit with Christianity.7 In practice, this was more difficult than it sounds, because this balance varied body by body, as each was thought to be composed of different amounts and ratios of the “naturals”: spirits, humors, elements, etc. This reinforced the importance of attentiveness to particular bodies and environments, many patients at least as careful as health practitioners to note the cycles and perturbations of their bodies, of the weather, and of the year; it also contributed to the demand for a medical marketplace that provided so many options for so many bodies. Early moderns also knew death intimately. Not only did death visit humans in hundreds of forms, but the dead were more among them physically and religiously. Lacking retirement homes and funeral parlors that might have insulated them from the sights, sounds, feel, and smells of death, they were fully invested in rituals for the newly dead, and, with the Reformation, they began updating their beliefs about the process of dying and the conditions of the afterlife. What is Hamlet, Stephen Greenblatt might want us to consider, without its purgatory-discoursing ghost, for example?8 What is Othello, Michael Neill might ask, without a personified death that stalks Othello in the human form of his trusted but untrustworthy ensign Iago?9 Death in these plays was shaped as much by cultural change as by cultural norms, and in these years of repeated plague visitations, death was increasingly both a cause for and a subject of interest, anxiety, debate, and representation. In his magisterial study Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy, Neill examines two of the ways that repeated visitations of plague radically altered how people viewed death and their places in the world. Increasingly, artists humanized death: in late medieval and Renaissance art Death is not merely imagined, but in the most literal sense envisaged, given a face: he becomes Milton’s deformed monster, guarding the gates of hell with his mother, Sin; or the grinning skeleton whose lineaments engravers loved to trace in the very branches of the Tree; or in the sardonic jester who surprises his victims with unanswerable proof of their mortality.10 This version of death was increasingly personal, able to shape shift, appearing like one’s best friend and one’s worst enemy, like the lover and the tyrant, like the thing devoutly to be wished and that which must give us

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Rebecca Totaro

pause. In these forms, death haunted literature, and especially the revenge play, striking a deadly pose as Iago and as Tamburlaine.11 At the same time, artists increasingly depicted death in the form of cold, dead, naked, unrecognizable bodies becoming food for worms: “The death most to be feared . . . is the mass death because of its extravagant multiplication of disfigured bodies” (15). This is the pile of dead bodies on stage at the end of the revenge drama. This is the pile of dead bodies in the plague pit. In early modern England, death was a common visitor, coming in many shapes, but however horrifying and dehumanizing they were, leprosy, smallpox, and syphilis, famine, war, and murder in plague-time became lesser manifestations of death. Each one was considered a “plague,” meaning originally in Greek and in Latin a “blow,” “stroke,” or “wound,” especially associated with punishment (OED), but only what we now know as the bubonic plague was called “the great mortality” and “the plague.” No other disease altered physical, social, religious, medical, and civic behavior and beliefs at once, generation after generation and sometimes decade after decade, year after year: “No other single phenomenon,” Neill asserts, “had a more decisive effect than the plague in shaping the early modern crisis of death” (15) and the way humans thought of themselves in relationship to it. A review of the plague’s symptoms illustrates another practical reason for the degree to which unlike other diseases, it successfully, permanently carved out a place for itself in bodies, in families, in cities, in the church, and in imaginations. We know the bubonic plague by its buboes—Latin word from the Greek βουβϖυ, meaning the groin or a swelling in the groin (OED)—and early moderns did as well. Perhaps a better description of the accompanying suffering is conveyed in the following report of the symptom made by Ambroise Paré (c. 1510–90), who is now remembered as much for his treatment of plague victims as for his position as royal surgeon to French kings Henry II, Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III: In the beginning while the Bubo is breeding it maketh the patient to feele as it were a coard or rope stretched in the place, or a hardened nerve with pricking payne: and shortly after the matter is raised up as it were into a knob, and by little and little it groweth bigger and is enflamed, these accidents before mentioned accompanying it. If the tumor be red and encrease by little and little, it is a good and salutary signe: but if it be livide or blacke, and come very slowly unto its just bigness, it is a deadly signe: It is also a deadly signe if it encrease sodainly and come unto his just bigness as it were with a swift violence, & as in a moment have all the Symptomes in the highest excesse, as pain, swelling and burning. Buboes or Sores appeare sometimes of a naturall colour like unto the skinne, and in all other things like unto an oedematous tumor, which notwithstanding will sodainly bring the patient to destruction, like those that are livide and blacke, wherefore it is not good to trust too much to those kindes of tumors.12

Introduction 5 The description speaks poignantly to the level of physical destruction witnessed on the body of a plague victim. The consummate professional, Paré provides his detailed account, noting locations, sizes, and colors of the symptom. He also offers what might be considered heightened language, were it applied to another symptom: the bubo can “come unto his just bigness as it were with a swift violence,” appearing as the tyrant even in this surgeon’s description and leading “the patient to destruction.” The conclusion that one should not “trust too much to those kindes of tumors” is also telling: this is a symptom the learned should not expect to treat successfully. The bubo typically appeared within a day of infection, ranged from almond to orange size and lasted as long as a week before rupturing and leaving a ragged sore, if the patient was lucky to survive that long.13 Even a current description conveys its unique nature, distinguishing it from all other symptoms and making the plague a stand-out among all other diseases to this day. According to the Centers for Disease Control, “The pathognomic sign of plague is a very painful, usually swollen, and often hot-to-the touch lymph node, called a bubo.”14 These swellings cause acute pain, and according to the Keyes et al. resource for emergency room physicians preparing to deal with plague, the severity of pain at the lymph nodes can help to confi rm that a victim is suffering from bubonic plague.15 These prominent, painful, telltale signs of plague coincided with a host of additional and equally disturbing symptoms, including the trademark black extremities caused by gangrene that can lead to necrosis, in which fi ngers and toes, most typically, turn black. This symptom may have resulted in bubonic plague being named “the Black Death” a name thought to be first employed by Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker, a nineteenth century professor of medicine at the University of Berlin.16 Other symptoms included purple spots from the hemorrhaging of capillaries into the skin, now referred to as purpura or petechiae; and additional inflamed lesions then called “carbuncles” but also both “God’s tokens,” for their resemblance to coins, and “coals,” for their burning hot appearance and sensation at some stages. These sores begin as fluid fi lled blisters that break and either heal eventually or become infected, leading to ulcers and/or necrosis. Each symptom alone was horrifying; their simultaneous presentation added to the terror for those who witnessed the plague at work on a human body. In William Bullein’s A Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence (1564), the physician character, Medicus, describes them at a length worth quoting in full for effect: A fever going before, noisome and lothsomnesse of stomacke, wambleyng of the harte, pulse not equall, urine stinking, desirous of slepe, perilous dreames with startyng, through the sharpenesse of hotte and burning humours, and then a little pushe will creepe forthe like a scabbe, sometyme more then one, then it wille increase and shine like

6

Rebecca Totaro pitche or Bptumen, with passing pain, and then it will have a crust like unto the squanies or flakes of Iron, when they fall off, when the Smith doeth worke, and in colour like ashes is this crust, wrought by extreme heate and burnyng, therfore it maie be called the burnyng cole, or Ignem persicum. Furder, there are fower colours to be observed in the sore besides the crust, yelowe, redde, grene and blacke. The fi rst twoo are not so daungerous as the second twoo are. Yet saieth Rasis in his booke of the pestilence, to Mansor the king, that the Carbuncle is deadlie, and moste perilous. And Avicen affi rmeth the blacke to be incurable, speciallie when a Fever Pestilence doe reigne. Sometime it is drawen backe againe into the bodie, then no remedie. Somtyme it happeneth in the moste noble places, as nere the harte, the throte, moste perilous, with sodain stopping the spirites of life. Some pestilent sores doe come in the clensing places, as arme holes, flankes. &c.17

The number and degree of symptoms follows in rough order from least to most severe: from symptoms common to other diseases, like fevers and nausea, to those specific to the plague such as the “pestilent sores” that come in the location of lymph nodes, which Medicus calls “clensing places”: these are the buboes. Here again is the notion that the plague reigns in the body, like an invader—a description used by physicians and pamphleteers alike; Thomas Dekker famously describes this host of affl ictions as “the leaders, lieutenants, sergeants, and corporals” marching for “The Plague” who “is muster-master and marshall of the field,” aggressively laying siege to the body.18 This mixture of detailed description and figurative language appears in literature like Bullein’s dialogue and Dekker’s pamplets: but also in medical texts of the day. Paré’s full description of the plague’s other, lesser symptoms quite dramatically displays the suffering of the plague-addled body: It is a most deadly signe in the Pestilence, to have a continuall and burning Feaver, to have the tongue dry, rough, and black, to breathe with difficulty, and to draw in a great quantity of breath, but breathe out little; to talke idely; to have phrensie and madnesse together, with unquenchable thirst and great watching; to have Co[n]vulsions, the Hicket [hiccup], heart-beating, and to swoune very often and vehemently; further, tossing and turning in the bed, with a loathing of meats, and daily vomits of a greene, blacke and bloudy colour; and the face pale, blacke, of a horrid and cruell aspect, bedewed with a cold sweat, are very mortall signes. There are some which at the very beginning have ulcerous and painefull wearinesse, pricking under the skin, with great torment of paine; the eyes looke cruelly and staringly, the voyce waxeth hoarse, the tongue rough and stutting, and the understanding decaying, the Patient uttereth and talketh of frivolous things. Truely those are very dangerously sicke, no otherwise than those whose

Introduction 7 urine is pale, black, and troubled like unto the urine of carriage beasts, or Lye, with divers coloured clouds or contents, as blew, greene, black, fatty and oylie, as also resembling in shew a Spiders Web, with a round body swimming on the top.19 These signs are enough to convince this surgeon, and any reader, that the patient in question will surely die. The description also emphasizes the terror that the symptoms could elicit, even from a man familiar with blood and tissue, disease and deformity. The plague victim appears as something more than a sick body; he or she is a mind and/or soul possessed or lost, with his or her face taking on “a horrid and cruell aspect,” and with “phrensie and madnesse together” and idle talk. The plague marked its victims by various yet unmistakable signs of death that seemed to reach not only into the body but also into the psyche and even into the soul—a phenomenon recently examined from an etymological perspective by Ernest B. Gilman in Plague Writing in Early Modern England. Because the Hebrew word for plague, ‫( רבד‬dbr), can mean both “word” or “speech” and “pestilence,” Gilman explains, some, like preacher Henoch Clapham (fl. 1585–1614), considered “that the plague itself is to be understood and even experienced as a species of language” (94). The physical affliction was at once a spiritual punishment, sent as God’s word made legible upon the body. The Reformation brought to England a new conception of the Bible, with its formal nationwide debut in English and a new way to read the plague as it appeared both in the Bible and on the bodies of one’s friends and neighbors. Preachers considered it a primary duty to interpret the plague, making sense of God’s word by looking to the Bible to answer parishioner’s questions about their bodies. In Gods three arrowes plague, famine, sword, in three treatises, popular London preacher William Gouge (1578–1653) distinguishes between God’s “afflictions as effects of wrath or love,” making two points: 1. Particular and private afflictions are oft in love, by reason of Gods wise and tender care over his children, inflicted on them. For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every sonne whom he receiveth. And God chasteneth us for our profit. But we read not of any publike and generall judgement, which came not from the wrath of God. Many instances of the affi rmative, that they were effects of wrath, were given before: and the Scripture affoordeth many more: but not one to the contrary. 2. There are common calamities that fall on all of all sorts: and there are other more speciall, that are intended onely against professours of the true Religion: as persecutions made by enemies of the Gospell. These may be for triall, to their honour that suffer. But a plague is not of that kind.20

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The marks of plague were marks only of judgment, in no way to be read as badges of honor or signs of God’s love; moreover, they were “publike and generall” signs of judgment, common to all, not particular to any individual and all the more clearly signs of God’s great, just wrath incited by a group and thereby recalling stories of Nineveh and of Sodom and Gomorrah. Unlike all other afflictions, this one was unmistakable in its message, marking bodies just as red crosses on doors marked houses: contaminated. God did not write as legibly in words of leprosy, fevers, syphilis, or dysentery, which affl icted some individuals as often. When God’s word of wrathful judgment took shape on the human body, its clearest manifestation was as the plague. It is for all of these reasons that plague reigned in the discursive field as most terrifying of all early modern crises noted by writers, easily and regularly topping more persistent and more locally significant contributors to high mortality rates: as Dobson explains, “Each epidemic awakened a country-wide fear that was far out of all proportion to its geographical spread or its effect on the regional mortality rates.”21 In retrospect, we can pinpoint with different terms but with equal clarity what distinguishes the bubonic plague from all causes of death in early modern England: the speed and ferocity with which it killed; the exceptionally high mortality rates with major visitations that some scholars call “crisis mortality”; the repetition of these visitations over time; the relatively modest needs of the Yersinia pestis bacteria and of its hardy host; and the corresponding lack of knowledge regarding its etiology.22 The plague never ceased to surprise, its effects often appearing to change from town to town, from street to street, from body to body, and from one visitation to the next. Adding to its unusual nature was the fact that no one lives with plague, as one can do with syphilis or leprosy, cancer or malaria; and it is possible to be reinfected. In “Plague Vaccines: Retrospective Analysis and Future Developments,” bioterrorism expert Jeffrey J. Adamovicz and pathogenic bacteriologist Gerald P. Andrews explain that “Although natural immunity in patients that survive plague infection generally prevents reinfection, some individuals may become reinfected with the bubonic plague.”23 The plague infected and killed. Fifty to eighty percent died, varying town by town.24 When it left the victims alive, they were scarred, but they believed themselves plague-free, and this was both a blessing and a curse. They did not have sores that would grow increasingly worse leading to disfigurement, as lepers and syphilitics had, but they remained at risk when the plague returned. This was not a disease that allowed for acclimation, physical or cultural, let alone for immunity. All who lived after the plague carried with them the memory of the past as a warning for the future, reinforcing the notion that the plague was one of God’s finest scourges, leaving many lasting marks. Because this uniquely horrific disease left physically whole survivors to mourn, remember, and watch for the next visitation, it challenged them: do it better and differently or die the next time. It called them to a relentless

Introduction 9 cultural response equal to its extreme, repeated ravaging. Representing the Plague in Early Modern England offers readers a timely encounter with the historical experience of people adapting to a pandemic emergency and the corresponding narrative representation of that crisis, as early modern writers transformed the plague into literature for safe consumption by readers. The essays examine the impact of the plague on health, politics, and religion as well as on the plays, prose fiction, and plague bills that stand as witnesses to the experience of a society devastated by contagious disease. Readers will find physicians and moralists wrestling with the mysteries of the disease; erotic escapades staged in plague-time plays; the poignant prose works of William Bullein and Thomas Dekker; the bodies of monarchs who sought to protect themselves from plague; the chameleon-like nature of the plague as literal disease and as metaphor; and future strains of plague, literary and otherwise, which we may face in the globally minded, technology-dependent, and ecologically awakened twenty-fi rst century. The bubonic plague compelled change in all aspects of lived experience in early modern England, but at the same time, it opened space for writers to explore new ideas and new literary forms—not all of them somber or horrifying and some of them painfully humorous. By representing the plague for their audiences, these writers made an epidemic calamity intelligible: for them, the dreaded disease could signify despair but also hope, bewilderment but also a divine plan, quarantine but also liberty, death but also new life. * * * * The bubonic plague struck England every decade on average during the period we consider here. It did not strike all cities or even all neighborhoods with equal force, but in many years, it appeared that it would come close to doing so. Mortality rates spiked, trade suffered, people grew fearful of others, and churches struggled to fi nd room to bury the newly dead. The following years in particular they called the “great years of plague”: Elizabeth I (1558–1603): James I (1603–25): Charles I (1625–49): Charles II (1660–85):

1563–64, 1592–93, 1603 1603–11 1625–26, 1636–39, 1641, 1643–47 1664–6625

Lined up back to back, this makes for more than two decades of plague out of slightly more than one hundred years, or one “great plague” year per every five years. Measured this way alone, the power of the plague is clear and pervasive. Considering the impact of plague on decades of London’s administrators, J. Leeds Barroll brings home this point: “the necessity of bending one’s behavior to this lethal invasion time after time had shaped an administrative tradition in London within which the great-great-grandfathers, great-grandfathers, grandfathers and fathers of the city aldermen and their contemporaries had frequently wrestled with the mysterious, evasive, and savage disease.”26 Modifications to thinking and behavior occurred throughout England, influenced as much by the printing press

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that disseminated London’s plague bills and other plague-related print as by the plague itself.27 England’s inhabitants knew it well, having experienced it themselves or having heard about it from surviving relatives and community members. Making matters worse, experience with the plague was neither uniform nor isolated but rather simultaneously uniquely horrifying and extensive. In their literary accounts, early moderns responded in corresponding fashion to this shape shifting terror by representing the plague in many forms. When they personified the plague, for example, they often depicted it as an always hungry monster, consuming bodies regardless of age, gender, reputation, or economic status or as a tyrant, because it so easily unseated government officials from mayors to monarchs. John Davies of Hereford captures this latter version of the plague in The Triumph of Death, Or, The Picture of the Plague According to the Life as it was in Anno Domini 1603: Its hard with Subjects when the Soveraigne Hath no place free from plagues his head to hide; And hardly can we say the King doth raigne, That no where, for just feare, can well abide. For, no where comes He but Death follows him Hard at the Heeles, and reacheth at his head.28 Death in this incarnation as the plague wants all power to himself and boldly strikes at the king—the head of the body politic. By the time Davies adapted the plague to suit his verse, England had seen all kings and queens in living memory flee from London, relocating with the full court, leaving the city and the nation without secure leadership. How could any king be said to reign in such conditions, with the plague reaching for the crown? It could not, as Barroll states plainly: “The crown perceived plague to be a clear and present danger to London as the seat of government” (15). King Henry VIII was the fi rst to initiate policy that would protect the king and court beyond the practice of flight from infected locales. He began formally in 1518 by applying Continental plague policy in the city of Oxford, so that he could pass through the city without fear of becoming infected. 29 This was a small step, but it was the fi rst toward what would become a nationwide program of religious and civic plaguetime regimens. No other disease had made the relative health of individual bodies a matter of national security. The steps taken by the Elizabethan government in the months following the queen’s battle with smallpox illustrate the extent to which the plague, unique among diseases, shaped English government at local and national levels. When Elizabeth I caught smallpox in 1562, the disease brought her low and put the nation on alert. During the worst points of her illness, thinking she was near death, she named Robert Dudley as Protector of the

Introduction 11 Realm.30 This decision was as important as any other Elizabeth I would make, as it galvanized her Privy Council and parliament: if she recovered, they would see that she survived to produce or name a proper heir. What followed was the well documented campaign to get her married, but until that could be accomplished, her council would protect her with positive publicity and by legislation. First, it would be shown that the smallpox had made her stronger.31 In addition, her council would see to it that her realm was newly outfitted with laws to increase order generally, safeguarding it from internal threats of unrest in the face of increasing population, poverty, and plague visitations.32 When plague visited England in July of 1563, just months after she recovered from smallpox, Elizabeth I and her council were poised to act, working with the church in the creation of the fi rst nationwide schedule of prayer and fasting to be used in plague-time England: A fourme to be used in common prayer twise aweke, and also an order of publique fast, to be used every Wednesday in the weeke, duryng this time of mortalitie.33 All English people would fast on Wednesdays with Fridays and Sundays spent in church for special services to demonstrate their faithful obedience to God and to their queen. Within a year, physician and author William Bullein had also prepared an unprecedented, creative response to plague: his A Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence is the fi rst extended work of plague literature written in English. With the next great visitation of plague in 1578, Elizabeth I and her council again took action to increase national security by issuing Orders thought meete by her Majestie, and her privie Councell, to be executed throughout the Counties of this Realme, in such Townes, Villages, and other places, as are, or may be hereafter infected with the plague, for the stay of further increase of the same. 34 The 17 orders complemented the 1563 A fourme by prescribing secular practices for plague control; in them, sanitation replaced prayer, Galenic bodily regimens aimed at balance replaced religious fasting, quarantine replaced mandatory church attendance, and the orders were enforced by justices of the peace not clergy. In less than two decades, security in England moved from locally conceived to nationally mandated, from religious to predominantly secular, from protecting the sovereign’s body to managing the bodies of all people in England. An example of this emerging relationship between sovereign and subject appears in order number five: If there be any doubt that the masters and owners of the houses infected, will not duely observe the directions of shutting up their doores, specially in the night, then shall there be appointed two or three watchmen by turnes, which shalbe sworne to attend and watch the house, and to apprehend any person that shall come out of the house contrary to order, and the same persons by order of the Justices, shal be a competent time imprisoned in the stocks in the highway next to the house infected. (sig. A4v)

12 Rebecca Totaro This order from the queen makes concerns clear: there will be some who will refuse to comply, and they must be forewarned and then punished if necessary. But there was flexibility built into the orders, as in this case allowing local officials to determine which quarantined homes required a guard and when, if at all, to detain someone in the stocks. All successive plague-time English governments would reissue these mandates largely unchanged; as noted plague historian Paul Slack puts it, “Until almost the last breath of the disease in England, the Orders of 1578 dictated policy from one end of the kingdom to the other” (209).35 Under James I, this new, negative but politically advantageous and relatively flexible tie between sovereign and subject in plague-time would become increasingly strained. In 1603, James reissued Elizabeth’s plague orders unchanged, but within the year, he had issued what many refer to as The Plague Act of 1604: An Act for the charitable relief and ordering of persons infected with the Plague (1604).36 This act was rhetorically more severe than the orders in its pronouncements upon plague victims: If any person or persons infected, or beinge or dwellinge in any House infected, shall be by the Mayor Bayliffe Constable or other Head Officer of any Citie Borough Towne Corporate priviledged Place or Market Towne, comanded or appointed as aforesaide, to keepe his or theire House for avoidinge of farther Infection, and shall notwithstanding wilfullie and contemptuouslie disobey such Direction and Appointment, offeringe and attemptinge to breake and goe Abroade and to resiste, or going Abroade and resistinge, such Keepers or Watchmen as shall be appointed as aforesaid, to see them kepte in, that then it shall be lawfull for such Watchmen, with violence to enforce them to keepe theire Houses; And if any hurte come by such enforcement to such disobedient persons, that then the saide Keepers Watchmen and any other their Assistant shall not be impeached therefore. (1061) The margin note reads “Infected Persons compellable by force to keep within House,” and the passage itself makes clear that arrest is not dependent upon the identification of sores on the body. It is the moment quarantined inhabitants cross the threshold of a house suspected of harboring a plague victim that they are labeled criminal and may be held by force. Here, for the fi rst time in English history, parliament permits and even prescribes violence against plague victims: guilty by habitation. According to the same act, individuals who left their homes and were found with a plague sore upon them would face execution: And if any infected person as aforesaide so comanded to keepe House, shall contrarie to such Comandement wilfullie and contemptuously goe abroade, and shall converse in companie, havinge any infectious sore upon hym uncured, that then such person shalbe taken deemed

Introduction 13 and adjudged as a Felon, and to suffer Paines of Death as in case of Felonie.37 The marginal note accurately captures the sentiment: “Penalty on infected Persons going out, Felony, &c.” This new ruling suggests that subjects might have to choose their worst nightmare: death by plague or the gallows. It stands in sharp contrast to the orders of Elizabeth, in which jail time was the most severe punishment. 38 This act carried more weight than the orders, as well, because it was ratified by Parliament. Even a brief comparison of the form and content of these documents points to differences between Elizabethan and Jacobean styles of government and between the perceptions of those governments in plague years. The two documents remained in force, reissued when necessary and setting the standard for all plague law in England, through the last visitation of 1665–66. The Jacobean government was no better able to enforce policy than its Elizabethan predecessor. Even in narratives that take up quarantine practices as a point of extended complaint, authors focus on the exceptions to and abuses of the plague orders rather than on any overbearing enforcement of them. The laws are bad because they increase anxiety, they are easily and dangerously circumvented, and/or they are misapplied, as Daniel Defoe explains in A Journal of a Plague Year (1722), a work that served not only as a warning to English readers to think carefully through their own plague evacuation plans but also as a critique of the increasingly restrictive plague policies of the early eighteenth century. 39 By this time, the last year of plague in England had long passed, the 1666 fi re of London its likeliest executioner, taking down the thatched-roof dwellings that had made the ideal habitat for the black rat. From 1563 until 1666, bubonic plague threatened literally individual bodies, but it also threatened the body politic in which those individual bodies were becoming increasingly politicized and governed. As the human population responded over generations to the plague as part of a cycle of host-pathogen adaptations, governments too changed in response to the literal disease, their symptoms varying in severity by degrees of fitness. This portrait of plague-time England is one we might recognize more readily through a Foucauldian lens of the disciplined body: each monarch dreaming of plague in order to increase his or her control, the reverse of the festival-time of liberty.40 Certainly early modern anxiety in times of plague increased as much from the plague itself as from the ratcheting up of local and national governmental policies and practices that subjected homes to search and separated loved ones at the most sensitive of times. But government officials and monarchs too feared visitations, and they kept an eye on each other, as local leaders fought to maintain control over their own jurisdictions without increased interference from above and as monarchs and their councils desired effective implementation of policy from one town to the next. Although reminding us in some

14

Rebecca Totaro

ways of the origin of Foucault’s panopticon, these government measures, at various levels, were at the same time a step forward in the history of humans dealing with infectious disease, as William H. Foege, former Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Senior Fellow of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation explains, “the most important lesson of plague history is the value of systematizing our generic approaches to disease control.”41 The concerns of individuals regarding the plague and its many effects only increased, in spite of and often due to what we might now call advances in a systematic approach to plague control. Their expressions of concern took pronounced form in the plague writing examined in this volume that in many ways takes as its center Dekker’s The Wonderful Year (1603), the work to which most scholars refer when discussing the bubonic plague in early modern England. The year of its publication, 1603, also emerges as an epicenter for the consideration of the plague in early modern England, well worthy of the title Dekker has given it. This is the year when plague and politics most clearly aligned: the death of Queen Elizabeth I and the coronation of King James VI of Scotland becoming King James I of England precede and follow this plague visitation. One might say that the plague itself took the throne in the interim. The second section of this four-part volume takes up this essential issue of governing in plague-time, the essays offering a close look at this odd year and its literary after-effects. The volume as a whole provides a corresponding assessment of plaguetime representation that is more literary than political. The year 1603 is clearly central to any consideration of the plague in England from political and historical perspectives, and it was as important from a literary perspective, some of our contributors tracing a shift in plague writing that takes place during and soon after this year. But these changes began as early as 1564, and soon, English authors would put the plague to as many literary uses as governments put it to political ones. William Bullein published his popular A Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence in that year, just a few months after Queen Elizabeth I’s issuing of the new plague-time schedule for fasting and prayer. Other plague narratives followed, making the plague serve as a platform for exhortations against sin, escapist entertainments, and critiques of government and medicine. In the process, writers advanced English literature. Within the narratives they spun, we fi nd traces of forced and embraced opportunities for change, and of course it is in these plague years that England also experienced what some have called a literary renaissance—the “golden age” of English letters. Edmund Spenser penned The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare wrote plays and poetry, the King James Bible was commissioned and published, Francis Bacon wrote The Advancement of Learning, and John Milton wrote Paradise Lost. The period saw the advance of printing and literacy; England’s Protestant reformation and confrontation with her Catholic enemies on the continent; the fi rst efforts at nationwide collection of vital birth, marriage,

Introduction 15 and death records; early efforts to distribute news in printed form; the founding of Jamestown; and the origins of the type of scientific investigation that would eventually lead to effective control of devastating diseases such as the bubonic plague. Early modern plague visitations caused trauma of a magnitude difficult to describe, but out of crisis came new approaches to perceiving and representing the world. In these years of crisis and creativity, plague writing emerged as a distinct and stable genre replete with subgenres and its own working vocabulary.42 Even in its absence, the plague remained present in these narrative symptoms of trauma—many of which were unexpectedly mirthful, as able to produce laughter in their time as Monty Python’s version of plague-time was in the 1970s and is now. We have inherited these infectious narrative symptoms of the early modern plague, and it is difficult to understand early modern England, English literature, or our own crisis-related discourses without considering the unique threat and trauma produced by plague in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. * * * * It makes sense to consider briefly the special case presented by the literary adaptation and appropriation of epidemic disease as opposed to more strictly literary adaptations and appropriations in which one set of words or sentences serve in another narrative for another purpose. Although the bubonic plague was and is a subject for interpretation, it is not fi rst a text but a disease, and it is a disease of great consequence to the human population. Affecting humans over centuries, it caused literal, evolutionary adaptation in the human population. The descendents of those who survived the fourteenth-century pandemic carried within them the results of generations of host-pathogen adaptations.43 In other words, the bubonic plague pandemic was a natural disaster with wide-ranging ecological consequences. At the organismal level, the bubonic plague wiped out hundreds of thousands of rodents and humans who were unable to tolerate the toxins produced by the Y. pestis bacteria. Those individuals who were infected but survived passed on their genes to new generations who again came into contact with Y. pestis. Because of this, the conditions for the pathogen were altered, and the Y. pestis population itself was selected for more virulent members.44 The relationship between host and pathogen was established, with manifestations of the infection varying over time and by individuals and groups. In some cases, researchers suspect, the host resistance increased to such an extent that it was protected from mortal damage caused by the Y. pestis bacteria and that this allowed for greater resistance in its progeny, as perhaps in the case of those currently demonstrating heightened resistance to the virus that causes AIDS.45 Early modern men and women had no knowledge of these processes, of course, but they did recognize the value in what we now call social and cultural adaptation. Their ancestors were survivors of the fourteenth-century pandemic, and these ancestors had passed on not only their genes but

16 Rebecca Totaro also their rituals, prescriptions, and basic practices—writing among them. These things were not inoculations as we now know them, but they were fi rst in a well-developed sixteenth and seventeenth century line of defense. These social and cultural practices and products grew out of secondary effects of plague, particularly out of traumatic stress and what psychologists now call “diseases of adaption” such as avoidance and vigilance.46 In plague-specific language, this increased desire to avoid illness and to be ever watchful fi nds reflection in the practices of flight and quarantine. In plague literature (the fictional adaptations and appropriations of the plague), these practices became the genre’s two most dominant narrative threads. Beginning in the fourteenth century with Boccaccio’s Decameron, authors pressed the concepts of fl ight and quarantine into service as the literary foundation for a series of comic tales, lessons on morality, and playful accounts of wives seeking to dupe their husbands. The residual effects of the plague visitation, these patterns of flight and quarantine, became the fuel for new ways of telling stories. The retooling of physiological and psychological trauma into new narrative forms and content is potentially rehabilitating—a retelling of trauma to gain control over it that is very much like current therapeutic methods for treating post traumatic stress disorder.47 In this proactive sense, authors wrote about the plague to adapt it in the most basic sense of the word “adapt”: “To fit (a person or thing to another, to or for a purpose), to suit, or make suitable” (OED). This defi nition originates in seventeenth-century usage and comes more closely in our post-Darwinian era to the meaning of “appropriation,” which even in the sixteenth century meant “To make (a thing) the private property of any one, to make it over to him as his own; to set apart” (OED). As Linda Hutcheon explains, this process of creative adaptation, “always involves both (re-)interpretation and then (re-) creation; this has been called both appropriation and salvaging, depending on your perspective.”48 In plague-time, men and women salvaged what they could from the suffering they experienced or about which they heard, recycling it in multiple forms, literary among them. Re-presenting the plague was sometimes a symptom of trauma, the obsessive repetition that is a sign of illness; it was as often a sign of recovery, recuperating the experiences ultimately to move beyond them. Equally important is a consideration of the comfort early modern English men and women had with the practice of appropriation in general.49 Using the theater as a proving ground, Charles Whitney explains in “Appropriate This” that Before at least 1660, playgoers and play readers, as the record of response suggests, were most interested in discovering ways to apply, use, and adapt elements of plays. . . . Their words express a willingness to leave behind the play as play and to appropriate its resources. 50

Introduction 17 As the evidence in this volume demonstrates, early modern English authors and audiences re-presented plague-time experience in much the same way that Shakespeare and other dramatists re-presented Holinshed’s Chronicles to suit particular political perspectives and that Thomas Dekker used Christopher Marlowe’s character Tamburlaine to describe the tyrannical behavior of the plague in a plague pamphlet. In forms often more difficult to detect or even to predict, they also appropriated aspects of the plague visitation experience, from a physical symptom, whereby Thomas Dekker can call a shrewish wife a plague sore, to the effects of plague such as the quarantine laws and anxiety over infected household goods that appear in plays like Romeo and Juliet and in John Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed, respectively. 51 The plague and its effects serve in less obvious forms as well. Speaking of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and the sonnets, for example, Katherine Duncan-Jones suggests that For the earliest readers of these poems, it was particularly desirable to fi nd escape, for death was all around them. They must have hoped to forget the severe plague in London that closed the playhouses and compromised the economic and social life in the City.52 In Venus and Adonis, she explains, Venus claims that the freshness of Adonis’s lip ought to have the power “To drive infection from the dangerous year: / That the star-gazers, having writ on death, / May say, the plague is banish’d by thy breath.” (ll. 508–10) (128) The immediate effect of using plague language and the theory of miasma in this passionate poem is the creation of what Duncan-Jones calls a “playing field” out of the “killing field” of plague-time. As early moderns turned parts of plays and poems into commodities at will, they did the same with the plague, selling it sometimes wholesale and at other times in potent pieces to serve the purposes at hand. In some ways, these appropriations and adaptations of the plague were of a more daring nature than the strictly literary forms. Writers were using a particularly horrific manifestation of death to serve literature, life, politics, religion, and their own livelihoods. As Catherine I. Cox explains with respect to Shakespeare, who “understood the human desire to imaginatively revisit lived catastrophes in order to gain some sense of control over them” (434), this was appropriation writ large, going beyond the enhancement of an art form to disrupt the course of trauma itself, opening space for a reassertion of human values, production, and creativity in what Norman Cantor has called “the wake of plague.”53 Representations of the plague proliferated under these particularly selective early modern conditions. Making their way into the marketplace and

18 Rebecca Totaro into minds for personal, political, religious, and aesthetic use on a previously unfathomable scale, the discursive manifestations of the plague prospered as figurative offspring of their originator, the literal disease that shut down exchange. These progeny have continued to serve the purposes of their human hosts, a limited survey of newspaper headlines from 2009 yielding the following new forms of plague: “the plague of obesity,” “the Walmart plague,” and “the plague of plagiarism.” With Laurie Garrett’s “coming plague” appearing on the immediate horizon, the time is (unfortunately) ripe to turn with all seriousness to an examination of the fi rst extended representations of plague in English literature. 54 * * * * Early modern English authors consistently attested to the plague’s unique power over bodies and to its equally marked effect on families, local and national government, the church, and literature, especially drama. They did so in as many different ways as there are genres, tones, settings, and characters, the plague at the forefront of some narratives and lurking in the background of or disguised in others. There was no escape from the plague as a constitutive part of lived experience; people devised inventive ways to live with it and even to harness it. The essays that follow show the variety of plague representations, made possible because of the recurring visitations of plague from 1563 to 1666 but also because of the printing press, the rise in status of writers and dramatists, the Reformation in England, the management of plague by local and national governments, and the degree to which the pestilence could be recast in so many forms. The essays in the fi rst section, “Making the Plague Serve Form and Function, 1563–1666,” provide a chronological overview of the period covered by this volume, beginning with an examination of the fi rst sustained piece of plague literature written in English, William Bulleins’s A Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence. Moving to a treatment of the 1603 visitation that signals the start of England’s worst consecutive set of outbreaks, the section ends just after England’s fi nal battle with the plague in 1665–66. These essays also examine changes appearing in both the form and content of plague writing, tracking the effects of the plague on prose satire and city comedy and charting the creation and appropriation of a new genre, the bills of mortality, which were issued in plague years not only to number the dead but also to give clear account of how many of those dead had died from the plague. At the heart of these concerns is an increasingly insistent association between the plague and the urban environment, which corresponded with patterns of outbreak and which at the same time underscores the fact that plague writing was largely a product of London, thereafter disseminated into the country like other goods and services and like the plague itself.55 In the lead essay in this section, “Writing the Plague in English Prose Satire,” William Kerwin argues that in Elizabethan England, repeated visitations of the plague help to account for striking changes in the form and

Introduction 19 content of satire, exemplified by a comparison of the two best known works of early plague prose in English—William Bullein’s 1564 A Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence, written during the fi rst plague visitation in the queen’s reign, and Thomas Dekker’s 1603 The Wonderful Year, published after her death, in the plague year that saw King James VI of Scotland become King James I of England. Attentive to the complexities involved in any effort to defi ne early modern satire, Kerwin begins with a review of what these pieces of plague writing have in common. Both authors were “confronted by the blazing memento mori of widespread and unavoidable death” and as satirists, they responded by “employ[ing] plague-related narratives of illness to further their narratives of protest and complaint and in doing so they reshaped a part of the literary culture.” The nature of these complaints are, however, strikingly different, hardly accounted for by the fact that they were written 40 years apart: whereas Bullein concludes his narrative of protest and complaint with a morality tale, offering a Dantesque, comedic ending of salvation, Dekker can do no such thing, his prose form lacking certain shape and any suggestion that it might provide comfort. Kerwin argues that this extreme shift in both the experience and the interpretation of the plague is all the more compelling because it occurs during the reign of a single monarch, and he advances several claims regarding its cause, locating them in the religious and socio-economic shifts taking place in an increasingly urbanized England. In “Plague Space and Played Space in Urban Drama, 1604,” Kelly J. Stage takes up this issue of the experience of plague in the urban environment, extending it to the city comedies that Thomas Dekker wrote in partnership with Thomas Middleton (The Honest Whore, Part 1) and with John Webster (Westward Ho) in the fi rst year after the 1603 visitation. Tracing the movements of the plays’ characters who pass from city to suburb and back again in schemes intended to fulfill or deflect desire, Stage fi nds a matching historical pattern of plague-time flight and return that altered the experience of civic, suburban, and country space. Represented in the thematic form of the risks and rewards associated with erotic longing and its attendant jealousy, the disruptive effects of plague provide fuel for comedy. As Stage explains, “the preoccupations of a plague society [are] collapsed onto the preoccupations of a sexual society.” Both preoccupations contribute to and are shaped by conceptualizations of social topography that on the one hand stand as reminders of the plague-city/health-country binary and on the other deconstruct that binary to show ultimately that plague-time patterns were increasingly subject to negotiation. The bills of mortality helped people determine whether or not to flee from the plague. They constitute one of two genres of plague writing created for the explicit purpose of managing plague visitations—the fi rst being the medical plague treatise. In “Physical and Spiritual Illness: Narrative Appropriations of the Bills of Mortality,” Erin Sullivan demonstrates that the bills served additional functions. They assisted local and national

20 Rebecca Totaro authorities who were making decisions about the organization and taxation of effected populations but they also served the discursive function of managing anxiety by suggesting the plague could be tracked and avoided. Extending her research in an exploration of this second function, Sullivan then demonstrates the presence of an emerging seventeenth-century correspondence between the numbering of bodies in the plague bills and the use to which London clergymen put those bills: for them, Sullivan explains, the bills “hinted at a kind of spiritual accounting expected of all English Protestants,” offering in one broadside per week a quantifiable catalog of sin for the city and a reason to exhort their parishioners to repentance. In at least one way, this essay brings the fi rst section of this volume full circle, demonstrating that 100 years after the morality tale ending of Bullein’s Dialogue, and through the bleakest years of unprecedentedly numerous and deadly plague visitations, English Protestants persevered in their efforts to justify the ways of God in plague-time. Section two, “Governing Bodies in Plague-Time,” provides a pair of essays unique to this collection and to the study of plague literature, the authors taking as their primary subject the narrative appropriation of royal bodies in plague-time. By 1603, kings and queens of England had learned to alter their itineraries and court terms when the plague visited the nation, but this year was unique because the plague visited soon after Queen Elizabeth I’s death and just before King James VI of Scotland’s entry into England. As Richelle Munkhoff and James D. Mardock show, the timing of the plague would shape the narrative legacies of these two monarchs, compelling both monarchs to dance figuratively with death in ways disconcerting to their former and future subjects. In “Contagious Figurations: Plague and the Impenetrable Nation after the Death of Elizabeth,” Richelle Munkhoff examines the provocative accounts of the queen’s dead, virginal body as it altered in death and seemed to some to open itself treasonously to invasion against the queen’s own desire. Elizabeth did not die of the plague, but writers naturally conflated the horrors of 1603: a queen taken by death and a capital invaded by the plague. Reading the representation of Elizabeth I’s dead body in Thomas Dekker’s The Wonderful Year; Elizabeth Southwell’s narrative of Queen Elizabeth’s death and subsequent lying-instate; and Thomas Heywood’s two-part play, If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Munkhoff considers “the powerful and confl icting ways that the queen’s body continued to signify in its material transition from life to death and in its nostalgic reification.” In the months and years following her death and the visitation of the plague, England sought a corresponding reintegration of national identity that depended as much on the recuperation of a positive image of their former queen as it did on embracing their new king and fi nding him fit to serve. When James VI of Scotland encountered the plague of England at once with his new subjects, it appears that he may not have been quick enough to rise to the occasion they had constructed for him. In fact, to avoid the

Introduction

21

populous, plague-ridden capital as long as possible, he made his way south to London slowly, and it was this veritable danse macabre that disconcerted his soon to be subjects who had hoped his coming would symbolize new strength. Here instead was another monarch made subject to plague. In “‘Thinking to pass unknown’: Measure for Measure, the Plague, and the Accession of James I,” James D. Mardock examines the king’s reception and the history of his representation, beginning in that fatal, fateful year. It was soon after this period of “public trauma, the perfect storm of perceived societal upheaval created by the arrival of an unknown foreign king during a devastating pestilence” that Shakespeare wrote Measure for Measure, a play that for some casts the character of Duke Vincentio as another King James I. Tracking the stages of James’s accession with the movements of the plague through England, Mardock accounts for the survival of this “Measure for Measure version of King James” before offering a more nuanced reading of the king and of the play. James I’s “performance of royalty was received differently before the country’s experience of the 1603 plague outbreak than afterwards,” for example; and in its plague-time context, Measure for Measure offers a more interesting representation of anxieties related to the regulation of desire than it does of an aloof King James, who knew quite well the importance of staging himself publically as a royal and who chose in this year to weigh the potentially insurmountable costs of doing so. Drawing on the work of theater historians and scholars of Shakespeare who have examined the practical and aesthetic implications of plague visitations for London playwrights and playgoers, patrons and actors, 56 the essays in the third section, “Performances, Playhouses, and the Sites of Re-Creation,” deepen and expand upon the treatment of plague representation on the early modern stage advanced by Kelly J. Stage in the first section and by James D. Mardock in the second. The closing of theaters on account of plague altered the activities of an industry, from top to bottom, from form to content. When the playhouses reopened, it was not quite business as usual. What exactly served as entertainment following such public and personal upheaval? How might one respond to antitheatricalists who blamed the players and playhouse patrons for spreading and in some cases for causing the disease? The healing nature of play-going as an activity in itself and as a response to antitheatricalists’ claims is the focus of “‘Sweet recreation barred’: The Case for Playgoing in Plague-time” by Nichole DeWall. In plague-time England, antitheatricalists warned that playhouses were hotbeds of infectious disease, whereas physicians prescribed “mirth” as a cure-all, and dramatists explored thematically both the danger of contagious ideas and the salubrious effects of the air. Examining these extreme early modern perspectives on playgoing, DeWall exposes their mutual Galenic origins and considers how audiences might have thought about theater-going. Many sought mirth and music—sure prescriptions against melancholy and other emotions thought to make one susceptible to the plague.

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In “Shakespeare’s Dual Lexicons of Plague: Infections in Speech and Space,” Paula S. Berggren considers the relationship between the enclosed space of the theater and the infectious conceptual spaces appearing in Shakespeare’s plays. She begins by offering a thorough review of Shakespeare’s use of plague terminology and isolating his two most consistent patterns in the language of cursing and oaths and in descriptions of confi ned and/or secret spaces. Drawing from a variety of plays and the sonnets, with special attention to Twelfth Night, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and The Winter’s Tale, Berggren focuses on the latter pattern, demonstrating that it is in the enclosed chamber and the tomb, the closet and the canopy that infection dwells. There it is a deadly form of desire that can kill with the speed and dreadfulness associated with the plague. Closed spaces in the plays, particularly those appearing at the ends of plays, often are or become “incubators of dangerous romantic passions,” but, she argues, these spaces can also act as a purgative, leading to a renewed life sans contagion. Within Shakespeare’s canon these lexicons speak to the range of experiences early moderns had with the after-effects of plague: always traumatic, many debilitating but some restorative. But for its single appearance situated off stage in Romeo and Juliet, however, what remains absent in Shakespeare’s plays is the literal disease. The direct dramatic representation of the bubonic plague is the focus of Barbara H. Traister’s essay, “‘A Plague on both your houses’: Sites of Comfort and Terror in Early Modern Drama.” Among early modern English plays, only Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, and John Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed offer extended representations of the plague as a literal disease. Even so, in these plays, not one character contracts the plague or is in any way directly harmed by it. Traister’s persuasive reading of these plays also underscores the degree to which early moderns comfortably appropriated the plague out of its element even when it was in its element. Among these few plays that stage the literal disease, two are comedies and only is set in a plague-time city. More pronounced is the figure of the quarantined home that is common to all three plays; it stands clearly both for the visitation of plague and for its accompanying effects that, as this collection demonstrates, caused as much suffering as the disease itself. With powerful accounts from the diary of Simon Forman and from the plague pamphlets of John Davies of Hereford, William Austin, and Thomas Brewer, which likewise associate homes with plagues and closed homes with physical and/or socio-economic harm, Traister shows the fear of the quarantined home as a dominant trope in plague writing and demonstrates that these engaging plays are not anomalies within but representatives of early modern plague writing. As the extended “I’m Not Dead Yet” song and dance number in the musical revival of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and the viral videos depicting Sesame Street’s Big Bird suffering from bird flu suggest, we continue to make the plague and commonly infectious afflictions serve our turns for

Introduction 23 catharsis. The essays in section four, “Contemporary Turns” acknowledge and contend with our ongoing fascination with infectious disease, moving us forward in literary and medical history to an arena where representations are most bold: the plague becomes a cipher for all social violence, plague writing a model for current climate-crisis narratives. Matthew Thiele argues, in “Plague in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Girardian Reading of Bottom and Hippolyta” that far from generalizing the plague into a vague condition of violence, Rene Girard’s often cited theory from the 1970s regarding the relationship between the plague, scapegoating, and storytelling is a viable tool for the new historians seeking to assess the direct and subtle effects of the plague on early modern literature. Thiele examines the case for and against scholarly use of Girard’s plague related themes when applied to literature in its historical context. Then he tests Girardian theory in a reading of Bottom and Hippolyta in the plague-time contexts of the plague-associated city of Athens, in which the play takes place, and of a midsummer in early modern England, when plague was most apt to strike. By pairing aspects of the historical situation suggested in the play with its composition date and a review of the Girardian themes of reversal, undifferentiation, and sacrifice, Thiele offers a compelling reading not only of the play as a rarely discussed work of plague writing but also of Bottom the weaver-ass and Hippolyta the Amazon-wife as representatives of plague-time anxieties over the crisis-driven dismantling of hierarchical order. In “Dekker’s and Middleton’s Plague Pamphlets as Environmental Literature,” Charles Whitney brings us to the present by arguing that these pamphlets are examples of what ecocritic Lawrence Buell might call “toxic discourse,” in that they express the “fear of a poisoned world.”57 At the same time, Whitney fi nds within them the merry spirit that turns a crisis into an opportunity for increased conviviality, the hallmark of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque. In The Wonderful Year, News from Gravesend, and The Meeting of the Gallants—all published between 1603 and 1604—Whitney observes a turn from the former to the latter, with increasingly dominant depictions of crisis as a breach that can open up space for festivity. The highlight is Middleton and Dekker’s appropriation of Shakespeare’s Falstaff, who appears in The Meeting of the Gallants as a plague-time tavern owner who with ale and tall tales consoles those waiting out the plague in a self quarantine. Driving the festivity here, of course, is commerce, as the tavern owner stands to make a profit from his happy, healthy patrons. It is this reminder of consumerism that brings Whitney to the present, where current consumers buy global warming doomsday books on the one hand and environmental self-help books on the other. In such current works of crisis literature, however, disaster looms on the horizon rather than standing as a shared memory in the past or threatening as the clear and present danger it was for Dekker, Middleton, and their contemporaries. Ending on a note of concern, Whitney wonders if we will not soon find that

24 Rebecca Totaro Dekker and Middleton have become the more reliable guides to our present experiences. In his sobering four-part Afterword, “Plague and Metaphor,” Ernest B. Gilman offers an exploration of the origin of plague language in English literature and a philosophical assessment of the complicated and variously interpreted relationships linking the epidemic disease, its metaphorical forms, and metaphor itself, before looking further into the future. Gilman suggests that if metaphor supplies what G.E.R. Lloyd calls a “semantic stretch” by which the gap between an alien term and the term appropriated for new purpose in new context (thereby with a new sense of appropriateness) is crossed, then one person’s literal meaning is another person’s metaphor. Extended to the plague, he explains, what one culture or discipline considers a plague is in another culture or discipline “plague,” the scare quotes assuring those who import the term that the Sontagian “other thing” described as “plague” is only figuratively like it. But, if the bridge of metaphor can work both ways, then at some point, the “plague” and the plague might be said to be indistinguishable. In this essay, Gilman takes us back to early modern England, when this relationship between plague and metaphor found both augmentation as a response to the cultural trauma of repeated plague visitations and rapid dissemination by means of the printing press, which disseminated plague writing as quickly as Londoners seemed able to spread the literal disease into the country. Once adapted for the purposes of inducing stability during crisis situations, plague writing has mutated many times, its variously formed progeny poised to infect new hosts.

Notes 1 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. Brian Gibbons, Arden Shakespeare: Second Series (1980; London: Arden, 2000), 3.1.92, 99. Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet between 1591 and 1596, and it was likely fi rst staged by 1597, when the fi rst quarto was published. The authors of the Romeo and Juliet entry for “Shakespeare in Quarto,” part of the British Library Treasures in Full (available online at http://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/ romeo.html [accessed November 7, 2009]), state that Romeo and Juliet relates most closely to a group of plays usually dated to the period 1594–95: Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Richard II. These years are the fi rst years following the reopening of theaters after their 1592–93 closing due to the plague. For more on the concepts of “plague-time” and of “plague writing,” see, respectively, Rebecca Totaro, Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton, Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005), especially pages 1–6; and Ernest B. Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 2 An examination of Shakespeare’s representation of the plague and its effects does not end here, of course. Even within this play, there are more complex issues at work, including those brought to light through source study. In Arthur Brooke’s The tragicall historye of Romeus and Iuliet written first

Introduction 25

3

4 5

6 7

8 9 10 11 12

in Italian by Bandell, and nowe in Englishe (London, 1562), for example, the plague had killed a man in the very house in Mantua that the messenger entered (sig. 70r), and this makes the detention of the messenger more reasonable than in Shakespeare’s version. In addition, it is the heat of the day that contributes to the passions in Shakespeare, whereas Brooke makes it the heat of sin that is clearly to blame. Finally, Shakespeare adds the character Mercutio and makes Prince Escalus his relative, thus adding a potential reason for empathy on the part of the prince, or at least a reason for his conclusion that “all are punish’d” (5.3.294). On the early modern medical marketplace, see especially Kevin Siena, “‘The Foul Disease’ and Privacy: The Effects of Venereal Disease and Patient Demand on the Medical Marketplace in Early Modern London,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 75 (2001): 199–224; Margaret Pelling, Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London: Patronage, Physicians, and Irregular Practitioners, 1550–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations, and the Urban Poor in Early Modern London (London and New York: Longman, 1998), especially 203–29; and David Gentilecore, Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in Early Modern English Medicine, 1550–1680 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 21. Steve Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time 7 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Mary J. Dobson, Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England, Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time 29 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 219. On the relationship between Galenic medicine and Christianity, see Vivian Nutton, “The Rise of Medicine,” in The Cambridge History of Medicine, ed. Roy Porter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 56; Totaro, Suffering in Paradise, 38–48; and Andrew Wear, Health and Healing in Early Modern England: Studies in Social and Intellectual History, Variorum Collected Studies Series, 613 (Aldershot, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 1998), 149. See Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Neill, Issues of Death, 5. I have removed Neill’s parenthetical reference to figures for the last two images mentioned in this passage. See Neill, Issues of Death, chapters 1 and 3. Ambroise Paré, A treatise of the plague contayning the causes, signes, symptomes, prognosticks, and cure thereof. Together with sundry other remarkable passages (for the prevention of, and preservation from the pestilence) never yet published by anie man. Collected out of the workes of the no lesse learned than experimented and renowned chirurgian Ambrose Parey (London, 1630), 65. The fi rst edition in French was published in Paris in 1568. I have retained original spelling but for the modernization of u/v and i/j transpositions.

26 Rebecca Totaro 13 J.F.D. Shrewsbury, A History of Bubonic Plague in the British Isles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 4–5. 14 Division of Vector-Borne Infectious Diseases, Centers for Disease Control, “Plague,” available online at http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid/plague/info. htm, accessed November 7, 2009. Similarly, the World Health Organization reports, Plague bacillus enters the skin from the site of the bite and travels through the lymphatic system to the nearest lymph node. The lymph node then becomes inflamed because the plague bacteria, Yersinia pestis or Y. pestis, will replicate here in high numbers. The swollen lymph node is called a ‘bubo’ which is very painful and can become suppurated as an open sore in advanced stage of infection. (Fact Sheet 267, “Plague,” available online at http://www.who.int/ mediacentre/factsheets/fs267/en/ [accessed September 25, 2009]). 15 Daniel C. Keyes, Jonathan L. Burstein, Richard B. Schwartz, and Raymond E. Swienton, Medical Response to Terrorism: Preparedness and Clinical Practice, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2004), 74. For the most useful images of bubonic plague symptoms, including the bubo, see also 75. 16 See Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker, The Black Death and the Dancing Mania, trans. Jane Duff (from the 1888 Cassell & Company edition), available online http://www.wattpad.com /6234-The-Black-Death-The-Dancing-Mania (accessed September 17, 2009). For images, see Keyes, Burstein, Schwartz, and Swienton, Medical Response. 17 William Bullein, A dialogue bothe pleasaunte and pietifull wherein is a goodly regimente against the feuer pestilence with a consolacion and comfort against death / newly corrected by Willyam Belleyn, the autour thereof (London, 1564), fol. 35r–35v. Contributors to this collection refer to this work as A Dialogue Against the Fever Pestilence. For an introduction to and transliteration with notes of the 1564 edition, see Totaro, ed., The Plague in Print: Essential Elizabethan Sources, 1558–1603, Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010), chapter 3. 18 Thomas Dekker, The Wonderfull Yeare (London, 1603), sig. D1r. Contributors to this collection refer to this work as The Wonderful Year. For a transliteration of The Wonderfull Yeare with an introduction and notes, see chapter 6 of Totaro, The Plague in Print. 19 Ambroise Paré, The workes of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey translated out of Latine and compared with the French (London, 1634), 833. The fi rst edition in French was published in Paris in 1575. 20 William Gouge, Gods three arrovves plague, famine, svvord, in three treatises. I. A plaister for the plague. II. Dearths death. III. The Churches conquest over the sword. By William Gouge Doctor in Divinity, and preacher of Gods Word in Black-Friers (London, 1631), 86. See also his treatise of thanksgiving, The saints sacrifice: or, a commentarie on the CXVI. Psalme Which is, a gratulatory psalme, for deliverance from deadly distresse (London, 1632). 21 Dobson, Contours of Death, 488; See fig. 7.7 that records “the spectre of disease and death as represented in the writings of early modern south-east Englanders” (489). 22 On the calculation of crisis mortality ratios, see Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985; reprinted with corrections, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985; New

Introduction 27 York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 81–82; for a reassessment of the category of “crisis mortality,” see Dobson, Contours of Death, 465n.1. 23 Jeffrey J. Adamovicz and Gerald P. Andrews, “Plague Vaccines: Retrospective Analysis and Future Developments,” Biological Weapons Defense: Infectious Disease and Counterbioterrorism, eds. Luther E. Lindler, Frank J. Lebeda, George W. Korch, (New York: Humana Press, 2004), 126. See also Dobson’s discussion of the difference between plague and smallpox and between plague and other airborne disease, like measles, which need a very large pool of susceptible hosts such as a city of 200,000 or 300,000 in order to be continuously present in a population. It is extremely rare for smallpox to attach itself to the same person twice, and once exposed to the disease in the fi rst few years of life, the risk of catching smallpox in later years is negligible (Contours of Death, 478)—

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26

27

28

29

a fact underscoring the terror of her council when Elizabeth I caught smallpox in her 20s. On mortality rates, see Dobson, Contours of Death, 483 and Slack, Impact, 66–67. On the incubation of plague, based on early modern records, see Ann G. Carmichael, “Universal and Particular: The Language of Plague, 1348– 1500,” in Pestilential Complexities: Understanding Medieval Plague, ed. Vivian Nutton, Medical History 27 (London: The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of medicine at UCL, 2008), 17–52, especially 44–52. These dates appear in this form in a larger table in Totaro, Suffering in Paradise, 2; please also see note 1 on the same page, explaining in detail the sources from which the table was compiled; for more on this concept of the “great years of plague,” see pages 32–33. J. Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Stuart Years (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 74. In many ways, the contributors to this collection trace their work on the plague to this work of Barroll, who argued that Shakespeare’s art was one “that did not bloom and flourish naturally in the spring of an English cultural Renaissance, but an art that had to be wrested from and forged in the crucible of daunting social disruption, danger, and indifference” (209). We also follow Jonathan Gil Harris in our examinations of plague, viewing it in its various early modern representations as Harris does smallpox, as “an anachronistic palimpsest rather than a corporeal, spiritual, or historicist fact prior to textuality” (Jonathan Gil Harris, “How to ‘Read’ ‘Early Modern’ ‘Syphilis,’” in Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe, ed. Kevin Siena [Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2005], 129). For more on the plague and print, see Totaro, Plague in Print, especially the introduction; Sharon Achinstein, “Plagues and Publication: Ballads and the Representation of Disease in the English Renaissance,” Criticism 34 (1992): 27–49; Stephen Greenberg, “Plague, the Printing Press, and Public Health in Seventeenth-Century London,” The Huntington Library Quarterly 67, no. 4 (2004): 508–27. John Davies, Humours heav’n on earth; with the civile warres of death and fortune. As also the triumph of death: or, the picture of the plague, according to the life; as it was in anno Domini. 1603 (London, 1609), 233. The title dates the piece to 1603, but according to the English Short Title Catalog, the fi rst publication date is 1609. Famously Henry VIII sent a young Thomas More to enforce the new quarantine policy in Oxford. For more on Henry VIII, Thomas More, and these early quarantine policies, see Totaro, Suffering in Paradise, chapters 2 and 3.

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30 Michael G. Brennan, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Margaret P. Hannay, “Robert Dudley, the Dudleys, and Queen Elizabeth,” in Elizabeth I: Always her own Free Woman, eds. Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney, and Debra Barrett-Graves (Aldershot, UK; Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2003), 20; Simon Adams, Leicester and the Court: Essays on Elizabethan Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 137. This portion of the Introduction began as a presentation at the Inhabiting the Body/Inhabiting the World: An Early Modern Cultural Studies Conference, organized by Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. and Mary Floyd-Wilson (March 2004); under revision it became part of the Shakespeare Association of American Conference seminar, “Shakespeare, Civility, and Liberty,” directed by Thomas Moisan. A Folger Shakespeare Library fellowship provided me with invaluable access not only to the texts discussed herein but to generous, daily conversation with the other fellows in residence—both immeasurably enhancing my research. 31 Creating a rhetorical campaign to convince her subjects and those in other nations that Elizabeth I was stronger rather than weaker as a result of her battle with smallpox was an easy matter; it required the making public of traditional sentiments regarding death, the kind Elizabeth had shared years earlier with her brother Edward as he suffered from repeated bouts of illness. In letters to him, she concluded that God had caused her brother the king to suffer so that English bodies would be spared from greater harm in the future. In these terms, the king’s body was a proxy, the people safe for their sovereign’s suffering on their behalf. Once recovered from her own battle with smallpox a decade later, Elizabeth explained in similar terms to her parliament in speeches and to her people in published poems that her affl iction had made the nation stronger. See especially, “An Answer to the Common’s Petition that she Marry, January 28, 1563” and her prayer “Thanksgiving for Recovered Health,” in Elizabeth I: Collected Works, eds. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 70–72, 139–40. 32 Among many to link population increases, poverty, and plague in early modern England, is Paul Slack, who writes, The Recorder of London noted that in 1603 there were 800 cases of plague in a single building, formerly one of four large mansions in which now together housed 8,000 people. Such instances inspired the vigorous campaign against subdivision and new building which the government waged, to no avail, between 1580 and the Civil War. (Impact, 153) See also Ann G. Carmichael, Plague and the Poor in Renaissance Florence, Cambridge History of Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Peter Ackroyd, London: A Biography (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), 93–94. An engaging avenue for extended consideration of the relationship between marginalized groups and the plague would be to consider the ethical dimension of the plague-time confrontation with the widow, orphan, and stranger—the “face,” in Levinas’s terms, most likely to compel charity and/or shame in such challenging times; see Emmanuel Levinas, “Ethics as First Philosophy” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Sian Hand (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989), 75–87; and Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). See as a starting point, Charles Whitney’s article in this volume. For an approach to these issues through the lens of medicine and ethics, see Patrick Wallis, “Plagues, Morality and the Place of Medicine in Early Modern England,” The English Historical Review 121, no.490 (2006): 1–24; and David N. Harley, “Medical Metaphors in

Introduction 29 English Moral Theology, 1560–1660,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 48 (1993): 396–435. 33 Church of England, A fourme to be used in common prayer twyse aweke, and also an order of publique fast, to be used every Wednesday in the weeke, duryng this tyme of mortalitie, and other afflictions, wherwith the realme at this present is visited. Set forth by the Quenes Majesties speciall comaundement, expressed in her letters hereafter folowyng in the next page (London, 1563). For a transliteration of these prayers, with lengthier introduction, see chapter 2 of Totaro, The Plague in Print. Three years earlier in 1560 Bishop Parker had issued a short form and order for common prayer for seasonable weather. It did not include fasting, and although Parker suggested that it serve against the plague in 1563, the queen and her council wanted a new service (Slack, Impact, 228–29). Only the fi rst lines of the preface to Parker’s 1560 short form and order appear repeated in the 1563 A fourme to be used in common prayer. Over the intent of this prayer schedule, I differ slightly in my views from those of Paul Slack, whose opinion that the church was a puppet of the Elizabethan regime is much stronger than my own. Like plague historian Charles F. Mullet, I see Grindal working cooperatively with the government to forward this schedule of common prayer, however much at odds he was with Elizabeth herself (The Bubonic Plague and England [Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1956], 80). On this tension, see Patrick Collinson, Archbishop Grindal, 1519–1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church (Berkeley: University of California Press; London: Jonathan Cape, 1979). It is Grindal who confi rms in a letter to Cecil the need for the reading of an additional admonition in church, in the hope that more Londoners will obey both civic and church prescriptions for health (Edmund Grindal, “The Bishop’s Admonition, to be Read by Ministers to their People,” The Remains of Archbishop Grindal, ed. William Nicholson [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1843], 271). Between 1563 and the next visitation, the city of London made small improvements to its orders, and Cecil kept careful record of the plague deaths (Slack, Impact, 207). 34 Elizabeth I, Orders thought meete by her Majestie, and her privie Councell, to be executed throughout the Counties of this Realme, in such Townes, Villages, and other places, as are, or may be hereafter infected with the plague, for the stay of further increase of the same. Also, an advise set downe upon her Majesties expresse commaundement, by the best learned in Physicke within this Realme, contayning sundry good rules and easie medicines, without charge to the meaner sort of people, as well for the preservation of her good Subjects from the plague before infection, as for the curing and ordring of them after they shalbe infected (1578). For a transliterated version of these orders and a lengthier introduction to them orders, please see Totaro, The Plague in Print, chapter 4. For a discussion of the timetable for their completion and fi rst publication, see Slack, Impact, 209, and Anne McKeithen, “Dating the First English Plague Orders: 1578?” in The Plague Book, University of Virginia, Historical Collectison at the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, available online at http://historical.hsl.virginia.edu/plague/ mckeithen.cfm (accessed October 20, 2009). 35 Not without precedent, these programs were Protestant variations on the Catholic fasts and processions that came into being in the fourteenth century. For church and civil documents from the fourteenth-century visitations, see Rosemary Horrox, trans. and ed. The Black Death, Manchester Medieval Sources (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). In England, local communities had mobilized independent of the church and state to create

30 Rebecca Totaro sanitation regulations. One can conclude that by the time Elizabeth I came to the throne, England had been a long time in advancing to more comprehensive orders. For example, as Slack explains, Archbishop Grindal drew from Genevan practice in 1563 to create the A fourme to be used, and Secretary William Cecil borrowed from northern European models as he and the council drafted the 1578 Orders (Impact, 229, 207). One would also be right to adopt Slack’s account of the 1578 plague orders, placing them in a trajectory of increasing governmental authority under Elizabeth, following the successful end to the Northern Rebellion in 1569 and the creation of poor laws in the 1570s (207). 36 An Act for the charitable relief and ordering of persons infected with the Plague, in Great Britain, The statutes of the realm (Buffalo: W. S. Hein, 1993), 1 Jac. I, c. 31. Slack is among those who fi rst calls this The Plague Act, and scholars generally follow suit (Impact, 211). Twenty years later, this act of 1604 was reissued word for word as part of “An Acte for contynewing and revyving of divers Statutes, and Repeale of dyvers others” (Statutes of the Realm, 21 Jac. I c. 28). 37 The act continues: But if such person shall not have any such Soare found about him, Then for his sayd Offence, to be punished as a vagabond in all respects should, or ought to be, by the Statute made in the Nine and thirtieth year of the Reigne of our late Soveraigne Lady Queene Elizabeth, for the punishment of Rogues and vagabonds, An further to be bound to his or their good behavior for one whole yeere. (Statutes of the Realm, 1 Jac. I, c.31) 38 James I also reissued William Lombarde’s standard rules for local officials, to which James I added a lengthy section, the title of which suggested it would deal directly with plague. William Lambarde was a barrister who advised Elizabeth’s Privy Council on legal issues. Issued multiple times during Elizabeth’s reign, his The duties of constables, borsholders, tithingmen, and such other lowe ministers of the peace. Whereunto be adjoyned, the seuerall offices of church ministers and churchwardens, and overseers for the poore, surveighours of the highwaies, and distributors of the provision against noysome fowle and vermine (London, 1583), provided guidelines for those who held lower-level government positions. In 1604, the Stuart government revised it with this additional section and title: And now enlarged in the yeare 1604. With an addition of the effect of the statutes, made in the session of Parliament lastlie holden, which are most necessarie for such officers to know, as touching their offices, & for the reliefe and ordering of the infected with the plague. The content of the additional section in the text, however, does not deal explicitly with plague or with relief for those who fall victim to it. Rather, the new statute reinforces Elizabeth’s 1597 Poor Law and then eliminates previous exceptions to the rules while increasing punishments, pointing to an increasing association between the plague and the poor if not also between the plague and power. See An Acte for the Reliefe of the Poore, Statutes of the Realm, 39 Elizabeth I c. 3. 39 For more on these last English debates over quarantine laws, see Slack, Impact, 326–37. 40 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 195–98. For an application of this theory to early modern drama in its plague-time context, see for example Nick Cox, “‘Subjected Thus’: Plague and Panopticism in Richard I,” Early

Introduction 31

41 42 43

44

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Modern Literary Studies 6, no.2 (September, 2000): 5.1–44, at http://purl. oclc.org/emls/06–2/coxrich.htm (accessed March 28, 2009). William H. Foege, “Plagues: Perceptions of Risk and Social Responses,” in In Time of Plague: The History and Social Consequences of Lethal Epidemic Disease, ed. Arien Mack (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 19. For popular examples of each genre including glossaries, introduction, and notes, please see Totaro, The Plague in Print. On the burgeoning study of host-pathogen adaptation, see Arturo Casadevall and Liise-anne Pirofski, “Host-Pathogen Interactions: Redefi ning the Basic Concepts of Virulence and Pathogenicity,” Infection and Immunity 67, no.8 (August 1999): 3703–13, available online at http://iai.asm.org/cgi/content/ full/67/8/3703 (accessed March 28, 2009); S. Altizer and A. Pedersen, “Hostpathogen evolution, biodiversity and disease risks for natural populations,” Conservation Biology: Evolution in Action, eds. Scott Carroll and Charles Fox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Steffen Rupp and Kai Sohn, Host-Pathogen Interactions: Methods and Protocols, Methods in Molecular Biology (New York: Humana 2008); N.E. Backage, ed., Parasites and Pathogens: Effects on host hormones and behavior (New York: Springer 1997). On the adaptation and genetic diversity of Yersinia pestis, see for example Dongsheng Zhou et al., “DNA Microarray Analysis of Genome Dynamics in Yersinia pestis: Insights into Bacterial Genome Microevolution and Niche Adaptation,” Journal of Bacteriology 186.15 (August 2004): 5138–46, available online at http://www.ncti.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc451624/pdf (accessed March 20, 2010). Raymond K. Auerbach et al., “Yersinia pestis Evolution on a Small Timescale: Comparison of Whole Genome Sequences from North America” PLoS ONE. 2007; 2(8): e770, available online at http:// www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc1940323/pdf (accessed March 20, 2010). See for example Peter Radetsky, “Immune to a Plague,” Discover: Science, Technology, and the Future (June 1997), available online at http://discovermagazine.com/1997/jun/ immunetoaplague1147 (accessed March 28, 2009); and Double Immunity the Public Broadcasting Service documentary based the work of Tim O’Brien who found that “People from some European populations carry a genetic mutation that prevents HIV from entering their white blood cells” and that this mutation “may have been a selective advantage during the bubonic plague as well”; in fact, “The areas that were hardest hit by the Black Plague match those where the gene for HIV resistance is the most common today” (“Double Immunity,” available online at http://www. pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/10/4/l_104_05.html [accessed November 9, 2009]). Eva Kahana, Boaz Kahana, Zev Harel, and Tena Rosner, “Coping with Extreme Trauma,” in Human Adaptation to Extreme Stress, From the Holocaust to Vietnam, eds. John P. Wilson, Zev Harel, and Boaz Kahana, The Plenum Series on Stress and Coping (New York and London: Plenum Press, 1988), 70–71. The authors explain that these two adaptive diseases “may both have been adaptive in the traumatic environment. Yet during the posttraumatic period, such responses may no longer serve a useful function but are difficult to unlearn” (71). By appropriating them to serve literary functions, perhaps authors could give these adaptive strategies more positive form and function. Among the many therapies for posttraumatic stress disorder that utilize the retelling of the traumatic event to render it less so, see, as a starting point, the discussions of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), especially Imagery

32 Rebecca Totaro

48 49 50

51

52 53

54

Rehearsal Therapy; Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR); and Psychodynamic Psychotherapy in Matthew J. Friedman, Posttraumatic and Acute Stress Disorders: The Latest Assessment and Treatment Strategies, 4th ed. (New York: Jones and Bartlett, 2006), 36–46. At the time of this publication, Friedman was Executive Director of the U. S. Department of Veterans Affairs National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Professor of Psychiatry and of Pharmacology at Dartmouth Medical School. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 8. For more on the relationship between the process and product of literary adaptation and appropriation, see Hutcheon, Theory of Adaptation, 6–9. Charles Whitney, “Appropriate This,” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, guest edited by Christy Desmet and Sujata Iyengar 3.2 (Spring/Summer 2008): 2–3, available online at http://www. borrowers.uga.edu/cocoon/borrowers/request?id=781730 (accessed November 7, 2009). For Dekker’s plague-sore wife, see his story “A Medicine to cure the Plague of a womans tongue, experimented on a Coblers wife,” in The ravens almanacke foretelling of a [brace] plague, famine, and ciuill warre, that shall happen this present yeare 1609, not only within this kingdome of Great Britaine, but also in France, Germany, Spaine, and other parts of Christendome : with certaine remedies, rules, and receipts, how to preuent or at least to abate the edge of these vniuersall calamities (London, 1609), sig. C2v-C4v. Katherine Duncan-Jones “Playing Fields or Killing Fields: Shakespeare’s Poems and Sonnets,” Shakespeare Quarterly 54.2 (2003): 128. Norman Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002). This kind of appropriation may also offer answer to Susan Sontag’s insistence that “illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking” (Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors [New York: St. Martin’s, 2001], 3); as recent experts in trauma theory and on the cultural importance of war and Holocaust memorials will attest, metaphors will be spawned, but the “healthiest way” of dealing with psychophysiological trauma may be to retell the memory in the form of a structured story, the creating of structure itself the fi rst step in dealing with radical suffering. This is quite different than aiming for health by stripping illness of its metaphorical language, as Sontag recommends. On trauma, memory, and memorials, see for example Sander L. Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). A close reading of plague memorial has yet to be conducted. Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994). Garrett’s “coming plague” is itself what we might call a “plague meme” like “ring around the rosies” and “A plague on both your houses,” successfully proliferating in our culture. On meme theory, see Richard Dawkins, The Selfi sh Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). For more on early modern plague, theories of contagion, and a consideration meme theory, see Donald Beecher, “An Afterword on Contagion,” in Imagining Contagion in Early Modern

Introduction 33 Europe, ed. Clarie L. Carlin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 243– 60. For a sample of recent articles employing current plague memes, see Tim Lewis, “UCL in the News: Food for thought. What Britain’s top brains eat,” available online at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0708/07082101 (accessed November 10, 2009); the video by Jesus Diaz, “The Terrifying Spread of the Walmart Plague” (January 2009) available online at http://i.gizmodo.com/5125187/the-terrifying-spread-of-the-walmart-plague (accessed November 10, 2009); Irving Hexman, “The Plague of Plagiarism,” available online at http://c.web.umkc.edu/cowande/plague.htm (accessed November 10, 2009). For an extended examination of Freud’s anxiety related to plagiarism, as if it were a plague that follows “a logic of plague-plagiarism,” see Jennifer Cooke, Legacies of the Plague in Literature, Theory and Film (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 114, but also 97–114, 160. Of equally virulent content are Shakespeare-related memes in general, from single lines to Shakespeare’s very name. On the origin, power, meaning, and future of this meme-genre, see Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer, editors, Shakespeare and Appropriation, Accents on Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). On Shakespeare being “like a local parasite” for the English, “attached to a species that eventually dominated its own niche and migrated into others, taking the parasite along and introducing it into new ecosystems that had, often, no defenses against it,” see Gary Taylor, Cultural Selection: Why Some Achievements Survive the Test of Time—and Others Don’t (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 87–88. 55 With London as the epicenter of plague visitations and printing, its illnesses, rumors, true reports, prescriptions, warnings, and entertainments reached to the ends of the nation, influencing thinking and behavior in ways impossible prior to the sixteenth century. For more on London as an early modern cultural epicenter for England, see Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); especially for plague, see 118–29, 355–59. 56 Among historians of drama and Shakespeare biographers considering the relationship between theater and plague, see especially the following (offered in chronological order of publication year): F.P. Wilson, The Plague in Shakespeare’s London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927); Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); J. Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theatre; Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life (New York: Arden Shakespeare, 2001); and Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 57 Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2001), 30.

Part I

Making the Plague Serve Form and Function, 1563–1666

1

Writing the Plague in English Prose Satire William Kerwin

How does plague affect our power to speak? Can our choices in speech actually shape our experience of the plague? On the one hand, plague can overwhelm us: as trauma theory has been articulating, cataclysmic events such as a deadly pandemic can lead to silence.1 But as political reactions to the HIV epidemic demonstrate, disease can also lead to an end of silence, to a new articulation of cultural voices previously unheard. The subject of this essay is the meeting place of one set of plague experiences, the outbreaks of bubonic plague in Elizabethan England, with one tradition of writing, English prose satire. The disease and satire each had a long and separate history, with plague in the fourteenth century deeply changing English life and satire drawing upon both classical and native traditions to establish a place within literary culture. But when they met during the plague outbreaks in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, they both changed: satire took on a new role, and what it was like to endure the plague began to incorporate modern forms of expression. Recurring outbreaks of the plague during the reign of Elizabeth I influenced the developing form of English satiric prose, and in turn new forms of satire helped produce new options for living under the plague’s shadow. A notoriously difficult tradition to pin down, satire undoubtedly appeared in different forms in the second half of the sixteenth century, and reading accounts of plague can help us see some of the changes it underwent.2 But plague, too, has a malleable history, although the consistency of the biological component of disease can encourage us to see plague as more constant than it was. Changes in the social world produce changes in the lived nature of any illness, and one large transformation in the early modern world was a new urban culture.3 So how did changes in urban culture influence the felt experience of the plague? Confronted by the blazing memento mori of widespread and unavoidable death, satirists across the Elizabethan era employed plague-related narratives of illness to further their narratives of protest and complaint, and in doing so they reshaped a part of the literary culture.4 At the same time they offered up different experiences of what it meant to live, and in many cases die, in a plague-infected country.

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This essay will consider the mixture of components within two very interesting plague moments and texts: 1564, represented in William Bullein’s A Dialogue Against the Fever Pestilence, and 1603, depicted by Thomas Dekker in The Wonderful Year. Each pamphlet in its own way includes in a multi-generic text elements of the satiric tradition of its generation. This tradition involves some continuities, and the two texts share an enormous amount: a Protestant disdain of perceived Catholic corruption; a sense that a dizzying change was robbing England of moral strength; an ability to capture colorful detail; and a sympathy for the poor in the face of injustice and aristocratic and middle-class greed. These pamphlets also bring to light the enormous changes that occurred in the intervening 40 years, both in the satiric tradition and in English social life. Bullein’s medical satire has more medieval elements of allegory and estates satire, is a fervid and explicit anti-Catholic tract, and ultimately provides a clear sense of moral authority grounded in a radical Protestantism. Dekker participated in a different satiric culture altogether, using plague writing as part of the new urban satire that had developed in late Elizabethan London.5 Of course neither pamphlet can represent its generation completely—the fact that Bullein was a doctor and Dekker was not is an obvious example of the reservations that must be maintained—but the two pamphlets do embody different forms of authorship that are connected to unique social pressures at their times of composition. The aesthetic choices of the two authors reflect these two modes of authorship: Bullein’s allegory-bound satire, centered on sustained reading of tableau-like static scenes, stands as a vivid example of early Elizabethan satire; Dekker, with his elliptical fictional transformation of urban cultural struggles, participates in the Juvenalian, urban, and modern satire of the new century. The genre’s evolution is not the only difference one can fi nd in Bullein’s and Dekker’s writings. A Dialogue Against the Fever Pestilence and The Wonderful Year present two different experiences of the plague, two distinct kinds of trauma, in which biological disease and cultural setting produce separate experiences of illness. The experience of plague and the form and content of satire change radically from 1564 to 1603, and this essay traces out some of the ways that satiric writing records and helps produce that difference. Within readings of each plague pamphlet, I will begin by emphasizing three shared satiric components. First, each author attends to the protests of the commons or the poorer estates. Here continuity is perhaps as strong as difference, but Bullein’s defense of the poor echoes an estates satire tradition that will shift by the end of the Elizabethan era (largely under the influence of Thomas Nashe) to a more picaresque and particular mode of representing and protesting poverty and injustice. Second, personification is central to each style and plague experience. Bullein employs a pictorial technique in which an artistic structure—a sculpture, a tapestry, a painting—speaks allegorically, helping build a satiric mode that connects meaning to doctrinal code.

Writing the Plague in English Prose Satire 39 Dekker’s personification more often gives voice to communally created places or corporate bodies: buildings, streets, and cities speak in a prosopopoeia that reflects and produces a world that is more topsy-turvy and, in the satirist’s moment of stripping back illusions, less anchored to secure and traditional foundations. Third, Bullein and Dekker incorporate theology into their satires in different ways. Bullein’s satire is ultimately not skeptical but bounded by presence; the character Theologus has the last word, which reflects the primacy of religious doctrine throughout. Dekker’s world is governed by absence: the absence of useful medical advice and political leadership in times of crisis produces an overwhelming sense of abandonment. Dekker ends his pamphlet on what he allegedly can NOT say, an authorial move that parallels a new cultural situation. Each satirist works with these three components to produce an ardent declaration that plague reveals what is wrong with the England they inhabit. * * * * William Bullein’s A Dialogue Against the Fever Pestilence was fi rst published in 1564, the year of England’s fi rst Elizabethan plague visitation. Bullein then revised the dialogue substantially for reprint in 1573 and a fi nal release in 1578.6 The book was Bullein’s third major work dealing with medicine, and he had been honing his skills as a humorist, medical educator, and social critic.7 With a cast of twelve “Interlocutors,” A Dialogue reads like the text of a morality play, with medical advice interjected by its physician author, mostly through the character of Medicus. This rich book has numerous characters and scenes, starting and ending with Civis the Citizen and his household; a number of the characters develop; and the elaborate scenes are rigorously interpreted, each by a subset of characters that differ in their perspectives. It is a plague text in multiple senses: it tells of events that happen around an outbreak, it offers medical advice for preventing and treating the plague, and it offers spiritual consolations for the afflicted. It is satiric only in parts: the tone shifts among the exposing mode of satire and the consoling forms and feelings of a sincere medical advice book and a theological stay against confusion. At one point the doctor, offering a break in the tract’s satire, provides medical teaching; and in the pamphlet’s conclusion, the character Theologus serves to catechize both the dying Citizen and the reader. The most powerful plague moments are unironic and sympathetic portraits of scared people facing death. Around these two long passages of advice and consolation, however, Bullein’s dialogue sketches characters, scenes, and stories in the Menippean satiric tradition.8 Linked by a Protestant disdain for Catholicism, these satiric elements combine the serious and the “merry” to cover a wide range of social topics.9 Whereas both the citizen-plot and the doctor-plot are sparked and directed by the plague, the objects of satire that are strung along each plot are for the most part not directly about the disease; plague is more often a vehicle for exposing the centers of medical and Christian authority, which need the cleansing of strong Reformation satire but which

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survive as foundational, preserved underneath what the satirist strips away. The book’s moments of satiric exposure can be divided into two sorts: characters who are unmasked and visual displays that are explicated by characters. Bullein employs satire through character to attack a number of targets, including his own profession, which he goes after with admirable vigor. At times, this is a classic piece of medical satire, revealing phony jargon and dishonest behavior. The mostly duplicitous character, Medicus, confesses to his sick and rich patient that he is an atheist—a “nulla fidian”(14)—the fi rst hint of a number of unambiguously fraudulent medical moments to come. The doctor’s discussions with his apothecary reveal his willingness to use worn-out ingredients or to switch ingredients behind his patients’ backs. The doctor deftly deflects two lawyers who are attempting to enter the rich patient’s home as rivals for his wealth, and he laments the loss of a favored mule in such a way as to manipulate his patient to pay for the loss. Departing from the sick man, Medicus darkly snarls, “He loved me as I loved him, He me for healthe, and I hym for money” (56), as blunt a statement of medical corruption as one could imagine. But even in a subplot so dark, satire drops completely at certain points and is replaced by moral and technical instruction and by the drama of an individual wrestling with his conscience. The doctor, who had been an exploiter of his sick patient, becomes for 27 pages a reporter of medical theory, advice, and prescriptions, allowing Bullein to use his tract as a vehicle for disseminating anti-plague particulars.10 The medical plot is also enriched in its portrait of Medicus’s helper, an apothecary named Crispinus, who is a less hardened cheat, taking what was a stock corrupt pair— the doctor and his apothecary11—and giving it high drama. Crispinus tells his employer, I will departe: his talke doeth so much trouble mee; mee thinke he doeth wounde my conscience. Also I will home, and caste awaie a greate number of rotten drugges wherewith I have gotten muche money in deceivying the people. Gode forgive mee! (26) The apothecary’s resolve to reform melts upon being challenged by the physician, an example of the fluctuating tone of the book’s narrative. His emotional wavering parallels the patient’s uneasy dreams about being damned for his sins. In fact, the book is shot through with a lively sense of conscience, working dream-like in the lives of the characters and intensified by their fear of the plague. The plague acts as a catalyst for moral and ethical decision-making. Crispinus is one of three characters who comes from the lower orders and who speaks with an authority missing from his upper-class benefactors. He acts as a spokesman describing events to the doctor and pushing against the duplicity of the educated physician. A second such character is

Writing the Plague in English Prose Satire 41 the beggar, Mendicus, who opens the dialogue with a speech to Civis and his wife. Throughout the short opening scene he parries tales and proverbs with the couple. Both a truth-teller and a satirist himself, Mendicus reports on the vices of the countryside, ascribing them especially to lawyers and landlords and the violence of invading Scots: In the countrie strife, debate, running for every trifle to the Lawiers, havyng nethyng but the nutshelles, the Lawiers eat the carnelles. [Also] much reisyng of rents and gresomyng of men, causing great dearth, muche poverties. God helpe, God helpe, the warlde is sare changed; extortioners, covetous men, and hypocrites doe much prevaile. (8) Like the rural England described in More’s Utopia, the northern countryside of Mendicus’s report produces trouble for poor landholders. This report of social confusion and protest against unjust land exchanges will foreshadow later discussions when plague has emerged fully as an equal or greater threat to wellbeing. A third, poorer character given a depth of authority is the citizens’ voluble and fool-like servant Roger, who enters the main stream of the book after the citizen and his wife flee London and travel northward. Roger tells a wide range of tales along the way and then serves as an interpreter of what he sees around the Inn when the trio rests there. Part source of folk wisdom (as when he describes the production of charcoal or tells of how his grandfather survived the Battle of Barnet Field in 1471 by hiding in the trunk of a dead tree for weeks) and part spinner of allegorical satires, Roger’s contribution is a Mennipean satire in itself, containing tales of local travel, legends, beast fables, and bawdy anti-Catholic stories. Roger’s beast fables present a clear Protestant agenda, very much like Edmund Spenser’s Prosopopeia and satiric eclogues in The Shepherd’s Calendar. The lion and the mouse, the fox and the fowls, and a “tale of many foxes,” allegorize Catholic rapine; at other times, as in jokes about friars, the attack is more direct. A representative piece is the epigraph to a usurer, which sets up one tale: Here lieth Gathrall, that never did good, A gentleman degenerate, yet sprong of good blod: Mercilesse, an usurer all the days of his life, An oppresser of poore men, a mover of strife; A papiste of religion, a soldiour of Rome, Here dwelleth his carkas till the daie of dome. (71) Death has surprised this villain, much as it has surprised many known by Bullein’s plague-afflicted readership. But the central flaw of the usurer is his Catholicism, from which spread his oppressive life of usury. Bullein soon directs the tale toward the potentially less polemical area of travelers’ tales,

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but again, as in all these “merry tales,” a dramatic setting or characterization serves to emphasize religious error.12 After serving as a source for tales and humor, Roger has a crisis of confidence a bit like the apothecary’s, and in this evolution he presages a host of Renaissance satiric characters. Like Shakespeare’s Pistol and Enobarbus, later underlings who meditate on the advantages of fl ight from service,13 Roger realizes that the master he has served, Civis, is now afflicted by the plague and has left no accommodation for his servant. Bullein keeps a reader on his or her toes by letting his characters temporarily escape the bounds of their morality-play limits, and in the process of opening up a gap between our fi rst sense of the characters and our newer ones he challenges us to consider their bad choices. In one example, the seemingly likeable Civis is revealed near the book’s end to be a participant—unbeknownst to his wife—in the landholding schemes that have impoverished so many rural families. Roger speaks “to hymselfe,” in what is very much a soliloquy: I have spon a faire threde. I have served a good maister with a mischief; he hath given me nothyng in his will; he is so spiritually minded that he forgetteth poore Roger, that hath taken paines for hym these ten yeres. (122) What follows is a colorful and lengthy imagining of a London underworld where he can “lurke in some baudie Lane,” with possible work including signing up with a cheating lawyer or serving as a tapster. Eventually, Roger imagines becoming a criminal: I knowe an olde stale hore of myne in London; she is married to, a hoddie pecke, John a Noddes. He liveth by stealing of Horse tailes and Calfes tailes, and dooeth seethe them, and sell them to the Hosiers to stop hose (because men now adaies hath small buttocks; would God, therefore, that their hose wer greater, they are to small). This queen will picke his purse for my sake. She can make false Dice; Hir fi rste housebande was prentise with James Elles, and of hym learned to plaie at the shorte Knife and the horne Thimble. But these Dogge trickes will bring one to the Poxe, the Gallous, or to the Devill. (122) As an early criminal tale akin to later accounts of coney-catching, this speech sketches a dramatic culture within London, making the servant suddenly the hero of his own epic adventure, helped by a prostitute to a stolen fortune. It is a small step from here to the picaresque adventures of Thomas Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller and the satiric travels that would soon delight London readers, and to the dangerously independent servants of Jacobean city comedy. Bullein’s book also employs many of the “merry tales” of the satiric tradition to delight, to instruct, and to anger. At the inn, we meet the third

Writing the Plague in English Prose Satire 43 prominent character from the lower orders, the lying Mendax, who provides a pleasing wealth of travelers’ tales, full of imaginary creatures, such as that of the “menne [who] dwell there with twoo heades and six handes every man” (99). He then shifts to a portrait of the city of Nodnol, in Taerg Natrib.14 Taerg Natrib (Great Britain written roughly in reverse) is a utopia, full of the perfect Protestant conditions (“not one Papiste in all that lande, I warrante you” [106]), an argument through irony about the deficiencies of Bullein’s real home, far from adequately Reformed. The travelers’ tales that were added in the later editions more aggressively connect monstrosity to a domestic political agenda; for example the Ethiopian “Canabales” feast on a hundred Friars lately arrived from Rome (104). Just as obviously as Taerg Natrib speaks of Great Britain, most of the stories point toward Catholic vice. Seemingly digressions from plague accounts, these tales actually continue the book’s emphasis on disease caused by immorality. One of the book’s most striking characteristics is its use of tableau-like scenes: moments when we are given an elaborate visual image and then given an interpretation of that scene by one of the characters, as well as by the author directly in marginal notes.15 Bullein effectively gives these collections of icons a chance to speak, personifying objects and connecting them to specific cultural traditions. A pillar in the garden of the sick patient’s house is covered with visuals that allow Bullein to attack his country’s flaws. On its top is the epigrammatic “Globus conversus est” (15), and the image of a tiger threatening a child, which Crispinus reads as an assault on the commons, a coded reference to Catholicism. This pattern of destructive change, and in particular suffering wrought by “papists,” is elaborated on the pillar’s other parts, which show the muses, Greek and Roman authors, as well as the older English satiric poets including “Morall Goore,” Skelton, “Wittie Chaucer,” “Lamenting Lidgate,” and Bartley (16–17); the pages give us a literary history with a distinctly anti-Catholic stream. A second scene rich in allegorical visuals occurs much later in the book, when the citizen and his family stop at an inn with a hall of pictures. Bullein reads them for us, and we are in the same rhetorical place as we are in much of The Faerie Queene with its Bower of Blisse; we are even told that “vertue and gentleness maketh a gentlemen” (85). Pictures of corrupt prelates and “coveitous landelords” dominate the scene, and Bullein echoes other authors in his discussion of “fair fields” (Langland) and in his reading of a picture of a “ship of fools” (93), the title of the Sebastian Brant text translated into English by Alexander Barclay.16 With great complexity, Bullein deploys complex iconographic scenes to put ideas in play and to position his own text within a long satiric tradition. In moments of respite from the plague, the characters fi nd tradition and order; the consistent suggestion is that defeating folly will “cure” the land. The Dialogue ends in the spiritual realm, in a series of events worthy of Everyman. The book has a chilling description of the appearance of Death on the highway, meeting the travelers as “a fearfull thing in the

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clouds appering, a blacke leane naked bodie, very long, ridyng upon a plae, miserable foule iade” (113). Death chooses Civis from among the others, and lets him know that he will die soon. Civis loses the support of his wife and servant and learns to depend on Theologus as he prepares for a good death. We have come a long way from the joking satire of earlier episodes, and Bullein ends with homiletic satire. As an example of prose satire, Bullein’s book is wide in its scope but narrow in its sense of cause; that is, many kinds of stories appear, but the causes of suffering are two: the inevitability of mortality, a realization hastened by the visitation of the plague, and the corruption of the Catholic church. Bullein’s faith in Protestant wisdom makes this a plague satire hopeful of happy endings. R.W. Maslen notes that “[t]ragic and comic narratives interchange with one another throughout the text, teasing the reader with the potentially ‘pleasant’ or ‘pitiful’ outcomes promised in its title page” (128). But ultimately there is no ambiguity: this is a comedy in the Dantean sense: false forms are stripped away, and the citizen and the reader are left with the full clarity of an ordered universe. The plague reveals divine order, even as Bullein recreates the fear and suffering of those with the disease. * * * * Thomas Dekker’s The Wonderful Year is a very different book, and its use of the plague speaks not only to different authorial temperament but to enormous shifts in the satiric tradition, toward a cultural moment in which Reformation issues are framed and superseded by urban concerns. Without consistent rhetorical deployment of the Bible or contemporary religious controversy, this 75-page pamphlet has a center of gravity in a London turned upside down, as the author unfolds a series of material spaces and objects with almost human agency, moving between sympathy and anger in a distinctly urban dance of death. Dekker uses the plague to accentuate his depiction of an unstable world in which the drive to create new social roles has left a moral vacuum. To be living alongside the plague in Dekker’s London is to be part of a fluid culture, where the transformations produced by plague are felt within the transformations of a predatory economic world, and where the consolations of philosophy or theology are barely felt at all. The briefest of summaries in the context of this discussion might be useful. The tract opens with natural and political shifts—the moods of the spring, the death of Elizabeth, the subsequent mourning and fear, followed quickly by rejoicing and public unity at the succession of King James. Then the plague hits, and for 17 pages Dekker provides passionate reporting, drawing on a variety of poetic and prose genres to convey the extent of the suffering and confusion. Abruptly retreating from his more figural proclamation of horrors, Dekker then offers to “play the Souldier,” and for 30 pages provides macabre tales of individual plague experiences.17 The pamphlet as a whole shares the capacious and animated nature of a typical crowded Dekker sentence: it reaches to include and sympathize with dramatically diverse elements, it personifies social dynamics, it makes quick

Writing the Plague in English Prose Satire 45 reversals, and it is haunted by the suggestion of an overarching futility. Consider these two sentences, which describe the entrepreneurial optimism that followed James’s succession: Trades that lay dead & rotten, and were in all mens opinion utterly dambd, started out of their trance, as though they had drunke of Aqua Caelestis, or Unicorns horne, and swore to fall to their olde occupations. Taylors meant no more to be called Merchant-taylors, but Merchants, for their shops were all lead foorth in leases to be turned into ships, and with their sheares (in stead of a Rudder) would they have cut the Seas (like Levant Taffaty) and sayld to the West Indies for no worse stuffe to make hose and doublets of, than beaten gold: Or if the necessitie of the time (which was likely to stand altogether upon bravery) should presse them to serve with their iron and Spanish weapons upon their stalls, then was there a sharpe law made amongst them, that no workman should handle any needle but that which had a pearle in his eye, nor any copper thimble, unlesse it were linde quite through, or bumbasted with Silver. (99–100) A moment of prosperity has transformed all of London into a sort of Epicure Mammon, as the mundane world of shops and trades “dead and rotten” metamorphose into unicorn’s horn and the exotic world of the distant travel, where “beaten gold” and silver decorate even workmen’s tools. The entire pamphlet revels in the instability and ubiquity of such moments. The world far outside London—the Levant, the West Indies, Spain—has given Londoners a new life, almost defeating death. The plague soon upsets expectations of this utopian dream of individual self-fashioning, but even mass death can in some cases lead to the same sense of opportunity and delusion: Dekker describes those members of the culture who profit off widespread death, such as Sextons, who imagined their new work would make it possible that “they and all their posteritie would all ryde uppon footecloathes to the ende of the world” (113). The plague replaces one self-aggrandizing dream with another. Herb-wives and gardeners thank God for the new profitability of their trades (selling medicines). Nothing useful comes from authorities civil or medical—most doctors “hid their Synodicall heads” (116)—but greed stays alive. That greed goes beyond individuals, and this is perhaps one reason why consistent personification of places is perhaps the signature note in Dekker’s satiric works. Where Bullein offers allegorical art works that can be decoded to provide the consolations of tradition and authority, Dekker provides places, such as an embodied city or a speaking structure, that offer no such comfort. He does much the same in his other pamphlets such as The Dead Term (1608), where the City and Westminster speak, as well as in The Seven Deadly Sins of London (1606), The Ravens Almanack (1609), and Work for Armourers (1609).18 In each, Dekker gives voice to

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city spaces, capturing the feeling and causes of human suffering. Even as Dekker moves toward a strange kind of realism, he re-allegorizes satire to capture the forces of what Lawrence Manley calls “settlement”19 and give them an agency. London speaks. In The Wonderful Year, at the plague’s height, “In this pittifull (or rather pittilesse) perplexitie stood London, forsaken like a Lover, forlorne like a widow, and disarmed of all comfort” (114). Both “pittifull” and “pittilesse,” London is pulled between suffering and violence, and the tone of the entire pamphlet strains to move in those directions, sounding at times the suffering of the poor and sick, and voicing at other times a surging anger at those, mostly rich, who have abandoned London in “her” dreadful condition. The images of the city as a suffering and combative place slide from one conceit to another. At one point, Dekker paints a picture of life in London as being like life in a charnel house: a person wakes up surrounded by corpses and the sounds, sights, and smells of death (104). Within that same paragraph the city becomes a burning house, with its resident suddenly waking: If some poore man, suddeinly starting out of a sweete and golden slumber, should behold his house flaming about his eares, all his family destroyed in their sleepes by the mercilesse fi re; himselfe in the very midst of it, woefully and like a madde man calling for help: would not the misery of such a distressed soule, appeare the greater, if the rich Usurer dwelling next doore to him, should not stirre, (though he felt part of the danger) but suffer him to perish, when the thrusting out of an arme might have saved him? O how many thousands of wretched people have acted this poore mans part? (105–6) Here suffering slides into its causes—the “rich Usurer,” living in safety just next door—and then back to the sufferer. Immediately after this passage Dekker describes two other spaces: the numerous rooms that in a morning hold hundreds of people become the small shared space of a burial ground, holding the same people that very evening. 20 Dekker then employs the conceit of military invasion to describe death’s appearance, but where Bullein provides an image of Death evocative of the Apocalypse, Dekker turns to the language of war invading the borders of the city: the “Spanish Leagar,” “stalking Tamburlaine,” and a host of more general participants in the crowded field of a military campaign in the suburbs and then in the city itself (110). Even before the plague has hit, Dekker gives voice to the city in the form of three epigrams. Each is spoken from the point of view of a public space associated with Queen Elizabeth at the time of her death. The Court, the Thames, and White Hall provoke a revision in the form of the epigram’s fi nal poetic turn that transforms the meaning of each place upon the occa-

Writing the Plague in English Prose Satire 47 sion: the court now removes the queen, who previously would “remove the Court”; the water of the Thames gradually merges with the water of the citizens’ flowing tears; and the earthly White Hall of London becomes Elizabeth’s new residence, at “White Hall in Heaven” (93–94). Places within the city, and the city as a whole, take on agency to mourn, to suffer, and to wound, suggesting a range of agencies within London, ever on the edge of metamorphosis and full of conflicting motions and emotions. Dekker’s interest in particular city spaces is only one example of his materiality: he turns often to clothing and rituals of burial, connecting the two in a series of moments suggesting even death cannot stop the urge to dress up and play new roles. The various London classes are well aware of what Stephen Greenblatt calls “the social significance of fabric,”21 and those who come upon the plague dead are shown stripping them for their outfits. The material reality of graves and the practical difficulties in getting one dug provide a recurring and connected theme. A tinker is paid to do burial work that others are afraid to do and strips the corpse of its clothing, in the process fi nding a stash of money that gives him new-found power (142–45). Dekker speaks directly to a man who fled London only to see his sole son die of the plague; the man returns to “London (from whose armes thou cowardly fledst away),” only to be stymied in his attempts to bury the child: thou must be inforced with thine owne handes, to winde up (that blasted flower of youth) in the last linnen, that ever he shall weare: upon thine owne shoulders must thou beare part of him, thy amazed servant the other: with thine owne hands must thou dig his grave, (not in the Church, or common place of burial,) thou hast not favour (for all thy riches) to be so happie, but in thine Orcharde, or in the proude walkes of thy Garden, wringing thy palsie-shaking hands in stead of belles, (most miserable father) must thou search him out a sepulcher. (109) Digging a grave, getting trapped in a grave, wearing clothes taken from a grave, being locked in one’s house by plague-terrified neighbors and then dying alone there: these events show the city turning into a grave, and Dekker works to capture how much the materials of living have become costumes and props of death. Places and objects have become unstable, flowing from one into another, and Dekker pushes that sense of instability even further, as he imagines bodies as fluid and almost interchangeable. A liquidity of body defi nes his relationship to his fellow Londoners, and also his sense of authorship; as a representative of the new literary culture, Dekker has a humoral sense of identity not present in Bullein’s Dialogue. He repeatedly draws on the liquids of the body politic to explain how and why he writes: “I plunge my verse into a sea of censure, / But with a liver drest in gall” (89); and

48 William Kerwin A stiffe and freezing horror sucks up the rivers of my blood: my haire stands on ende with the panting of my braines: mine eye balls are ready to start out, being beaten with the billowes of my teares: out of my weeping pen does the inck mournefully and more bitterly than gall drop on the pale fac’d paper, even when I do but thinke how the bowels of my sicke Country have bene / torne. (102–3) This flow of fluid is inspired by what he has seen (and is about to relate): the tales of “desolate hand-wringing widowes,” “woefully distracted mothers,” and “out-cast and downe-troden Orphanes” (103). The movement from their tears to his pain leads to his ink, and ultimately, he hopes, to a transformation of the bodies of his readers. Dekker explicitly rejects invoking any traditional muses—“Apollo therefore and you bewitching silvertongd Muses get you gone, I invocate none of your names”(103)—and calls instead for those pained city dwellers to Ioyne, all your hands together, and with your bodies cast a ring about me: let me behold your ghastly visages, that my paper may receive their true pictures: Eccho forth your grones through the hollow trunck of my pen, and raine downe your gummy tears into mine Incke, that even marble bosomes may be shaken with terrour, and hearts of Adamant melt into compassion. (103–4) The muses he invokes are the “ghastly visages” of plague-struck London, and Dekker imagines them moving through his pen and ink, outward from there toward future readers, whom he hopes will, in turn, be “shaken” and moved to “melt.” In a remarkable flow of passions—a literal liquidity of emotion—Dekker turns to the plague for material and hopes that the result will be a material change in his readers. Dekker includes himself in the vision of change. His model for authorship has, since the opening of the book, included a kind of self-sacrifice connected to class warfare. In that opening Dekker acknowledges the personal costs of authorship, mocking the custom of praising the potential reader. The reality, he argues with the new satire’s truculence, is that putting one’s work in print is a dangerous thing: “For he that dares hazard a pressing to death (that’s to say, To be a man in Print) must make account that he shall stand (like olde Weathercock over Powles steeple) to be beaten with all stormes” (78): that is, it may lead not only to a kind of execution, but to a transformation. 22 Characteristically, it is as a London space that Dekker imagines his new petrified status as author. But Dekker wants to become London, and as “pressed to death” in his pamphlet, he becomes the underclass. His position as author, unlike Bullein’s, aligns him with the experience of plague; he writes from within it, not in judgement. The second half of his satire is a collection of moving stories of individual plague experiences from the poor within London, and from marginalized

Writing the Plague in English Prose Satire 49 groups such as Dutch workers, the poor, and the lowest class of medical workers. 23 This closing 30-page collection of anecdotes is advertised on the pamphlet’s title page as being “like a mery Epilogue to a dull Play.” Nine full stories and three more that Dekker “could” tell but that he refrains from detailing provide us with a Night Gallery of chilling encounters and sudden reversals, often spectacularly ghoulish in detail (and hence, utterly teachable). If these tales are “merry” it is a very dark cheer indeed, like Poe’s “The Casque of Amontillado,” perhaps, and a dominant tone in this section—as in much of Dekker’s prose—comes from a mix of passions: pleasure from a fantasy of violent justice and despair at unstoppable violence. Where Bullein’s A Dialogue Against the Fever Pestilence ends with the consolations of philosophy, Dekker’s Wonderful Year ends in an ironic distance that matches that ironic title: Dekker cannot tell these stories, and the keepers of jails, graveyards, and churches cannot and in fact make no attempt to aid the suffering. His closing restraint as narrator complements the inadequacies of civic authority. In contrast to the sense of deistic presence in Bullein’s 1564 plague moment, in 1603 Dekker emphasizes the absence of compassionate order. One feels this especially in Dekker’s concluding tales, but it can also be heard in the introductory apparatus to the pamphlet. Dekker mocks the traditions of dedicatory appeals to “Gentle Reader, Courteous Reader, and Learned Reader,” conjecturing that the person holding his book in hand might more likely have “no more Civilitie than a Tartar, and no more Learning than the most errand Stinkard” (77). In this hostility he was following in the path of John Marston, who in his Scourge of Villainie fi rst chose as his dedication: “To Detraction I present my Poesie,” and then added: “To his most esteemed, and best beloved Selfe, / Dat Dedicatque”— (that is, “he gives and he dedicates”).24 Similar audacity marks the Epistle Dedicatory of Dekker’s 1604 plague work, News from Gravesend: Sent to Nobody. 25 Dekker seems to be screaming out that obeisance to traditional authority is madness, because “Nobody” is there, least of all Bullein’s Medicus, Theologus, or God. * * * * Forty short years separate these vastly different works. Were it not for the chameleon-like nature of prose satire, we would be hard pressed to say that A Dialogue and The Wonderful Year share more than the depiction of a plague visitation. Upon further reflection, the prose satire emerges as the ideal literary form for literature dealing with a disease that appeared to many as a shapeshifter; depending on the audience, it played the tyrant and the lover, the scourge of God and the heartless trickster. It calls for multiple perspectives and suits the prose satire as Anne Lake Prescott describes it: But what is ‘satire’? Sometimes a form, often a mode, it can double as diatribe, sermon, parody, joke, utopia, dystopia, epistle, or novel; its

50 William Kerwin tone ranges from fury to faint irony, anguish to amusement. Is it, then, discourse with attitude?” (220)26 To be sure, Bullein and Dekker write about the plague with attitude, and each do so with an attitude specific to his historical context and to his readers. When we move to distinguish between these two forms of plague satire, what I am calling Bullein’s “Reformation plague satire” and Dekker’s “urban plague satire,” we are better able to sort out the varied and shifting components both of prose satire and of plague-time experience. We are probably more comfortable considering the constructed nature of literary modes, such as the shift from verse satire to dramatic satire, but plague has its cultural forms as well, shaped by and shaping its reporting. Because disease is inseparable from the meanings people give it, plague in 1564 and plague in 1603 mean and therefore are different things, just as HIV/ AIDs in 1985 and in 2009 mean and are different things, in spite of their unchanging etiologies. In Bullein’s early Elizabethan plague moment, the literal plague figures forth the metaphorical plague of a spiritually sick England. His plague is a spur to godliness, and particular speech gives way to the language of scripture. In contrast the anger in Dekker’s fi nal tales exemplifies the fused tones and cries of the new London satire. With the influence of the Juvenalian revival and the popularity of Thomas Nashe, satire increasingly gives voice to urban mobility and exchanges: things such as clothes, graves, books, and bodily fluids circulate with greater rapidity and even dying becomes new in the ways it registers urban anonymity. In Dekker’s pamphlet, the underlying subject is urban chaos, and living-withplague means recognizing and feeling deeply that one lives in a predatory world, with abandonment lurking around every corner. A cultural constant is the need for satire in times of plague, something on which Bullein, Dekker, and their many readers clearly agreed. But both the plague and satire elicit radically new reactions every time they are experienced, the one calling for a revision of the other. Dekker’s satire ends the silencing of individual Londoners by an abstract biblical voice, presenting us instead with the particular despairs and angers of modern suffering.

Notes 1 For an overview of these issues as well as a summation of the current state of plague literature, see Ernest B. Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Gilman writes, “The inability to bespeak the plague, exceeding in these ways the conventional tropes of indescribability, leads us to consider speechlessness as a species of trauma, both individual and communal” (54). 2 The critical history of prose satire in the English Renaissance is incredibly rich and incredibly hazy. Unlike verse and epigrammatic satire, which have more prescribed forms and more central classical forebears, prose satire has

Writing the Plague in English Prose Satire 51

3

4

5

6

7

neither formal nor authorial guides that allow one to identify it and classify it. Surveys of Renaissance satire point this out: esteemed critics such as Anne Lake Prescott and John N. King can cast a wide net and describe the major satires of the period, but they explicitly refuse to draw strict lines of genre. See Anne Lake Prescott, “The Evolution of Tudor Satire,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1500–1660, ed. Arthur Kinney (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 220–40; and John N. King, “Complaint and Satire,” in A Companion to English Renaissance Literature, ed. Michael Hattaway (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 367–77. For a theoretical discussion of the distinction between disease and illness, with a number of individual case studies, see Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition (New York: Basic Books, 1988). For a collection of case studies based on various medical conditions, see Charles E. Rosenberg and Janet Golden, eds., Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992). For an overview of how this relates to the plague, see Rebecca Totaro, Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton, Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005). For more on the memento mori tradition and its relationship to plague, see Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Of course Dekker had his own form of radical Protestantism, a point made powerfully by Julia Gasper in The Dragon and the Dove: The Plays of Thomas Dekker (London: Oxford University Press, 1990). In what is probably the most bracing rereading in recent decades of an inherited tradition of a gentle Dekker, Gasper persuasively demonstrates connections among Dekker and other Reformation writers. But as I will argue below, Dekker is also shaped by secular concerns centering on urban life, and not as driven by Protestant doctrine as Gasper contends. All following quotations from this text are from A Dialogue Against the Fever Pestilence, eds. Mark W. Bullen and A.H. Bullen, Early English Text Society (1888; reprint Millwood, New York: Kraus Reprint, 1987). This edition is based on the 1578 text, which differs markedly in several areas from the original 1564 version. Both Bullein’s tract and Dekker’s pamphlet are described and analyzed with great acuity by Margaret Healy in Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues and Politics (New York: Palgrave, 2001). For a newly modernized version of the 1564 dialogue with notes and glossaries, see Rebecca Totaro, ed., The Plague in Print: Essential Elizabethan Sources, 1558–1603, Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010), chapter 3. The most compelling analysis of Bullein’s work overall, especially in A Dialogue, is R.W. Maslen’s “The Healing Dialogues of Doctor Bullein,” The Yearbook of English Studies 38, no. 1 (2008): 119–35. Maslen situates Bullein’s fi rst two texts, The Government of Health (London, 1558) and Bullein’s Bulwark of Defense (London, 1562), within other humanist writings and fi nds the dialogue a remarkable collection of components, deeming the ending “a rhetorical gesture as radical as anything in the great drama of Shakespeare’s generation” (134). Maslen also introduces the related DekkerMiddleton pamphlet collaboration News from Gravesend: Sent to Nobody (London, 1603), in The Collected Middleton, eds. Gary Taylor and Joseph

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8 9 10

11

12

13 14

15 16

17 18 19

Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), 128–31. Lawrence Manley calls the A Dialogue “a ferociously heterogeneous work” (Literature and Culture in Early Modern London [Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995], 118). For an overview of this tradition, see W. Scott Blanchard, Scholars’ Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renaissance (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995). See also Prescott, “Evolution of Tudor Satire,” 230–38. For an ecocritical and Bakhtinian reading of plague satire, see Charles Whitney’s essay in this volume. Maslen dismisses the book’s appearance as a medical advice book as “a blind,” a trick to move readers toward the spiritual realm. I agree that spiritual advice holds a higher place for Bullein, but I also think the long section of medical recipes is meant as a serious contribution to public health, part of the diversity of components in this work, which like a commonplace book sets practical medical recipes next to satire. For a broader treatment of the social history of apothecaries, their perceived alliances and competitions with physicians, and their appearances in Renaissance literature see William Kerwin, Beyond the Body: The Boundaries of Medicine and English Renaissance Drama (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), especially chapter two, “Drug Cultures: Materia Medica and New Men” (16–61). The use of merry tales as part of serious satire was a long established tradition. For a treatment of John Heywood as an epitome of this practice, see Ann Baynes Coiro, Robert Herrick’s Hesperides and the Epigram Book Tradition (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). See Henry V, act five, scene one, and Antony and Cleopatra, act three, scene thirteen. Prescott places this inverse utopia within a tradition including Lucian’s A True History and More’s Utopia (“Evolution of Tudor Satire,” 234). On this utopia as potentially the fi rst written exclusively in English (More’s was written fi rst in Latin), see Elizabeth McCutcheon, “William Bullein’s Dialogue Against the Fever Pestilence: A Sixteenth-Century Anatomy,” in Miscellanea Moreana: Essays for Germain Marc’hadour, eds. Claire M. Murphy, Henri Gibaud, and Mario A. DeCesare. (Binghamton, New York: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1989); and Totaro, Suffering in Paradise, 15–17. It is important to note that the 1564 version of Bullein’s dialogue does not include the tale of Taerg Natrib. Healy notes that several Protestant leaders in the 1560s argued for the importance of iconography in their struggle (Fictions of Disease, 83). Alexander Barclay, The Ship of Fools, a translation of the work by Sebastian Brant. Brant’s work was fi rst published in 1497, and Barclays’s translation in 1509. For a modern version see The Ship of Fools, ed. T.H. Jamieson (Edinburgh: W. Patterson, 1874). Thomas Dekker, The Wonderfull Year. 1603, in The Non-Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 5 vols. (1884; reprint New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 1.78; italics in the original. For an examination of plague as a shaper of Dekker’s urban landscapes and city comedy, see the essay by Kelly J. Stage in this collection. For extensive treatments of city spaces and their connections to satire there are numerous sources; three of particular use: Manley, Literature and Culture; Karen Newman, “Walking Capitals: Donne’s First Satyre,” in The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England, ed. Henry S. Turner (Routledge: New York, 2002), 203–21; and Jean Howard,

Writing the Plague in English Prose Satire 53

20 21 22

23

24 25 26

Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2007). For more on plaguey dwellings, see Barbara H. Traister’s essay in this collection. Stephen Greenblatt, “Introduction,” The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997), 4. Shakespeare employs part of this wording a year later in Measure for Measure. Lucio protests his sentence: “Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death, whipping, and hanging.” The Duke replies, “Slandering a prince deserves it” (5.1.516–17). Dekker’s imagined “pressing,” also envisioned as a punishment, comes for telling the truth. For more on the plague-time context of this play, please see the essay by James D. Mardock in this volume. For more on medical workers at the bottom of the medical hierarchy, especially in plague time, see Richelle Munkhoff, “Searchers of the Dead: Authority, Marginality, and the Interpretation of Plague in England, 1574–1665,” Gender & History 11, no.1 (April 1999): 1–29. Quotations from John Marston are from John Marston, Poems, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1951). The editors of this text, Gary Taylor and Robert Maslen, ascribe this section to Dekker (128–31). Linking complaint and satire, King writes that the two forms “are literary modes rather than genres”: We may think in terms of a satirical spectrum that ranges from invective complaint coloured by rhetorical figures that stop short of fictiveness, to constructions that are more or less fictive, to a point where satire shades into comedy unconcerned with discernible historical particulars. (“Complaint and Satire,” 367–68)

2

Plague Space and Played Space in Urban Drama, 1604 Kelly J. Stage

Nobody in my family has this disease, and neither do any of my custom-

ers. . . . Still, I get to sell out of oranges every day. —Anonymous resident of Mexico City, May 2009 1

Mexico City enforced a five-day quarantine in early May 2009, closing government offices, businesses, and bars to limit the spread of new infection. The city’s reaction was not in itself surprising; the same basic strategy to contain infectious disease has been trusted for centuries, as London’s treatment of plague in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries attests.2 But businesses and individuals struggled as a result, and citizens were left distressed by worry over disease and their economic problems.3 Exemplifying both concerns is the statement from the orange seller, above. This resident of Mexico City was among many who suspected that the Mexican government had concocted the H1N1 flu scare to distract Mexicans from the nation’s economic problems, but at the same time, the clamor for Vitamin C kept him in business. This complex crisis situation and its equally complex interpretation mark at least two common plague-time phenomena: fi rst, citizens adapted rapidly to physical changes in the operation of their city, and second, rumor had convinced many people that the government was willing to appropriate a well-worn story—a dangerous disease has threatened the city!—in order to manipulate the populace. The H1N1 threat has already grown since Mexico City’s fi rst brush with the disease, but only in time will we be able to re-examine the flu’s social and political impact in addition to its mortal one. Will the opinions of the orange seller, for example, be viewed as the byproduct of a government that had alienated its citizenry, as the remarks of a callous opportunist, or as a realistic account of life during an epidemic? Will the eyes of history read this flu as a common disease outbreak, or as an episode appropriated in discussions regarding Mexico City’s twenty-fi rst century political and economic struggles?4 These questions interest me because, as Ernest B. Gilman has recently suggested, we never fully shake the cultural memory of past plagues.5 Yet,

Plague Space and Played Space in Urban Drama, 1604 55 much as we have largely shaken off memory of the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) epidemic of 2003, early seventeenth century Londoners seemed able with each plague free year to get quickly back to work and to entertainment. Evidence from plays performed in England the year after the great plague of 1603 indicate a certain forgetfulness of the plague’s horrors, as quick to take hold as plague’s initial spread. The 1603 outbreak of the plague in London is a good case study in tracing, through cultural materials, the communal efforts at once to remember and to forget urban trauma; the visitation marked a unique intersection of urban crisis and urban theater.6 The outbreak closed the theaters in London for nearly a year, and when the theaters reopened in 1604, productions depicting London life and the urban experience were popular draws at the box office. New plays rarely mentioned plague explicitly and did not feature the disease as the primary cause of crisis in their plots; an escape from the anxiety of the previous year was perhaps welcomed by audiences.7 Given antitheatrical sentiments that theatergoing was likely to cause and spread plague, dramatists’ desire to avoid mentioning the disease makes intuitive sense.8 Even so, the urban plays of the period are interested expressly in the operations of everyday life in cities, undeniably influenced by crises like the plague. Because the plague crisis in particular reshapes London’s physical and social space, we may look for plague’s markings not on the characters’ bodies but in the theater’s post-plague conceptualization of London. Reading plague space in urban dramas brings to light repeated patterns illustrating Londoners’ strategies for understanding escape, contagion, corruption, and healing—the realities and fantasies of a plague-addled society. To follow a socially interactive model of plague, I outline a general reading of the way plague conditions complicated social topographies already operating in and around London. A preliminary discussion of London’s early modern growth in Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s 1603–4 plague pamphlets sketches Londoners’ moral and pragmatic responses to plague across a diversely coded mapping of London, Westminster, the suburbs, and the countryside. Having shown plague restriction and plague fear defi ning the cityscape, I then turn to Dekker and Middleton’s play The Honest Whore, Part I (1604) and Dekker and Webster’s play Westward Ho (1604), both of which register the aftermath of plague’s 1603 visitation.9 Plague inevitably changes the urban construction of social space and in turn, post-plague social space is reconstructed on stage, rendering sometimes a hopeful view of urban rebirth and sometimes a critical view of urban amnesia. * * * * In the wake of the disease’s assaults on London, making sense of the indiscriminate and violent force of plague requires viewing conceptualizations of city space against the transformative power of plague-time practices.10 In his formulation of plague’s affect on early modern city space, Ian Munro explains, “As the quintessential urban malady, plague is a spatial

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disease; it refigures the lived and symbolic space of the city, altering and transforming the urban aspect.”11 This is not to say that the plague is an exclusively urban disease but that it has an especially powerful grip on evolving notions of urban life. The destructive power of plague’s assault on London is evident in Thomas Dekker’s often quoted description of plague’s arrival in The Wonderful Year (1603). His prose vividly recalls the typical dichotomy of suburb versus City and situates plague as a force laying siege to London at large. Dekker describes plague approaching the City through the figure of Death, fi rst personified as a Spanish leaguer and next as a Scythian war lord known for his unstoppable ferocity: a “stalking Tamburlaine” (46) launches plague’s attack on central London from the suburbs beyond the city wall. Dekker’s further accounting of the “sinfully polluted” suburbs (46) powerfully illustrates an external threat to internal sanctity. Dekker’s report of the visitation’s onslaught exemplifies the stigmatization of the suburbs, as he repeats and amplifies representational strategies employed by City of London officials, royal proclamations, and historians. Early modern London’s rapid population expansion was complicated by squabbles over official jurisdiction and inconclusive discussions of the City’s relationship to the areas on the outskirts of London.12 The static demarcation between the suburbs and the City tends to characterize the suburbs as squalid, poor, over-crowded and full of criminals.13 John Stow’s anxiety about the population beyond the walls in A Survey of London (1598/1603) crystallizes disdain for the crowded outskirts, as he comments that Bishopsgate ward is “too much pestered with people (a great cause of infection).”14 Stow’s condemnation draws on plague anxiety while using it as a literary device. The idea of the ward being pestered with people employs “pester” in its typical sense—to fill up, to overcrowd. The sentence, however, links the idea of the crowd with infection by adopting the association of “pester” and plague, which had become current only in the last half of the sixteenth century. The defi nition of pester as “Of a rat, insect, or other pest: to infest (a place or thing); to plague”15 explains the slipperiness of the terms involved. Stow’s words imply—perhaps unintentionally—that those pestering become the pest, from the Latin pestis or plague, rather than simply the pesterer.16 The metaphorical plague is signified by the overcrowding, and with it comes the literal threat of disease. Stow worries more about the metaphorical plague—the people—than the literal, as his parenthetical suggests; however, the fear of disease helps to drive the reader’s conclusion that the suburbs are bad. Rhetorical strategies opposing City and suburb ironically make concrete a phenomenon defi ned by fluidity. Stow may have tried to fight the fluid influx of tens of thousands of immigrants to London, but their movements defi ned the changing cityscape.17 Early detractors of suburban population growth were expressly concerned with the limitations of London’s physical space. The Lord Mayor and Aldermen brought the issue to the Privy Council in 1580, and Queen Elizabeth responded with official restrictions on building in 1580. In

Plague Space and Played Space in Urban Drama, 1604 57 addition, the Lord Mayor was issued orders to prevent “the pestering the city and all places adjoining, with inmates and increase of allees.”18 The mandate outlines that keeping order was a matter of public welfare: clean streets, sound buildings, and managed population were necessary to combat the threat of plague. Even without plague raging in the London, the City authorities’ policies show an implicit understanding of how to use plague as an advantage. Such policies ground Michel Foucault’s much later conclusions in Discipline and Punishment: “The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing . . . this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city.”19 London’s relationship with the theater manifests this logic of order enforced by plague fear. As Barbara Freedman has shown, City officials may have covered signs of social protest by insisting on theater closings for fear of plague rather than directly addressing the threat posed by potentially riotous gatherings. 20 Throughout the 1580s and 90s, theaters were closed on account of plague even when no other precautions for outbreak were taken.21 Such representations of the plague landscape flatten the figurative terrain. As Paul Slack argues, plague was not merely a cause or a result of overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, and poverty in London’s outskirts. Instead, suburban populations were stuck in a reciprocating relationship of disease and disorder: there, as in the suburbs of provincial towns, plague was both a symptom of urban instability and an independent variable which aggravated it, raising death rates which were already abnormally high and accelerating a turnover of population which was already rapid. (161) In other words, the conditions which made poor urbanites vulnerable to plague transmission also reinforced the demarcation of City and suburb. Slack explains, “it was plague which gave towns their reputations as consumers of men” (187). At the same time, social perspective contributes to a degree of relativism; distinctions between City and suburb were deconstructed by nonurbanites who associated the metropolis as a whole with moral, spiritual, and physical sickness. Simplified binaries, whether suburb against City or City against country, offer representations of space that do not necessarily conform to everyday practices or popular beliefs. Representations of London struggle to reconcile the concrete reality of the City’s limited physical space with the activities that create its social expanse. As Joseph P. Ward has argued, paradigms of “unruly suburbs” and “well-governed City” overlook the more intricate, everyday, economic links between London, its suburbs, and its exurbs. 22 Ward’s analysis of records of the Carpenters Company, the Tylers Company, and the Bricklayers Company suggests a high-level of involvement for City tradesmen in the making of suburban London. City

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men were regularly employed in work not only beyond the walls, but 15 or 20 miles away, in satellite towns like Lewisham as well as in places not under City jurisdiction, like Bridewell (32–34). 23 Retracing the steps of everyday Londoners, Ward shows that practicality demanded negotiation, not stratification, of boundaries. The idea of plague is illuminating in the way representations of space show London and its problems, but plague outbreak also changes the material experience of the cityscape. Using David Harvey’s helpful framing question from Social Justice in the City—“how is it that different human practices create and make use of different conceptualizations of space?”24 —I turn to the way plague-time practices revise London’s spatial distinctions. There were few weapons to combat plague in premodern London: quarantine, studious observation of one’s own body as well as those of others, whatever alleged medicine could be procured, flight, and prayer. With respect to social space, plague’s arrival in London in 1603 elicited two distinct but related spatial responses: official quarantine restrictions and unofficial fl ight to the countryside.25 Both reactions were highly visible in 1603–4, in King James I issuing The Plague Act of 1604 that sanctioned the use of violence in quarantine enforcement: venturing outside with plague sores was punishable by hanging.26 Many individuals chose to flee when plague struck, although this response was largely determined by status. As Margaret Pelling has shown, upper-middle class elites—especially members of the London College of Physicians—consciously avoided residence in London when conditions seemed right for outbreaks. 27 Government took a similar course when James I’s court and Parliament retreated to Winchester in 1603. The emptying of Westminster resulted in obvious large-scale shifts in London traffic, with the usual flood of lawyers, clerks, litigants, and upper-class men at term-time diverted south. Quarantine restricted and redefi ned travel within London. The metropolis pestered by immigrants soon saw emptiness. Shutting houses closed the streets to some and sealed off families or businesses to others. A force of official workers—watchmen, searchers, gravediggers, pest-carters—circulated throughout the wards looking for plague. Houses confi rmed to have plague victims were externally marked with a cross on the door and kept shut, thereby altering the urban space at street level. The searchers—women who investigated deaths for signs of plague—may have been marginalized by history, as Richelle Munkhoff’s work has shown, but their actions defi ned the cityscape as they traversed their parishes; the information collected by them translated into a reimagining of urban space through statistics.28 The 1603 visitation marked the fi rst time that the statistics for City and suburbs were assembled weekly in an official, published, circulated, and sold document: the London Bills of Mortality.29 The bills detailed the number of plague and other deaths in the City, outside of the City, and in the liberties, parish by parish.30 As Stephen Greenberg has shown, official printer John Windet may have processed up to 6,000 broadside bills each week during

Plague Space and Played Space in Urban Drama, 1604 59 the height of the 1603 epidemic. Although obviously in demand, the fact that few of the 1603 bills have survived suggests that their value lay in their immediacy.31 Their value to us is just as certain, because these broadsides document the shifting social space of London in plague-time.32 The bills offer a sense of the epidemic’s enormity, and at the same time they break down plague space into units: parishes, suburbs, City, and liberty. The tangible product of the searchers’ active surveillance thus allowed Londoners to code the shape of the whole urban area into compartments of danger or relative safety.33 The documents not only commemorate the watched-over, written, and controlled version of the city under quarantine that Foucault posits; they also perform an anatomy of London. As J.C. Robertson has shown, Londoners used the bills to track the infection’s progress across the city and consider the status of the contagion. 34 On each Thursday following July 14, 1603, a Londoner with a penny could purchase a plague map: the bill would show which parishes were the most “hot” and whether the inner or outer parishes were more infected.35 For example, the fi rst bill would show that travel to St Mary Le Bow—where no plague deaths had been recorded—may have been an acceptable risk, but visiting St Anne’s at Aldergate, where 11 plague deaths had been recorded, was perhaps not. A glance confi rmed that staying inside the walls was preferable to being outside (159 plague deaths versus 487).36 In many parts of London, the circulation of watchers and the careful movements of citizens became the usual traffic of everyday life. In The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary, written mostly by Thomas Middleton with Thomas Dekker, a few gallants and a host recall a fearful city under quarantine restrictions and emptied of richer residents. The fi rst gallant we meet, Signor Shuttlecock, comments to Signor Jinglespur that he has not met another gallant in the walk of St Paul’s—usually swarming with people—for months. Paul’s has been “strange and bare” throughout the crisis.37 Even the men who are already out and about discuss the prospect of moving their meeting to a hostelry as a matter of bravery: Jinglespur asks his fellow gallants if they “dare” to “venture to an ordinary” (189). Quarantine, surveillance, and fear are only partially responsible for deserted streets, empty gathering places, and nervous interactions, as people remain inside in a veritable self-quarantine. Running away, the unofficial response to plague, literally drains London. Dekker and Middleton’s pamphlet records the complete dearth of traffic and the City’s resulting economic death. As Shuttlecock explains to the returning gallants, merchants were getting desperate: “And gentleman, ‘twas time for you to come, for I know many an honest tradesman that would have come down to you else” (189). In coming “down” to the usual buyers, the text traces the shift of seasonal Londoners to Winchester in the south of England, to which James I’s court, and all of its attendant population, had relocated. Even once traffic resumed, paranoia about potentially infected items like clothing and bedding remained. Middleton and Dekker play on consumer paranoia to

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ridicule frivolity and poke fun at cowardly gentlemen runaways. Jinglespur explains returning gallants’ fears to buy new clothes in town: [gentlemen’s] bombast is wicked enough in the best and soundest season, and there is as much peril between the wings and the skirts of one of their doublets, as in all the liberties of London, take Saint Tooles Parish, and all the most infected places of England. (188)38 His puns on “skirts” and “wings” link gallant fashion, plague fear, and suburban mortality rates with the runaway’s own socially diseased body. The wings and skirts of a doublet were the point of connection to the sleeves and hose; between legs and arms then, the gentleman would fi nd his own “infected” places, here linking the plague and syphilis.39 In The Wonderful Year’s vehement condemnation of runaways, Dekker more starkly maps the uneven ground of plague space. Dekker’s treatment of the runaway goes beyond jokes: fleeing London is socially defined by money but morally defined by cowardice and corruption.40 The Wonderful Year levels social difference by insisting that runaways cannot escape plague’s grasp, and with heavy-handed morality, Dekker writes more horrific fates for runaways than for Londoners who stay. The runaway is damned for the fact of running; not only will the attempt ultimately fail, but the world outside will not accept the Londoner, contaminated by association if not by disease. Instead, he insists that countryfolk will “shun thee as a basilisk” (45) and that plague will follow him anyway. The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary condemns runaways too, warning that many died as they left town and were unceremoniously buried along the highway. The new entombments of “ditches, pits, and hedges” reshape the road with commemorations of cowardice (194). The story is, of course, a wishful fiction; runaways had a far better chance of survival. But the wish enacts social justice: running away required money, and poor urbanites (like Dekker) remained in London, many paying an ultimately higher price.41 Dekker’s venom against runaways is potent in these pamphlets, but his other writings present absolute outrage in reaction to the suffering of the poor during plague-time. His News From Gravesend: Sent to Nobody, for example, also written with Middleton, excoriates the rich who have fled. The pamphlet is dedicated to the one knight who has remained in the London, “Sir Nicholas Nemo, alias Nobody” whose name figures the absence he emblematizes.42 The stigmatization of fl ight and the persistent view that country-folk would shun runaways strained the relationship between London and the country for decades.43 The moral coding of City or country as bad or good and fl ight as cowardly suggests that social space is defi ned by the moral baggage carried along, not by the road. * * * *

Plague Space and Played Space in Urban Drama, 1604 61 Despite writers like Middleton and Dekker’s success as plague pamphleteers and their pamphlets’ frequent use of theater metaphors, post-visitation plays do not figure plague as the Tamburlaine Dekker describes in The Wonderful Year.44 Given preacher Thomas White’s assertion that “the causes of plagues are plays,”45 playwrights had reasons to avoid discussing the disease at all. Plays were more likely to use plague as a word or thing— an oath, a distraction, or something dawdling in side-plots—than as an event.46 Even Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610), a play that takes plague-time London as its setting, minimizes discussions of the literal disease.47 Instead, Jonson makes plague’s transformation of his setting an enabling instrument for his trickster protagonists who use their absent Master Lovewit’s empty house in order to scam those who remain in town while Lovewit waits in the country for plague to subside. The return to business as usual at the end of The Alchemist does not bring justice for those who lost money or honor at the hands of the con artists, but neither does it show suffering. Jonson so fully appropriates the plague as to erase it, permitting a willful forgetfulness: all of the bad behavior we have witnessed in the play is irretrievably part of London, brought into relief by plague but not expunged by its departure. Thus, the play proves that life goes on in the wake of the plague—and even in the midst of it. Across drama’s urban landscape, plague persists as a readily available signifier of urban corruption and contamination. Similar negotiations of plague space are folded into other plays’ presentations of coded social landscapes. Readings of two 1604 Thomas Dekker plays, The Honest Whore, Part I (with Thomas Middleton) and Westward Ho (with John Webster), follow as exemplary models of the way plays offer a geography defi ned by plague restriction and plague practices although neither play is explicitly about plague. Their comedic missions seek cleansing and recreation for the characters and their cities. As the plays employ moral mappings of urban environments, they nonetheless muddle otherwise clean-cut distinctions of clean City, dangerous suburb, and saving countryside. Dekker’s City, suburbs, and country settings do not easily settle into sinful and non-sinful the way The Wonderful Year defi nes them. The plays’ runaways often seek sin beyond their already corrupt city—Milan or London in the two examples that follow—which strikes a strange balance of urban space as diseased and yet as domain of virtuous citizenship and sound authority. In The Honest Whore, running to the country is a possible curative, whereas in Westward Ho, a similar journey explicitly associates leaving town with seeking out sin. In The Honest Whore, urban sites are riddled with brothels, bawds, and dangerous women but also with honest tradesman and faithful lovers; for example the linen-draper Candido links urban ills and adulterous wives as he interrogates his wife’s “coz” (7.168):

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Candido collapses the two meanings of “cousin”—to be a cousin and to cheat—and neatly implies a nested relationship of immorality: the cozener cheats citizens and makes whores of their wives. At the macro level, the very word “cozen” inscribes the corrupt, whorish status of their city itself. Paternalistic male control over female bodies and domestic spaces is not created by plague limitations, but plague topography corresponds to a pent-up urban domain struggling to contain a populace fearful of contagion. In The Honest Whore, Dekker and Middleton offer the coincidence of sexual immorality and urban immorality explicitly through their titular character, Bellafront, a prostitute whose reformation ultimately signifies hope for urban renewal and spiritual healing. The recovery of spiritual values and cleanliness—both for Bellafront and, by her example, for the entire population—is only part of the play’s complicated topography. Nominally set in Milan, the play presents a city interchangeable with London, with funerals in the streets, whorehouses doing brisk business, nearby satellite cities for escaping Milan’s pollution, citizens plying their wares in their shops, gallants roaming about the town causing trouble, and ineffectual institutions. The play’s ending, which transports its characters to Bedlam (Bethlehem Monastery, located just beyond London wall) rips a hole in the Milanese backdrop and makes identification with London clear. However, the real problem is not Bedlam’s geographical situation but the play’s depiction of the hospital, which prompts the question of whether urban institutions can cure anyone of anything. The Honest Whore’s striking opening scene—a funeral procession presenting the body of a young woman—begs to be read in terms of plague. The action itself recalls Queen Elizabeth I’s March 1603 death and funeral, inexorably linked with the arrival of plague in London.48 The dead woman’s father, the Duke, invites the image explicitly when he tells Hippolito, the lady’s beloved, that even “Queens’ bodies are but trunks to put in worms” (1.57). The candid remark offsets some of the scene’s sadness, otherwise provided by Hippolito’s interruption of the procession and his display of heartbroken grief. Yet, Hippolito appears shockingly frank in his narration of his beloved’s physical state. His description of Infelice’s appearance, “her winding sheet / Was laid out fore her body; and the worms / That now must feast with her were even bespoke, / And solemnly invited like strange guests” (1.106–9), parallels Dekker’s descriptions of plague corpses in The

Plague Space and Played Space in Urban Drama, 1604 63 Wonderful Year. They stand “upright in their knotted winding sheets, others half-mouldered” and fill observers’ eyes, “with the sight of nothing but crawling worms.”49 The play is a comedy, however, and the shock and sadness of the opening scene melts away when the action reveals that Infelice is not actually dead. The play thus safely retreats from its disturbing beginning, the audience having been told that the Duke induced her apparent death. The plot nonetheless ranges over a landscape that replays the associations of the previous year’s crisis. The Duke instructs Infelice that her illness requires her to leave Milan and recover in nearby Bergamo, where she will be restored by “a most wholesome air” and “ sweet walks” (3.76) and deer to hunt. Bergamo resembles a satellite city like Lewisham or Brentford, far enough away to avoid the miasmic pollution of Milan. Infelice’s retreat to Bergamo is flight, but the country cannot restore health from a fake illness. Infelice is not even the real runaway; her father is. The associations of travel in plaguetime help us to read the Duke as the real coward who evacuates Infelice because he fears contagion from another disease: Hippolito’s lovesickness. The Duke’s misguided notions are part of the play’s figuring of real danger in dirty Milan. Contamination is easily found in the typical urban center, not in the form of a literal sickness but as associative impurity manifest in the Duke’s corruption, the flourishing trade of prostitution (represented by Bellafront), irreverent wives (like Viola, Candido’s wife), and dissolute gallants (like Matteo, a brothel regular). There are also spots of hope in the urban landscape, figured primarily in Hippolito’s faithfulness and in Candido’s ethical fortitude. The play’s contrast between good citizens and questionable figures like the Duke heightens the criticism of irresponsible elites and presents the possibility of the Milan’s recovery. Ultimately, Hippolito’s reform of the prostitute Bellafront disinfects urban contamination of the body through personal fortitude and godliness. In his grief for Infelice, Hippolito rejects Bellafront and strikes down the oldest profession. His rebuff figures the whore’s body as the repository of urban ills: “your [Bellafront’s] body, / It’s like the common shore, that still receives / All the town’s filth. The sin of many men / Is within you” (6.376–79). Sexual inconstancy and feminine weakness are directly synonymous with the space of urban material pollution—its outward sickness collected up in open sewers of run-off. The whore’s body thus emblematizes Milan’s filth, and by the end of Hippolito’s abusive speech, Bellafront sees herself as corrupt: “I am foul” (494) she declares and identifies harlotry as “the spot that taints my soul” (495), invoking the idea of an outward mark with an inner disease. For Bellafront, the prostitute’s contaminated body easily merges with the diseased body. Her attempt to write Hippolito a letter expressing her gratitude fails because of her inner taint: “Ink on this paper would ha’ but presented / The foul black spots that stick upon my soul” (9.11–12). Her own imagining of her soul includes the

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marks of infection—a picture not far from the all-too-common presence of plague tokens on a real body. Bellafront’s infatuation and contagion is met by a spatial response: Hippolito enacts a self-quarantine, ordering his servant to close down his house, shut the windows, and keep watch over his door. Officially, he seeks refuge from the sound of any woman’s voice, especially Bellafront’s. However, Hippolito is diseased in his own right: lovesickness has defeated him as he maintains his ardent love for Infelice. When the servant mistakenly allows a disguised Bellafront into his chamber, Hippolito’s angry reaction shows that he considers the outsider as infectious. He orders away Bellafront explicitly as disease: “Purge this infected chamber of that plague, / That runs upon me thus; slave, thrust her hence” (10.137–38). Hippolito seems to read those tokens Bellafront had imagined on her soul. The situation of the closed house, the unclean guest, the disease, and even Hippolito’s advice to “take physic” (10.180), are all reminders of behaviors and fears from the preceding year. In the play, however, the disease is curable, not with conventional “physic,” but with Bellafront’s true repentance. Unable to convince Hippolito to love her, she decides to leave the “undoing city” (10.203). Her escape insists that the worst danger is in Milan, and running away is the only option for redemption. The remedy for her social disease requires leaving infected urban society: appeal to God and run. Bellafront effectively turns the trope of the runaway around. Usually, the runaway attempts to avoid the fate conferred on a city by an apparently unhappy God. The runaway is punished, or so said conventional wisdom, because he has shown his cowardice and lack of moral fortitude. For Bellafront, however, running away means confronting her disease rather than avoiding judgment. Her spiritual reckoning comes by leaving the urban den of sin, Milan, in recognition that staying there enables her transgressions rather than her prompt reform. In becoming a runaway, Bellafront submits to morality and its consequences rather than escapes them. Bellafront is not alone in seeking restorative healing; all of the major characters must leave the confi nes of their homes and the city of Milan to settle their plots. Infelice and Hippolito’s love story, Bellafront’s conversion, and the patient citizen Candido’s conflict with his wife all come together at Bedlam. The institution serves as the necessary (if English) backdrop for the play’s darkly comedic, healing ending. Madness becomes the metadisease of the play, underwriting all urban preoccupations with love, whoredom, and matrimonial squabbling. The Duke’s madness is the most emphatically addressed at Bedlam, and to be cured, he must concede his authority over Infelice and accept the success of Hippolito’s plotting— which involves a faked death, a hasty marriage, and a reformed whore playing a madwoman. The trip to Bedlam results in reasserting the play’s desired social bonds: Hippolito and Infelice are finally united, the citizen’s wife repents, and Bellafront proves her honesty and wins a husband. Hip-

Plague Space and Played Space in Urban Drama, 1604 65 polito’s efforts bring everyone together, and only through coincidence does anyone’s spiritual or mental illness improve. Although the idea of Bedlam brings about the play’s revelations and cures, the institution seems only to house lost causes who, according to Bedlam’s acting authority Friar Anselmo, will “make you smile” (15.165) or who are utterly “untameable” (15.167). Despite Anselmo’s good intentions—proved by his alliance with Hippolito—his methods appear to consist of locking up the inmates and trotting the harmless ones out for entertainment. Between the hospital’s impotence and the corruption of authorities like the Duke, the play casts an ominous shadow on official power. The city and its institutions seem as mad as Bedlam’s lost souls, one of whom confi rms that if all the mad men in Milan were brought to Bedlam “there would not be left ten men in the city” (15.121–22). Dekker and Middleton have turned plague’s landscape inside out. First, the play reaches its moment of healing on the outskirts of its city, an area usually considered dangerous that now provides health. The Honest Whore also explodes elitist greed, crafts cities as at once dirty and clean, condemns women to save them, lays bare urban institutional correctives, and denies death itself (both Hippolito and Infelice come back from being “dead”). The play makes quarantine protective, implies the city’s need to judge and condemn sin, rejects the country as restorative, makes running away the process of salvation, and confi rms that madness, not plague or prostitution, is the urban epidemic. Dekker and Middleton turn the private to public: the small stage offers up scenes from a city, and rather than keep spectators blind, it invites them to see the funeral, the shut house, and the hospital’s interior. Moreover, the hospital becomes the stage for Hippolito’s play, made complete by Bellafront’s bravura performance as a madwoman. In The Honest Whore, transforming the shape of the city means replaying it. The shape of the comedy provides an alternative mapping of the plague landscape articulated in nondramatic texts such as News from Gravesend. In that pamphlet, the speaker Somebody insists that in ink “we” may “tell / The horror of a plague, the hell” (140, ll. 521–22). Ink gives way to drama, however, and the verse in this pamphlet figures a tear-stained tragedy: The stage, whereon the scenes are played, Is a whole kingdom. What was made By some (most provident and wise) To hide from sad spectator’s eyes. Acts full of ruth, a private room To drown the horror of death’s doom, The building high, now higher rear: The pest house standeth everywhere. (145, ll. 934–43)

66 Kelly J. Stage The poem presents plague as a tragedy played out across the entire nation, which imposes a narrative arc to the plague story. The desire for cleansing and catharsis from the experience demands fashioning the disease into the shape of a tragedy. At the same time, Dekker and Middleton’s verse suggests that the stage (if not the “whole kingdom”) is replaced by a different, government controlled space: the pest house, or any house under quarantine, which becomes a hidden, private performance space of death. In the hands of Dekker and Middleton as dramatists, the tragedy of the pamphlets becomes comedy, the private room becomes public, the powerless conquer the powerful, and the formerly closed playhouse opens up to show recovery. * * * * In Westward Ho, Dekker and John Webster revisit the problems of sexual dalliance, and the play’s use of London and its periphery shows consistent iterations of the social and topographic formulations introduced in The Honest Whore and in plague pamphlets. Westward Ho’s complicated structure—dependent on large scale movements, suspicions of bodily and moral corruption, and paranoid responses to paternalistic control—is built upon a matrix of plague responses.50 The characters understand the topography of London according to recognized urban formulations, linking the space of a corrupted and constrained London through the embattled space of the domicile.51 The play’s frequent insistence upon constant urban and domestic surveillance reaffi rms a basic correlation between policing spaces and policing bodies. The play’s husbands (Justiniano, Wafer, Honeysuckle, and Tenterhook) fear that their wives (Mistress Justiniano, Mistress Wafer, Mistress Honeysuckle, and Mistress Tenterhook) will leave home, cuckold them, and become sexually contaminated. The women consider themselves victims of male plotting; as Mistress Honeysuckle puts it, “theres the policy of husbands to keep their / Wives in” (1.2.116–17) which is intended to keep mothers from circulating while children are still nursing.52 The men, on the other hand, see their own cuckoldry in terms of being constantly watched. Justiniano, the paranoid husband, explains that cuckolds walking in London, “weare their hats ore theire eye-brows, like / pollitick penthouses, which commonly make the shop of a Mercer, / or a Linnen Draper, as dark as a roome in Bedlam” (1.1.154–56). The cuckold thus seeks to hide his horns from view, conscious of prying eyes, and ends up instead blinding himself in his own world of madness. The dangerous disease of urban spaces is extramarital sex, and by collapsing the discourse of social disease in London with the discourse of plague, Westward Ho taps two highly energized moral landscapes and extends them over the entire urban space. The prostitute Luce provides the best shorthand of disease’s commutative associations: “saies a gentle-/ man last night let the pox be in the Towne seaven yeare, West-/ minster never breeds Cob-webs, and yet tis as catching as the plague[e], / though not al so general” (4.1.81–84). The

Plague Space and Played Space in Urban Drama, 1604 67 comparison shows the urban entrenchment of pestilence and social disease by equating pox and plague. However, whereas pox strikes the wanton, plague is unrelentingly infectious. The same symbolic collapse of contemporary ideas about sex and contagion contributes to the play’s spatial and moral coding of the wives’ secret journey to Brentford to escape their suspicious husbands. The audience tracks the women as they are prodded into increasingly licentious situations by Parenthesis (actually Justiniano in disguise), who attempts to get the women out of their houses in order to catch them behaving badly. Parenthesis tries to associate moral responsibility with geography, but he cannot do so consistently. He tantalizes the wives with warnings about corruption in the City where “some wives are Cuckolding some Husbands” (2.1.190); at the same time he insists that those in “the Suburbes, and those without the bars, / have more privilege than they within the freedome” (2.1.163–64). Assumptions about the division between City and suburb prove less powerful as the women show they really just want the freedom to move at all. Parenthesis succeeds in tempting Mistress Honeysuckle but only by promising she may “steale forth” to the Stillyard and enjoy treats like “a Dutch Bun, and a keg of sturgeon” (2.1.211, 212). The typical paternalistic trope dictating women’s containment should not be dismissed, but that trope occupies the same ground as plague quarantine. The women seek to escape their everyday lives, their husbands, and their homes as if they have been shut in. The watched female seeks freedom from comparable ideological barriers: male watchfulness keeps out sinning men and dangerous traffic; a cross on the door contains a disease manifested by a corrupt city’s God-given punishment. Once out of the home, Justiniano manipulates his victims’ fears of being caught to force their hand. He convinces them to move beyond the shadowy rendezvous possible in either City or suburb. The titular westward journey, a trip to Brentford accompanied by the women’s favorite fl irtatious gallants, represents a considerable commitment to bad behavior. In Brentford, they will be free from anxiety and “out of eyes, out of eares” (2.3.74) in “private rooms” (2.3.74). As they set out westward, the play again adjusts plague’s geographical associations. These runaways leave behind London but seek rather than abandon sin. Brentford had an established reputation as a resort town, but it was also an important trading partner for London merchants and consumers, a place for everyday business.53 The conflicting maps of practical experience, plague morality, and sexual misbehavior chart the same trajectory. Refracted through the women’s desire to venture away from home, Brentford conflates the practices of commercial consumption, sexual circulation, and escape from urban disease.54 The women make their way to Brentford by inventing a ploy based on illness anxiety, and I argue plague trauma, rather than by employing a more feasible excuse like going shopping. The play’s most anxious and immoral manipulation of disease threat takes advantage of the overlapping

68 Kelly J. Stage topographies determined by infection fear (City corrupt, countryside clean) and sexual dalliance (City clean, countryside corrupt). Mistress Honeysuckle suggests the plot: Mistress Wafer will claim that her child, who is out at the wetnurse, is dangerously sick. The news will provide Wafer and the other women with a justification to leave London for Brentford immediately. Thus, the map for sexual dalliance will be replaced by a map for movements associated with fl ight and quarantine, redrawn to suit this comedy. The plan and its performance are comparable to the opening scene of The Honest Whore in their potential to recall troubling associations of the previous year. The episode takes advantage of the trauma experienced by Londoners, both those on stage and in the audience. The lie the women craft includes detailed news of the child’s illness to be delivered in front of Mistress Wafer and her husband. The severity and symptoms—vomiting, loss of appetite, lying “at the mercy of / God” (2.3.98–99)—are similar to those described by Thomas Lodge in his Treatise of the Plague but do not alone indicate positive diagnosis of plague.55 Fear registers in the very idea of staging an illness, as Justiniano and the women must admit their lie is morally questionable. The women concede that only an ass could tell such a lie and “neare stagger at it” (2.3.89). In accepting the role of messenger, even the morally questionable Justiniano worries: “Heavan pardon me, and pray God / the infant be not punisht fort [the lie]” (2.3.94–95). Clearly, playing around with rumors about the life of a child is serious business. The threat’s ethical consequences seem also to provide the occasion for increased pathos in the delivery of the lie, as Mistress Wafer flies into a staged panic when informed of the crisis. Hearing that the child is “wonderous sicke” (3.3.37), the mother goes on to ask for more information: does the child have a burning fever? Justiniano cannot offer a diagnosis, and the text seems reluctant to assign a cause. For example, the idea of the burning fever could again hint at plague; The Wonderful Year describes “burning fevers” as one of the “leader” of plague’s assault on the field (Dekker 46). Similarly, Mistress Wafer’s call for cures includes dragon water and treacle, which were often associated with plague treatment but not exclusively so. 56 A fever does not prove positive for plague, of course, and we know that “burning fever” and “burning ague” had been epidemic in the 1550s across England but that was not the case during the 1603–4 plague year.57 But plague-specific and morally suspect or not, the disease-appropriating plot works, and the women assert their power to manipulate disease threat regardless of its actual presence, perhaps as City fathers had done when they likewise deemed it necessary. After a short argument with her husband, Mistress Wafer wins her freedom to leave London immediately and without Mister Wafer. His desire that she wait a day until he can fi nish business and join her on the trip is met with her scorn; the urgency of treatment and the danger of the situation depend less on a positive diagnosis than on the suggestion of sickness. The child’s potential illness casts the

Plague Space and Played Space in Urban Drama, 1604 69 shadow of plague, but the next scene is quick to invoke it more clearly. As Monopoly searches for excuses for his recent absence from Mistress Tenterhook, he uses plague in his lie: “I kept from Towne a little; let mee not live / if I did not heare the sicknes was in Towne very hot” (3.4.4–5). Again, the idea of plague and the justifiable anxiety surrounding it are at issue rather than the confi rmed appearance of the disease itself. Both the Wafer ploy and Monopoly’s lie remind the audience of the uncertainty surrounding the illness’s appearances and the necessity of coding citizens’ movements. Runaways were treated as shameful cowards, and country denizens regarded arriving Londoners as potentially contaminating. Those whose movements had been controlled—or disparaged if they had left town—could fi nd in Westward Ho’s London the threat of sin, infection, and surveillance. But characters in the drama appropriate disease rather than worry about it. Instead, they worry about the lies they tell and getting caught by their husbands. The women’s ploy even reverses the idea of running away: they suppose that they will run to disease rather than from it. This may confi rm their moral impairment but it certainly gives them a degree of power over disease. Such power ultimately needs correction, but rather than discipline the misbehaving citizens in a single ritualized cleansing, the play’s Brentford fi nale is more ambivalent. At the inn, the women reveal that they have no desire to sleep with their gallant escorts; in fact, they fake an illness to quarantine themselves away from their would-be suitors. Again, they manipulate contagion danger but this time clearly to preserve rather than undermine wifely sanctity. The husbands arrive in Brentford to catch the wives, only to be revealed as frequenters of London’s most popular hothouse, operated by the bawd Birdlime. All of the runaways fi nd themselves together in the country, struggling to defi ne exactly how bad they have been. They decide to dismiss their guilt by deflecting it onto Birdlime, who nonetheless takes their condemnation in stride and single-handedly disrupts the understanding of urban topography that the citizens try to reinstate. After Justiniano berates Birdlime and insists that she return to her “place of sixe-penny Sinfulnesse the suburbs” (5.4.250), she simply refuses. Instead, she explains, “I scorne the Sinfulnesse of any suburbs in Christendom: tis wel / knowne I have up-rizers and down-lyers within the Citty, / night by night, like a prophane fellow as thou art” (5.4.251–53). Exploding the idea that the City is any cleaner than the suburbs or Brentford, the bawd reminds everyone that easy distinctions of suburb and City, open and closed, are mere fictions. They cannot banish Birdlime any more than they can banish their own mistakes; like a searcher, she has found them out and exposed their sores. The husbands and wives may try to leave their guilty feelings in Brentford, but everyone has reasons to remain suspicious when the group returns to London. Justiniano brushes away such worries and announces their new directive: “Farewell Brainford. / Gold that buyes health, can never be ill

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spent, / Nor howres laid out in harmlesse merriment” (5.4.306–8). His defense of the play’s “harmless merriment” might implore audience and entourage agreement.58 In light of the 1603 plague, however, Justiniano’s lines are more ominous. If buying one’s way out of London (“Gold that buyes health”) is practical but morally suspect, Justiniano’s second contention that no harm has been done is naive. Like all runaways, the party remains morally diseased. Returning to the City means returning to watching and waiting. Only in the theater does such a space double as the space of merriment. * * * * Although London beyond the walls becomes a destination associated with cowardly running away and sexual misbehavior, out-of-town trips in both plays ultimately help Londoners turn back to the suburbs and City with redirected sensibilities. The plays revise the runaway narrative in a hopeful looking back: London is to be remembered and remade as runaways return. Similar to the ambivalence of The Meeting of Gallants, which figures the city’s recovery as its repopulation, nothing absolutely indicates that runaways or London will change. Dekker’s and Middleton’s pamphlets operate in the opposite mode, remembering, fearing, and cataloguing the plague year in all of its wonder and horror. In the return to normalcy, the plays perhaps illustrate something more terrifying. The characters supposedly learn from their escapes; yet, as the plays return their citizens to urban life, they reinstate dangers hiding in post-plague London: return to the usual also often means forgetting lessons learned. In both The Honest Whore, Part 1 and Westward Ho, echoes of quarantine, escape, stigmatization, and sin show the preoccupations of a plague society collapsed onto the preoccupations of sexual society. As the plays reinvent the practices of running away and quarantine, they provide opportunities to reexamine the moral coding of specific spaces: is the City bad or good, are the suburbs clean or dirty? Sometimes the look back at London results in the happy cleansing of urbanites. In darker evaluations offered by Westward Ho and The Honest Whore, to see London’s moral disease requires the characters to choose which fiction they would rather indulge: urban freedom that denies the reality of madmen and bawds in the City and at its margins, or urban quarantine and suspicion that protects by closing off circulation. None—characters, dramatists, audiences, nor pamphleteers— favored the latter model. Londoners in 1604 seem to choose forgetfulness, but even that choice inscribes and criticizes the unspoken, plague-marked associations of urban corruption, a practice that may still be familiar more than 400 years later.

Notes 1 Source quoted in Hugh Collins, “Outbreak Squeezes an already recessionbattered economy in Mexico City” Irish Times, Newspaper Source Plus,

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2

3 4

5 6

7

8

9

10

May 2, 2009, available online at http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ world/2009/0502/1224245838755.html (accessed August 27, 2009). China and other Asian nations adopted a similar quarantine policy, even though the World Health Organization advised that containment would not be effective because the virus was already too widespread. All but China dropped the quarantine. The Chinese policy, particularly enforced against foreign travelers, may be as much about avoiding mistakes made during the SARS outbreak in 2003 as it is about coping with the H1N1 problem, thus possibly offering evidence for the suspicion of governments in plague-time articulated at the opening of this essay. See Donald G. McNeil Jr. and Sharon LaFraniere, “China Presses Quarantine Against Flu,” The New York Times, 28 July 2009 D8, available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/ health/28quar.html (accessed August 27, 2009). See Hugh Collins, “Outbreak Squeezes,” paragraphs 2, 4–7, 14–16. In using the idea of appropriation here, I am calling upon the work of Charles Whitney. See Charles Whitney, “Appropriate This,” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, guest edited by Christy Desmet and Sujata Iyengar 3.2 (Spring/Summer 2008): 1–22, available online http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/cocoon/borrowers/request?id=781730 (accessed November 7, 2009). Ernest B. Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 5. In using the term “urban theater” I reference the fact that professional playing based in London was a relatively new industry in 1604. While companies still toured on occasion—especially in plague-time, for example—the theater in London became a truly urban institution at the end of the sixteenth century, starting with the fi rst successful purpose-built playhouse, The Theatre, in 1576. Furthermore, an explosion of plays in the early seventeenth century that were explicitly about cities—often London itself, sometimes surrogates—marked a new interest in representing everyday urban experience in performance. An exception to this general rule may be Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed, which does offer an apparently plague infected body onstage. The date of the play is uncertain, however, with some arguing for a pre-1604 composition and others for at least a later revision. For more on this play, please see Barbara H. Traister’s essay in this volume. For more on anti-theatrical sentiments and plague, see Nichole DeWall’s essay in this collection and J. Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theater: The Stuart Years (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 101–16, 173. Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, The Patient Man and the Honest Whore, in Thomas Middleton: Collected Works, eds. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007): 280–327; Dekker and John Webster, Westward Ho, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, 2 vols, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955) 2: 311–403. References will appear parenthetically by scene and line for The Honest Whore, Part I and by act, scene, and line for Westward Ho. I will refer hereafter to The Honest Whore, Part I as The Honest Whore. Original spelling of all early modern texts has been retained with the exception of u/v and i/j regularization. For more on the pamphlets in relation to current ecocritical literature, please see Charles Whitney’s essay in this volume. In this essay, “City,” capitalized, refers to the official jurisdiction of London, most easily defi ned as the roughly one square mile of territory within the walls. In using “city” without capitalization, I refer more generally to

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18 19 20

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Kelly J. Stage the urban area of London as a social center or to the general idea of urban space. Ian Munro, The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London: The City and Its Double (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 179. See Norman G. Brett-James, The Growth of Stuart London, (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd, 1935), 68–85. See Ian Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 204. John Stow, A Survey of London, ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, 2 Vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908): 1.165. This quotation also used by Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985; reprint Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 160. See also Munro, The Figure of the Crowd, 186–87. OED, s.v. “pester.” See OED, s.v. “pester” for the linking of “pester” and “pest.” “Pester” comes from the French root empestrer, which designates its meaning as impede, obstruct, or entangle. The association of pester with “pest” apparently helps the word retain a plague-influenced usage in the late sixteenth century. “Pest” comes from the Latin pestis (plague). Jeremy Boulton argues persuasively that statistics show London’s population increase as dependent on consistent rural immigration to the city, not merely internal expansion (Jeremy Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century [Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987], 36–40). Keith Wrightson offers a similar opinion, citing London as the most remarkable example of early modern rural-urban fluctuation (Keith Wrightson, English Society [New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1982], 128). According to Vanessa Harding, London’s early modern population doubled between 1550 and 1600, from approximately 100,000 to around 200,000 (Vanessa Harding, “The Population of London, 1550–1700: A Review of the Published Evidence,” London Journal 15, no. 2 [1990]: 111–15). This order quoted in Brett-James, Growth of Stuart London, 69. For more on early sanitation issues, see Ernest L. Sabine, “Butchering in Mediaeval London,” Speculum 8, no. 3 (July 1933): 335–53. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 197–98. Barbara Freedman offers this reevaluation of evidence, although her look at the documents is in service of pointing out short-sighted or incomplete scholarly accounts that may not have read the work of London documents with a careful enough eye (Barbara Freedman, “Elizabethan Protest, Plague, and Plays: Re-Reading the ‘Documents of Control,’” English Literary Renaissance 26, no.1 [1996]: 17–45). See Freedman, “Elizabethan Protest,” 38. Freedman uses this comparison of theater closures against other signs of plague to argue that theaters were manipulated for administrative desire to control the populace rather than to really mitigate plague risk. See Joseph P. Ward, “Imagining the Metropolis in Elizabethan and Stuart London,” in The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–1850, eds. Gerald Maclean, Donna Landry, Joseph P. Ward (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press), 24. Ward, “Imagining the Metropolis,” 32–34. I cite Ward directly here, but much important work has been done in the past 20 years to reassess London’s

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24 25 26

27

28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35

evolution in the early modern period. Seminal among these is Ian Archer’s In Pursuit of Stability, which redefi ned the prevailing model of London expanding through crisis and Steve Rappaport’s Worlds Within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), which also critiques the crisis model of London’s social problems. David Harvey, “Social Justice in the City,” quoted in David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (London: Verso, 2006), 126. On London quarantine, see Slack, Impact, 207–15. On The Plague Act of 1604, see Rebecca Totaro, Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton, Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2005), 42; Thomas Dekker, The Wonderful Year, in The Wonderful Year: and Selected Writings, ed. E.D. Pendry (London: Edward Arnold, LTD., 1967), 23–64; Ernest Gilman, “Plague Writing, 1603: Jonson’s ‘On My First Sonne,’” in Reading the Renaissance: Ideas and Idioms from Shakespeare to Milton, ed. Marc Berley (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003), 154–56; Paul Slack, “The Response to Plague in Early Modern England: Public Policies and Their Consequences,” in Famine, Disease, and Social Order in Early Modern Society, eds. John Walter and Roger Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 170. For comparison, see the companion text: James I, King of England, Orders, thought meete by his Maiestie, and his Priuie Counsell, to be executed throughout the counties of this realme, in such townes, villages, and other places, as are, or may be hereafter infected with the plague, for the stay of further increase of the same (London, 1603), sig. A4r–A5. See Margaret Pelling, “Skirting The City? Disease, Social Change, and Divided Households in the Seventeenth Century,” in Londinopolis: essays in the cultural and social history of early modern London, eds Paul Griffiths and Mark S.R. Jenner (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 160–61. See Richelle Munkhoff, “Searchers of the Dead: Authority, Marginality, and the Intepretation of Plague in England, 1574–1665,” Gender & History 11, no.1 (1999), 1–29; see especially 1–8. See J.C. Robertson for a detailed narrative of the bills’ development in “Interpreting the Bills of Mortality,” Urban History 23, no. 3 (1996): 329–31. See Robertson, “Interpreting the Bills,” 330–32, 344, 348–49; see also in this volume the essay by Erin Sullivan. See Stephen Greenberg, “Plague, the Printing Press, and Public Health in Seventeenth-Century London,” The Huntington Library Quarterly 67, no. 4 (2004): 516–22. Dekker mentions God’s “Arithmetick” (sig. B5) in the bills in a later pamphlet, A Rod for Runaways (London, 1625), in that the increasing totals show God’s justice and indignation (Thomas Dekker, A Rod for Runaways Gods tokens, of his feareful iudgements, sundry wayes pronounced vpon this city, and on seuerall persons, both flying from it, and staying in it. Expressed in many dreadfull examples of sudden death (London, 1625). See Robertson for an interesting discussion of the way the bills may be viewed as shaping “individuals’ very subjective ‘mental maps’ of the City” (“Interpreting the Bills,” 340). See Robertson, “Interpreting the Bills,” 325–27. This term “hot” was used in plague pamphlet’s and plays to describe increased spread of the plague. See for example the Honest Whore (3.4.4–5), and Jonson’s prologue to The Alchemist.

74 Kelly J. Stage 36 Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks, Buried in London and in the places neere adioyning (London, 1603). 37 Dekker, Meeting, 188. All references to The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary; or The Walks in Paul’s refer to page numbers from Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 183–94. For more on the 1603–4 plague pamphlets by Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, see Charles Whitney’s essay in this collection. 38 St Toole’s Parish was actually St Olave’s Parish, Southwark, which had the highest mortality of any parish. See F.P. Wilson, ed., The Plague Pamphlets of Thomas Dekker (Oxford: the Clarendon Press, 1925), 105–33, n.17; 226. See also Paul Yachnin, “Introduction,” A Meetings of Gallants at an Ordinary, in Taylor and Lavagnino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 183–85, n.165; 188. 39 For more on the slippage between plague and pox, see the essays by Paula S. Berggren and James D. Mardock in this volume. 40 Dekker, The Wonderful Year, 46. 41 On the uneven distribution of plague deaths for poor and rich Londoners and the efficacy of running away if one could afford it, see Munro, Figure of the Crowd, 183; and Slack, Impact, 166–69. 42 Dekker, News, 132. All references to Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s News From Gravesend: Sent to Nobody refer to page numbers and line numbers in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 132–48. 43 On city and country relations in plague-time, see Totaro, Suffering in Paradise, 38–41 and Slack, Impact, 187–96. 44 On the lack of plague references as plague in early seventeenth century plays, see Barroll, Politics, Plague, 101–16, 173. 45 Thomas White, A sermo[n] preached at Pawles Crosse on Sunday the thirde of Nouember 1577 in the time of the plague, by T.W. (London, 1578). 46 For more on the plague in early modern drama, please see the essays in section three of this volume. 47 See especially Patrick Philips, “‘You Need Not Fear the House,’ The Absence of Plague in The Alchemist,” Ben Jonson Journal 13 (2006): 43–46; Totaro, Suffering in Paradise, 120. Both make the point that Jonson’s play offers a kind of remedy through healthful laughter. 48 The Wonderful Year begins with Dekker’s lamentation on Elizabeth’s death. Twyning notes its similarity to The Honest Whore’s scene 1; see John Twyning, London Dispossessed: Literature and Social Space in the Early Modern City (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 31–33. Please see Richelle Munkhoff’s essay in this volume, which deals at length with the coincidence of Elizabeth’s death and her funeral with the 1603–4 visitation of the plague. 49 Dekker, The Wonderful Year, 43. The incident’s imagery is also reminiscent of one of the stories in The Wonderful Year, that of a young bride who dies before her new husband can join her and consummate their marriage. 50 See Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, eds. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 123–42, for a treatment of the motif of female enclosure in early modern texts. See also Paula S. Berggren’s essay in this collection. 51 See Jean E. Howard, “Women, Foreigners and the Regulation of Urban Space in Westward Ho,” in Material London, ca. 1601, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2000), 153–54.

Plague Space and Played Space in Urban Drama, 1604 75 52 See Michelle M. Dowd, “Leaning Too Hard Upon the Pen: Suburb Wenches and City Wives in Westward Ho,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 15 (2003): 227–30. 53 Although a small town, Brentford leaves a sizeable footprint on early modern London’s literature. The Merry Wives of Windsor features Falstaff disguised as the “fat woman of Brentford” (4.2.71), the woman Mistress Ford’s husband suspects of being a witch (William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Norton Shakespeare, eds Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus [New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997], 1225–91). That figure is conflated with the fictional “Jyl,” whose fake “will,” Jyl of Breyntfords Testament, circulated widely in the sixteenth century (Robert Copland, ed., Iyl of braintfords testament Newly compiled [London, 1567]). Popular publications and plays present Brentford as a collection of ale-houses and inns, as in The merrie conceited Jests of George Peele (Anonymous, Merrie conceited iests of George Peele Gentleman, sometimes a student in Oxford VVherein is shewed the course of his life how he liued: a man very well knowne in the Citie of London and elsewhere [London, 1607]). In Penny-Wise, Pound Foolish, Dekker describes the folly of a Bristol merchant, Ferdinand, who falls in love with another woman and who takes his lover sometimes “to Brentford to lie there” (Thomas Dekker, Penny-Wise, Pound Foolish: Or, A Bristol Diamond Set in Two Rings, and Both Cracked in Pendry [London: Edward Arnold, LTD, 1967], 121). 54 For more on the idealization of Brentford as a town of resort for upper class citizens and as an escape from city morality, see Theodore Leinwand, The City Staged: Jacobean Comedy 1603–13 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 47. On women and commercial relationships, see Dowd, “Leaning too Hard”; and Simon Morgan-Russell, “‘No Good Thing Ever Comes Out of It’: Male Expectation and Female Alliance in Dekker and Webster’s Westward Ho,” in Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England, eds. Susan Frye, Karen Robertson, and Jean E. Howard (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 70–84. 55 Thomas Lodge, a London physician, outlines the symptoms for diagnosis in his 1603 treatise: When the sicke is very much tormented with the passion of the hart, vomitings, soundings, or weakness, or faintness of the hart, without great outward but vehement inward both heat and drought, with appearance of swellings, botchings, carbuncles, and mesels, without all question he is seized with a pestilential fever and also lists loss of appetite and lack of sleep among the symptoms (Thomas Lodge, A treatise of the plague containing the nature, signes, and accidents of the same, with the certaine and absolute cure of the feuers, botches and carbuncles that raigne in these times: and aboue all things most singular experiments and preseruatiues in the same, gathered by the obseruation of diuers worthy trauailers, and selected out of the writing of the best learned phisitians in this age [London, 1603], sig. C3r). 56 On treacle and its popularity, see Slack, Impact, 30–33. Dragon water is mentioned by Dekker in The Wonderful Year (47), to be procured in Bucklersbury along with mithridatum, another popular cure; see also the editor’s note on dragon water in the same edition (344). 57 See Slack on burning fever and burning ague as well as other epidemics in early modern England (Impact, 70–74). 58 See Howard on the scene’s ambivalent ending (“Women, Foreigners,” 163).

3

Physical and Spiritual Illness Narrative Appropriations of the Bills of Mortality Erin Sullivan

Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the presence of plague in England profoundly shaped literary and theatrical production. As many theater historians have shown, the arrival of the plague meant the closure of London theaters, leading writers and actors to pursue new ways of selling their creative wares, such as touring the provinces or turning their attention to nondramatic literature.1 One thing that has received less direct attention, however, is the mechanism by which London officials declared the city too plague-ridden for theatrical gatherings. Their decisions were strongly influenced by the numbers of plague deaths reported by each of the city’s parishes, a system that by the 1520s was in nascent form and that by the early 1600s had resulted in weekly, printed broadsides containing local breakdowns of plague deaths in the city.2 Known as the London Bills of Mortality, these broadsides have long been prized by historians of demography and epidemiology for their statistical content but have only recently garnered the attention of cultural historians and literary scholars. Perhaps this is not surprising; a cursory glance at a typical London bill reveals many lists and numbers but little narrative comment upon which a literary analysis might be based. In this essay, however, I would like to suggest that a careful reading of the bills alongside other contemporary documents on disease can yield important insights into the ways Londoners attempted to deal with the horrors of plague outbreaks. By dividing up and quantifying the effects of epidemic disease, the bills helped Londoners mentally track, contain, and make sense of the threat they were facing, thus alleviating some of the psychological strain that inevitably arose in these times of crisis. This method of coping proved so useful, I argue, that it was later taken up by religious writers in their attempts to account for and regulate sin, which they saw as an equally insidious epidemic threat. By looking at the bills in their social and cultural context, we can see how these broadsides helped readers develop coherent, meaningful narratives about the experience of suffering, be it public or private, physical or spiritual.3 In the fi rst half of this essay I offer a history of the production of the printed bills, paying particular attention to the ways in which they influenced public understanding of the

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plague, and in the second half I look at how the bills were appropriated by other writers as a means of drawing attention to more spiritual forms of “dis-ease.” In both cases, I argue that the bills served an important creative function in the understanding and regulation of illness. By rendering sickness of body, city, and soul visible, the bills offered their readers a method of imagining and combating disease, allowing them a degree of control over an otherwise devastating force. * * * * The early history of the London Bills of Mortality remains somewhat speculative, due in part to the fact that it was not until the late seventeenth century that a major contemporary response to the bills was put into print. Although the system of record keeping was unique to England, citizens appear to have taken it largely for granted until John Graunt published his Natural and Political Observations . . . upon the Bills of Mortality in 1662, which drew attention to the usefulness of the bills when thinking about the relative healthfulness of London during different times of the year. In his treatise, Graunt lamented a lack of long-term interest in these documents, saying that people who “constantly took in the weekly Bills of Mortality” generally checked the weekly death tolls, looked for any unusual or scandalous causes of death, noted the absence or presence of plague deaths, and then discarded the broadside.4 Of course, it is likely that Graunt wanted to highlight the novelty and significance of his own venture, but the fact remains that little sustained commentary on the bills exists prior to his book. One other factor that has hindered study of the bills is the incomplete survival of these documents in the years leading up to Graunt’s publication. Like other forms of ephemera, the bills seem to have been produced, read, and circulated, but inconsistently preserved, reinforcing Graunt’s assertion that once their initial function of relaying weekly death rates had been performed, the single-page broadsides were quickly cast away. We might expect their printers, the Company of Parish Clerks, to have maintained a complete set, but such a collection is yet to be found; Leeds Barroll has suggested that it may have been destroyed in the 1666 fi re or that Graunt himself may have borrowed the collection when writing his book and then failed to return it.5 Whatever the ultimate fate of these early bills, however, a working knowledge of their production, distribution, and uses can still be achieved. Passing references to the bills in contemporary letters, handbills, plays, and sermons abound, and these sources suggest a rich (if somewhat scattered) pattern of circulation. In the section that follows I outline the early history of demographic record keeping in England, showing how this practice eventually resulted in the regular printing of the bills. The institution of the bills evolved out of an increased commitment to parish record keeping that developed over the course of the sixteenth century. Although the earliest surviving printed bills date from 1603, the history of these documents begins several generations earlier.6 As early as 1519, Cardinal Wolsey showed interest in the relationship between London’s vital

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statistics and the onset of disease, and in 1538 Thomas Cromwell issued an edict requiring each London parish to keep a book recording the details of all the marriages, christenings, and burials among its parishioners. The order was reiterated in 1547, 1555, and throughout Elizabeth’s early reign, suggesting both the importance of this venture to governing officials and also that uniformity of record keeping did not emerge with ease.7 Despite local inconsistencies, however, many parishes throughout the country began maintaining record books in the middle part of the century, and by the 1560s London parishes were sending details of their registers to city officials and the Privy Council.8 Particularly in the city, where disease was generally the most destructive, authorities used parish death records to track rises and falls in mortality rates, often compiling local statistics to produce citywide figures. Intermittent references to these comprehensive lists of deaths, which we might term proto-bills, can be found in letters throughout the sixteenth century, as can the suggestion that death statistics during the 1563 plague epidemic circulated in some form. With the plague epidemic of 1592–93 the parish clerks began to issue occasional printed bills, and by the turn of the century they were producing these citywide accounts with some regularity.9 Looking at the dates for this evidence, we can see that it was the onset of plague more than anything else that instigated attempts at citywide record keeping. Certainly in the latter part of the period, talk of the bills was concomitant with the plague. Ian Sutherland has noted that there was “much more contemporary interest in the bills when plague was prevalent,” and scholars through the years have supported the idea that the institution of the bills arose as a response to plague outbreaks (290). “To the plague the public of London owed their bills of christenings and burials,” wrote one nineteenth-century historian, and John Graunt similarly asserted in 1662 that “the rise of keeping these Accompts [i.e. the bills] was taken from the Plague.”10 This claim is further supported by the fact that the fi rst set of extant weekly and annual printed bills date from 1603, the year of London’s next major epidemic after 1592–93. By this time the bills were available at least to readers with court connections, and several scholars have documented multiple references to plague death tolls in the correspondence of ambassadors, councilors, and merchants.11 The specificity of much of this correspondence strongly suggests the direct reporting of information contained in the bills, rather than simply a relay of talk within the court. The bills listed not only plague deaths but also the total deaths in the city and the parishes in which they occurred. On May 20, 1603, for example, Venetian ambassador Girolamo Carlo Scaramelli sent a letter back to Venice including precisely this information: “The plague progresses. In nine infected parishes last week thirty-six died of plague and one hundred and twelve of other illnesses.”12 The extent to which more ordinary citizens in London had access to the bills is less clear, but Stephen Greenberg has argued forcefully that the print

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runs of the early bills were very large, suggesting a wide readership. Basing his argument on a detailed bibliographical survey, he has shown that the Company used two presses for the bills in 1603 and often left the sets of type for the bills standing for weeks at a time, meaning that the printers did not have to spend time resetting them (an unusual enterprise, given the limited stock of type in a typical print shop). Based on these factors, he has estimated that the Company could have produced 5,000–6,000 copies of a bill each week.13 If this is indeed the case, such a large print run suggests an equally large readership (or even larger, assuming that the bills were shared and discussed among groups of citizens). Work on the pricing of the bills further supports the supposition that they were widely available, as they appear to have been relatively affordable. At the cost of about one penny for a weekly bill, the same price as admittance to a public playhouse, this new form of information would have been within the buying power of many of the city’s residents.14 Around 1608, a reference to the bills appears in the play Ram Alley, suggesting that socially diverse theater audiences would have been familiar enough with the broadsides to understand such an allusion.15 * * * * It seems likely, then, that by the early 1600s many London citizens were frequent consumers of the bills, avidly reading and interpreting the contents of each week’s new publication. Each broadside listed out all the parishes within the city walls as well as the suburbs (by 1603 there were nearly 120 altogether), giving the total deaths in each parish plus those due to plague (see figure 3.1). At the bottom of the page were cumulative figures for the week, allowing readers to consider the numbers overall and make predictions about how the plague was progressing. The bills presented their contents in a spare manner, with little or no explanation or comment, but despite such brevity they seem to have made a significant impression on the minds of their readers. In these succinct tabulations readers saw the records of people who had died in their neighborhoods in the immediate past, and they must have felt at least the vague sense that they too might become a figure in a future bill if they did not think carefully about how best to proceed. In this section, I look at some examples of how Londoners read and reacted to the bills, emphasizing the ways in which people increasingly used the broadsides as a method of locating, mapping, and even containing illness in the city. Letters and other documents from the period demonstrate that readers used the bills to track where the plague was in the city, how badly the outbreak might be, and how quickly it was spreading. In May 1604, Nicolo Molino, another Venetian ambassador, wrote about his fears that the pestilence was returning: “the week before last ten, in the last, nineteen, deaths from plague. Alarm is felt at the approach of the warm season.” By the end of the month, the situation had worsened: “A further rise is expected . . . Everyone is beginning to look out for a house in the country.”16 As Molino’s cor-

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Figure 3.1 A weekly bill for 13–20 June 1665, reprinted in London’s Dreadful Visitation (1665). The earlier weekly bills followed a very similar format, fi rst listing the parishes within the city walls and then those without. At the bottom of the page were the total deaths from plague and other illnesses, which in later years were listed on the reverse side of the bill (see figure 3.2). Image courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

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respondence suggests, the bills told citizens how far the disease was from their own homes and whether or not they needed to start thinking about leaving London (if this was possible, of course). For those who remained in the city, noting which areas were infected was of utmost importance; writing from his home in the Strand during the 1636 plague outbreak, Viscount Chaworth took some comfort in the fact that the deaths seemed to be decreasing and also that they were a comfortable distance away: “The Plague byll was this month 87 in all Stepney & those parishes.”17 Indeed, as J.C. Robertson has shown, Londoners identified infected parishes in the bills and then avoided them as much as possible. In 1630, freeholders living in St Leonard, Foster Lane, petitioned to have the death figures for nearby St Martin’s le Grand listed separately from their own area. St Martin’s was crowded and impoverished, and when plague had begun appearing in its streets, shop owners on Foster Lane found their own businesses “much shunned and avoyded by their customers.”18 They knew that Londoners were reading the bills to see which parishes to stay away from and that being grouped in an unhealthy parish was bad for business. Such letters and documents suggest that although the bills by no means divested plague of all its terror, they did bring some order to its ravages by tracking its progress through each parish and rendering it quantifiable. As Richelle Munkhoff has argued, the bills made “the enormity of the plague tangible,” and thus to some extent knowable, imposing a degree of control onto an otherwise overwhelming and terrifying entity (8). In a time before the circulation of newspapers, the bills were one of the few—perhaps only— institutionalized methods of disseminating vital information throughout the city, and citizens made the most of what they were offered.19 As other scholars have suggested, these parish-by-parish breakdowns of weekly deaths influenced how Londoners visualized the spread of disease and ultimately shaped their “very subjective ‘mental maps’ of the City.”20 By marking out safe and prohibited territory, they helped Londoners minimize their risk of infection, either by not visiting particular parts of the city or by leaving it entirely. Readers could judge the healthfulness of the city’s different quarters in lists and tables within the bills, and they could use the broadsides as a guide to help them navigate through London’s various parts. Evidence from later in the seventeenth century suggests that this link between the bills and London geography only strengthened in the ensuing years. It seems likely that the Company of Parish Clerks continued to publish the bills regularly throughout the fi rst decade of the seventeenth century, and possibly also during the 1610s and 1620s. 21 Certainly by 1629 the bills were a continuous presence in the city: in this year their content was expanded to include tallies of all causes of death, and, furthermore, from this point forward many weekly and yearly printed bills survive (see figure 3.2). 22 By the 1640s, official documents were citing the bills on a regular basis as a way of referring to London’s parishes and their inhabitants,

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Figure 3.2 A weekly bill for 13–20 June 1665, reprinted in London’s Dreadful Visitation (1665) (backside of figure 3.1). In 1629 the bills were expanded to include tallies of all “diseases and casualties,” with this information being printed on the back of the bill. The 1664–65 weekly bills were collected and preserved much more systematically than their predecessors. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

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reflecting both the familiarity these broadsides had come to enjoy throughout the city and the extent to which they had become associated with the physical area that London occupied. One Civil War broadside, reporting a Parliamentary victory in Cheshire, ordered “that publike thankes be given unto God in all the Churches of London, Westminster, Suburbs, and within the bills of mortality, upon the next Lords day.”23 Five years later, when the Parliament printed a letter by Oliver Cromwell to the Speaker, it set out the letter’s distribution in a similar manner: “Ordered by the Parliament, That this Letter be forthwith printed and published, and Read in all Churches and Chappels in and about the City of London, late Lines of Communication, and Bills of Mortality.”24 Many official publications cited the bills in this way, using their itemized, parish-by-parish listings as shorthand for the whole of London. Whereas during plague times the bills helped map health and illness as an outbreak spread in the city, during periods of relative health the bills became a way of mapping out and referencing the environs of the city itself. It could be argued that such a connection, no doubt born out of convenience, simply indicates that the bills were a familiar feature of London life and therefore a useful point of reference when addressing the city’s inhabitants. I would like to suggest, however, that this discursive link between the bills and the city of London ran deeper. The idea of the body politic appeared frequently in writings about London, particularly when matters of health and disease were at stake. As Margaret Healy has convincingly argued, such links between individual and collective health are not uncommon: “All ‘bounded structures’ (nations, societies, cities) must imagine their conditions of disunity—problems relating to boundaries, internal structures and the relationship between parts—in much the same way as they imagine the physical body’s conditions of disharmony.”25 Writings on plague frequently characterized London as a disordered, diseased body, suffering physically for her manifold moral corruptions and political transgressions, and the bills could be used as evidence for this stance. John Davies, in his 1609 poem The Triumph of Death: or, The Picture of the Plague, attributed the “all-confounding Pestilence” of 1603 to London’s sinfulness.26 By the time of the poem’s publication, London had endured six years of mild but persistent plague infection, and the possibility of another major outbreak was never far away. Davies mixed metaphors throughout his poem, but he frequently returned to the idea of London as ailing body, lamenting how God’s wrath “Blister[s] our Cities publike Body so” (247). According to Davies, in these uncertain times, the plague lingered in London’s interior/ intestines, always threatening to spread to other parts: We see it will not out, but still it lies In our best Cities Bowells like a Cole That threats to flame, and stil doth fall and rise, Wasting a part, thereby to warne the whole. (247)

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In the margin next to the line about the falls and rises in the plague’s potency, Davies offered documentary proof for this statement. Such fluctuations “appeareth by the Plague bills euerie weeke,” he wrote, weaving the broadsides into his elaborate (and somewhat unwieldy) body politic metaphor. In his aside, Davies gave direct voice to an idea that was implicit in several other sources: that the bills offered citizens regular appraisals of their city’s overall health, allowing them a better understanding of how the physical condition of the body politic improved or worsened with each week. By both itemizing and locating illness in the city, the bills helped demystify and lay open the nature of disease for their readers, effectively offering up the dissected “body” of London on a weekly basis for public examination. In this sense, they acted as the city’s anatomists, sectioning, investigating, and diagnosing London’s different parts/parishes in an attempt to regulate the sicknesses that imperiled her survival. By reading and interpreting these regular, “premortem” examinations of London’s health, citizens could develop strategies for managing both public and private disease, thereby limiting future damage. * * * * This link between the bills and the functions of anatomy strengthens when we consider the ways in which contemporary writers seized upon both as useful rhetorical devices. Recent scholarship has demonstrated the metaphorical power that the emerging practice of anatomy enjoyed in early modern culture, pointing out how common anatomical synonyms, such as “lay open,” “rip,” and “section,” offered an appealing vocabulary to those interested in analyzing and dissecting a range of ideas and problems. 27 The bills themselves were one of the chief methods of displaying and scrutinizing London’s physical health, and they became attractive imaginative tools for religious writers interested in similarly exposing the city’s moral depravity. In his landmark study, The Impact of the Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, Paul Slack suggests that the bills played a significant role in the secularization of plague, but in this section I would like to explore some examples of how they were also exploited for religious purposes. Although I agree with Slack that the bills made plague “familiar and measurable,” thereby helping to quell “supernatural interpretations which are reserved in most societies for unusual afflictions and sudden calamities,” they also opened up new discursive possibilities for the exploration of spiritual affliction. 28 Several religious writers, admiring the bills’ register of London’s physical maladies, imagined an analogous “catalogue of sin” that would render spiritual transgression similarly concrete. Their responses to the bills demonstrate both the imaginative impact these brief broadsides had on their readers and the extent to which bodily disease provided a useful conceptual model for thinking about spiritual disorder. Religious writers saw in the bills a unique opportunity for laying open and critiquing the spiritual corruption they believed to be endemic in the capital. Preaching from the outdoor pulpit at Paul’s Cross in 1619, Francis

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White warned his audience that London was a city insensible to its growing spiritual sickness. Citizens lived in “a dead world, a dead time,” full of “men carrying about with them living bodies, but dead soules,” and they were in urgent need of moral correction. Acknowledging the ineffectiveness of various preachers’ attempts to rouse the drowsy city, White wished for a set of bills of spiritual mortality that would force Londoners to confront their sinful behavior: And could you but every weeke have bils brought you in, to signifie within the City liberties, and without, how many soules dye in a weeke; some of a surfet of drunkennesse, some of a swelling tympany of pride, some of the burning feaver of malice, some of the dropsie of covetousnesse, some of one or other disease of the soule; you would blesse your selves, to see most mens bodies to be but living Sepulchers for dead soules . . . 29 As his sermon suggests, White saw the bills as a regulating device within which amorphous, intangible threats could be harnessed and displayed. Although the existing Bills of Mortality helped Londoners monitor and manage the physical health of both themselves and the collective body politic, they did not account for the dead and dying souls enclosed in seemingly healthy bodies. Spiritual disease was still rampant and poorly understood; like plague in the previous century, sicknesses of the soul needed to be rendered tangible and concrete before they could be properly addressed and expunged. Unsurprisingly, it seems that White’s sermon did not have the thoroughly cleansing effect for which he surely prayed. Fourteen years later, poet Francis Quarles again looked out at London and saw a city rife with moral corruption, and, like White, he imagined a spiritual reckoning that would startle Londoners into more pious modes of living. In his poem “On the Sight of a Plague bill,” he began with a meditation on the severity of the plague—“Five thousand in a weeke”—reading it as a just punishment from God to a city unrelenting in its sinfulness. Such ignorant sinning, he felt, was far more dangerous than any plague, and accordingly he called for “weekly Bills of our Transgression” that might impress their readers as strongly as the existing Bills of Mortality. Elaborating on this idea, he wrote: O, if that weekly Catalogue of Sin Could, with our City Bills be brought but in; And be compar’d, wee’d think our Bills not high, But rather wonder there are men, to dye.30 Like White’s sermon, Quarles’s poem highlighted the dangers of spiritual death, which could occur long before the death of the body. By structuring

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the somewhat nebulous concept of spiritual illness through the more cogent one of physical disease, both writers attempted to make their ideas of sin more comprehensible to their audiences. In the bills, they saw a means of codifying, classifying, and ultimately controlling problematic behavior in the city, reflecting what Margaret Healy has described as “The urgent need to order disorder” (10). Of course, White and Quarles were not unique in their use of medical metaphor to explore religious ideas. Taking up descriptions of Christ as a healer in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, contemporary religious texts frequently identified Christ as the supreme physician, facilitating both physical and spiritual regeneration.31 Although they acknowledged that religious men could no longer heal the body through touch or decree (the age of miracles, according to John Calvin, had fi nished), they did suggest that faith in and obedience to God was central to physical health.32 As Andrew Wear has pointed out, the Latin word salus meant both “health” and “salvation,” and writers frequently exploited this linguistic connection in their accounts of spiritual and physical illness: as clergyman Thomas Becon wrote, “God’s word worketh marvellously unto the health of them that believe. And therefore in the word of God it is called the word of health, or salvation.”33 Just as Jesus had used physical healing as a visible representation of his power to save souls, religious writers used contemporary medicine as a means of explaining spiritual disorder and regeneration. Through medical metaphors, these writers found a means of materializing concepts that were inherently abstract, and practices such as dissection, surgery, bloodletting, and purging all became common tropes in the rhetorical depiction of spiritual physicke. Most central to this medico-religious discourse was the experience and understanding of disease. Many writers played upon the metaphorical potential of disease, inviting audiences to conceptualize their spiritual infi rmities in terms of their more tangible and familiar physical illnesses. Such a tactic had the additional advantage of attracting the strong interest most people showed in the health of their bodies, often to the exclusion of their souls: “We are afraid of the least ague; we are sensible of the least toothach . . . shall we neglect those so great, and so dangerous diseases of our most noble part? . . . shall we be ignorant of the specificke remedies of our soule?”34 By utilizing the language of medicine, religious writers hoped to impress upon their readers the dangers of ignoring troubling but essential discussions about the states of their souls, while at the same time providing them with a more structured way of thinking about the effects of sin. Following this point, such writers commonly likened the work of the pastor to that of the physician, noting that both were fundamentally involved in the business of healing. Countless books concerned with moral management and spiritual healing stressed the importance of seeking out “a whole physician” (that is, a healer for both the body and soul) in order to obtain “an absolute cure.”35

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* * * * Given this strong metaphorical link between the healing of the body and the healing of the soul, it comes as little surprise that several writers, in the fashion of White, attempted to explain the diseases of the soul in terms of well-known physical illnesses. Whereas White offered a brief list of spiritual diseases and their physical analogues, other writers explored this conceit in far greater detail, adopting the structure of medical textbooks as they elucidated the nature of various spiritual corruptions. In this fi nal section, I would like to consider the relationship between physical and spiritual illness, and indeed medicine and religion, more broadly, paying particular attention to the language writers used to articulate concepts of disease and suffering across the body-soul spectrum. As several scholars have argued, early modern people understood the mind, body, and soul as deeply intertwined; through a greater exploration of the role of metaphorical language in the discussion of illness, I believe we gain a richer understanding of how many readers were using the Bills of Mortality to create meaningful narratives of dis-ease. Like White and Quarles, fellow preacher Thomas Adams creatively exploited contemporary medical terminology and practice as he discussed the dangers of spiritual disorder in his 1616 treatise, Diseases of the Soul. Following the custom of contemporary medical texts, Adams started his treatise at the head of the body and worked his way down, describing the causes, symptoms, and cures for each spiritual disease. His prescribed cure for brain-sickness, a form of selfishness and egocentrism, is typical of other entries: I might prescribe him the opening of a veine which feedes this disease, that is, affectation: the itching bloud of singularity let out, would much ease him. Or a good purge of humility to take him down a little, because he stands so high in his owne imagination: and full vessels, to prevent their bursting must have timely vent.36 Adams himself emphasized in his opening pages that, although the aims of medicine and religion were linked, his blending of the two in his treatise should be read metaphorically. His intention, he explained, was to “borrow so much Timber out of Galens wood, as shall serve me for a scaffold to build up my Morall discourse” (3). For Adams and other writers, the world of medicine provided a familiar framework through which the more complicated and abstract world of sin and salvation could be better understood. Using the terms of traditional rhetorical theory, we could say that sin functioned as the tenor and medicine as the vehicle in this metaphorical arrangement and that Adams relied on the coherence of the latter to explain his vision of the former.37 Such a straightforward rhetorical relationship would have suited the aims of early modern preachers, who commonly used analogy as a pedagogical

88 Erin Sullivan tool. Clear metaphors invited audiences to see the sermon or essay as both moral instruction and rhetorical game, and they might even have helped writers keep their audience’s attention by encouraging them to anticipate what comparisons would come next.38 Such a device worked best when the more abstract, religious concept emerged with even greater clarity and potency than the metaphorical framework upholding it; for example, when preacher Matthew Griffith came to his discussion of spiritual and physical cures in one sermon, he reminded his parishioners that whereas earthly “Physicians use Phlebotomy, and let their patients blood to cure them . . . Christ himself was let blood to save us.”39 Drawing on the pain and discomfort his listeners would have known through the common practice of bloodletting, Griffith emphasized both the severity and generosity of Christ’s own bloodletting, which was enacted not for his personal wellbeing but for the spiritual salvation of his followers. From a pedagogical point of view, such clearly delineated and novel metaphors could be useful tools for explaining difficult concepts. I would like to suggest, however, that early modern writers’ frequent invocation of physical illness to illuminate the nature of sin—whether in poetry, sermons, or meditations on the London Bills of Mortality—necessarily reflected a more complex and richer relationship between the two. As many cognitive linguists, anthropologists, and philosophers have pointed out over the last 30 years, the language we use to talk about ideas is deeply embedded in the way we think about and experience those ideas in our lives. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in their influential study, Metaphors We Live By, emphasize the central role experience plays in metaphorical thinking: “the two parts of each metaphor are linked only via an experiential basis . . . it is only by means of these experiential bases that the metaphor can serve the purpose of understanding.”40 In other words, a metaphor does not “work” unless, to some extent, the tenor and the vehicle issue from a shared experience of life, often invisible to those native to the culture. In the case of physical and spiritual disorder in early modern England, this common wellspring included both the mysteries of embodiment and the experience of suffering.41 Although continued developments in human anatomy had begun the process of demystifying the physical body, offering individuals a better idea of what its interior looked like, doctors still struggled to understand how breakdowns in its functioning could be ameliorated through medicine. Likewise religious writers acknowledged that, even more than physical illness, diseases of the soul were “easily contracted: hardly eschewed: hardlier found, and felt; and most hardly helped, and healed.”42 In both the physical and the spiritual life, cures remained elusive and suffering common, and it was this experiential link that made for such rich metaphorical writing in religious poetry and prose. The world of medicine offered religious writers a language of pain, illness, and healing that helped structure and shape people’s understanding of all forms of dis-ease,

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demonstrating the extent to which matters of the body and soul could never be fully segregated. Both in terms of the physical body and the immortal soul, the London Bills of Mortality played an important role in helping Londoners imagine the progress and containment of disease within their city and themselves. Although official record keeping started off as a locally organized, somewhat unsystematic affair, by the early seventeenth century it had resulted in the production of weekly bills that were distributed widely throughout the city. In these bills, readers found ways of narrating stories of illness, offering them the opportunity to organize, describe, and even make predictions about the spread of disease in their city. The institution of the bills remained prevalent in London until the middle of the nineteenth century, but it seems likely that their imaginative impact was greatest in these early years. At this time, the dissemination of regular, weekly news was highly unusual and the threat of plague particularly fearsome, and as a result the bills occupied a unique position in English society. In these “accompts,” as the bills were frequently called, readers could witness a terrifying form of accountancy in which human losses were tallied up and tracked as the plague took its course throughout the city and beyond.43 Although, as Slack argues, the English public increasingly saw a natural order in the ravages of plague, many writers never fully rejected the link between the disease and divine punishment. For them, the plague bills remained a reminder of God’s wrath, and their morbid accounting a numerical representation of England’s sins. Perhaps this is why we see not only the plague, but also the bills, being drawn into the realm of religion: through their constant and scrupulous record-keeping, they hinted at the kind of spiritual accounting expected of all English Protestants, albeit in its most quantified form.44 As we have seen, the bills’ tabulations were eagerly read and creatively interpreted, and after examining a variety of contemporary responses to the broadsides it is not hard to understand why: amidst the terrible confusion of crisis, the bills offered their readers a much-needed sense of structure, helping them cope with widespread suffering and devastation. In their brief tables, they reviewed the losses of the past, helped readers make sense of the present, and offered at least some hope about the future, suggesting that by organizing and quantifying both physical and spiritual disease, England’s suffering might eventually be eased.

Notes Many thanks to Hal Cook, Andrew Wear, Steve Ridge, and the editors of this volume, who all read early drafts of this essay and improved it greatly with their perceptive comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to the Wellcome Trust, which has provided generous fi nancial support for this research. 1 For more on provincial tours during plague time, see Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge

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2

3

4 5 6

7

8

9

Erin Sullivan University Press, 1992), 29 and 34; and Peter H. Greenfield, “Touring,” in A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 251–68. Many scholars have argued that Shakespeare’s narrative poems and sonnets are largely a product of plague-time theater closures. See Katherine Duncan-Jones and H.R. Woudhuysen, Shakespeare’s Poems (London: Arden, 2007), 12–16; and Katherine Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (London: Arden, 1997), 8–11. J. Leeds Barroll has further argued that Shakespeare did not write plays unless the London theaters were open; see J. Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Stuart Years (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 17–22, as well as chs 4–5. Although the regulations changed somewhat throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it is generally thought that 30 plague deaths in a given week were grounds for theater closures. Barroll has emphasized, however, that these numbers were meant as a guide, and that authorities retained the power to close theaters even when deaths had not yet reached 30 (Politics, Plague, 98–100). The readers of the bills were by and large Londoners, but news of the bills certainly traveled to the countryside and also overseas (see the later discussion in this essay about correspondence among ambassadors to London). There is also evidence that the bills themselves, or at least manuscript copies, circulated to some extent outside the capital; see J.C. Robertson, “Reckoning with London: Interpreting the Bills of Mortality before John Graunt,” Urban History 23, no.3 (1996): 338 n. 56 and 341 n. 68; and Herbert Berry, “A London Plague Bill for 1592, Crich, and Goodwyffe Hurde,” English Literary Renaissance 25, no.1 (1995): 3–25. John Graunt, Natural and Political Observations . . . upon the Bills of Mortality (London, 1662), 1. Plague figures for 1605–10, for instance, exist only as part of later projects such as John Bell’s London’s Remembrancer (London, 1665). See also Barroll, Politics, Plague, 219. These 1603–4 printed bills are in three sets, the fi rst of which begins in July 1603 (English Short Title Catalogue listings 16743.9–11). The most complete collections are held at Harvard University’s Houghton Library and the British Library. For a more detailed description of the sets, see Stephen Greenberg, “Plague, the Printing Press, and Public Health in Seventeenth-Century London” Huntington Library Quarterly 67, no.4 (2004): 513 n. 5. Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985; reprinted with corrections, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 148– 49; and Thomas Rogers Forbes, Chronicle from Aldgate: Life and Death in Shakespeare’s London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 39–40. Robertson, “Reckoning,” 329. One nineteenth-century study suggests that this happened earlier, in 1553; see James Christie, Some Account of Parish Clerks (London, 1893), 132. Historians of the period will be familiar with the idiosyncrasies of various parish registers, which vary from surprisingly detailed to disappointingly brief. On the issue of keeping a record of births, deaths, and marriages, Forbes has suggested that parishes may have resisted the order due to fears that such documentation would provide a basis for new taxation (Chronicle from Aldgate, 40). No bills from the 1592–93 epidemic survive, but early histories of the bills frequently cite evidence for these dates, and more recent analyses of the bills tend to adopt their chronology. A reference to “the Plague bills” in a 1596

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11 12

13 14

15

16 17 18

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publication by Thomas Nashe’s further suggests a 1590s print run; Nashe, Have with You to Saffron-walden (London, 1596), sig. O2r. The earliest surviving handwritten bill is undated (British Library, Egerton MS. 2603, fol. 4), but Slack suggests that it may come from 1532 (Impact, 375 n. 12). The earliest extant printed document containing bill-like statistics is a pamphlet from 1582 held at the Guildhall Library; see “The Number of all those that hath dyed in the Citie of London, & the liberties of the same, from the 28, of December 1581, unto the 27, of December 1582” (Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks [London, n. d.]). For a transcription of this early bill with notes, see chapter 5 of Rebecca Totaro, The Plague in Print: Essential Elizabethan Sources, 1558–1603, Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010); see also Berry, “A London Plague Bill.” For further histories of the London Bills of Mortality (at times confl icting), see Forbes, Chronicle from Aldgate, 47–49; Graunt, Observations, 1–11; Greenberg, “Plague, the Printing Press,” 512–17; Richelle Munkhoff, “Searchers of the Dead: Authority, Marginality, and the Interpretation of Plague in England, 1574–1665” Gender & History 11, no.1 (1999): 4–6; Robertson, “Reckoning,” 328–34; Slack, Impact, 148–49; Ian Sutherland, “When was the Great Plague? Mortality in London, 1563 to 1665,” in Population and Social Change, eds. D.V. Glass and Roger Revelle (London: Edward Arnold, 1972), 289–91; and Cornelius Walford, “Early Bills of Mortality,” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 7, ed. Charles Rogers (London, 1878), 214–33. John Angus, “Old and New Bills of Mortality” Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 17, no.2 (1854): 117; Graunt, Observations, 4. For an exception to the plague as the reason for the bills, see Walford, 216–17. Walford suggests that the public distribution of the bills was for the “almost sole purpose . . . of frightening persons away from the metropolis.” For example, see Barroll, Politics, Plague, 121–22, and Robertson, “Reckoning,” 325–27. Scaramelli quoted in Barroll, Politics, Plague, 103. See also Great Britain, Public Record Office, Calendar of State Papers and manuscripts relating to English affairs, existing in the Archives and collections of Venice, and in other libraries of Northern Italy; ed. by Rawdon Brown [and others], 1202– 1675 (London: Longman, 1864–1947): 10.42. Greenberg, “Plague, the Printing Press,” 517–22. Estimates for the cost of weekly bills are based on Walford’s assertion that a year’s subscription in 1594 cost four shillings (216). Munkhoff has suggested that he derived his information from Graunt’s Observations, but, as she notes, little detailed work exists concerning the pricing and distribution of the bills (“Searchers,” 26 n. 18). Robertson has found evidence suggesting that during plague times people paid up to three pence for a bill, which he describes as “three times the official rate” (“Reckoning,” 333). For the costs of play-going in early modern London, see Gurr, 12 and 134. Barroll shares the reference to Ram Alley of which I speak: “I dwindle,” says one character, “as a new player does at a plague bill certified forty” (Politics, Plague, 100 n. 57). The play was printed in 1611, but theater historians think that it must have been staged by 1608. Molino quoted in Barroll, Politics, Plague, 121. See also Brown, vol. 10, 150–55. Chaworth quoted in Robertson, “Reckoning,” 340. Ibid.

92 Erin Sullivan 19 Greenberg has strongly argued that the City of London actively promoted the production and distribution of the bills (“Plague, the Printing Press,” 526–27). 20 Robertson, “Reckoning,” 340. Munkhoff also writes about how the bills’ wide readership invested the documents with considerable authority (“Searchers,” 8). For more on the bills’ role as early news sources, see Greenberg, “Plague, the Printing Press,” 509–10 and 526. 21 Although very few bills survive from these years, several contemporary letters include references to them. Barroll has shown that plague remained a constant threat in the years following the 1603 outbreak and that the theaters were likely closed many times during 1604–10 (Politics, Plague, 173 and 218–22). Additionally, in 1665 John Bell published London’s Remembrancer, which included death statistics for 1605–10 and 1624–25, further suggesting that bills were produced but have since been lost. 22 The main collection of seventeenth-century annual bills is located at the Guildhall Library, printed books collections St.424.9, Granger 1.3.3, Broadsides 23.70, and A.7.1 no. 14. A patchy collection of weekly bills for 1636–77 is held at the Bodleian Library, G.A. Lond. 4˚ 95–97. 1629 is also the fi rst year in Graunt’s cumulative tables (Observations, fold-out table between 74 and 75). Paul Laxton has compiled a complete microfiche collection of weekly and annual bills for 1700 onwards, but to my knowledge it is only available in England at the Bodleian Library (Laxton, ed., London Bills of Mortality [Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1984]). 23 English and Welsh Parliament, “Die Veneris 2 Feb. 1643” (London, 1643). 24 Oliver Cromwell, “A Letter From the Right Honorable, The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, To The Honorable William Lenthall Esq; Speaker of the Parliament of England” (London, 1649), sig. A1r. 25 Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues and Politics (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 16–17. See also Ernest B. Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 47–48. 26 The poem is published as part of Davies’s Humours Heau’n on Earth (London, 1609), 230. 27 See especially Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1995); and Richard Sugg, Murder After Death: Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), esp. “Introduction: The Invading Body.” For more on the different kinds of medical metaphors deployed in religious literature (and to what ends), see David N. Harley, “Medical Metaphors in English Moral Theology, 1560–1660,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 48 (1993): 396–435; and Andrew Wear, “Religious Beliefs and Medicine in Early Modern England,” in The Task of Healing: Medicine, Religion and Gender in England and the Netherlands, eds. Hilary Marland and Margaret Pelling (Rotterdam: Erasmus, 1996), 147–55. 28 Slack, Impact, 240. For more on religious interpretations of the plague, see Rebecca Totaro, Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton, Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies (Pittsburgh: Duqesne University Press, 2005), 38–48; and Gilman, Plague Writing, 238–41 and 247–49. Both suggest that Protestant divines struggled to offer their parishioners a fully credible theological model for understanding epidemic illness: “The church openly and proudly owned the very origin of plague,” Totaro writes, but “it could never own or even imagine its cure”

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33

34

35

36

37 38 39 40

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(48). Gilman argues that the loss of Catholic plague saints made it increasingly difficult for theologians to imagine and represent how London might be protected from mass illness; by the time Daniel Defoe comes to write about the Great Plague of 1665, Gilman writes, “the Word of God has fallen silent and is no longer capable of imparting any meaning at all to epidemic catastrophe” (240). Francis White, Londons Warning by Jerusalem (London, 1619), 33–34. Francis Quarles, Divine Fancies (London, 1633), 101–2. For a few biblical examples, see Matthew 4:23–25 and 9:1–8; and Luke 5:18– 26 and 7:11–18. On miracles, Calvin wrote, “those miraculous powers and manifest workings, which were dispensed by the laying on of hands, have ceased; and they have rightly lasted only for a time” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 2, ed. John T. McNeill [Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960], 1454). For an English reiteration of this sentiment, see also Thomas Adams, The Workes of Thomas Adams (London, 1629), 252. Early modern writers often described Christ and Adam’s (prelapsarian) bodies as an example of physical perfection, and they presented faith as the prime method of attempting to return to such a state (of course, a full return during man’s earthly life was considered impossible). Gail Kern Paster provides a helpful consideration of Christ’s body versus that of postlapsarian man in her introduction to Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), esp. 1–7. Becon quoted in Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 30. See also Thomas Becon, Prayers and Other Pieces of Thomas Becon, ed. John Ayre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844), 490. John Abernethy, A Christian and Heavenly Treatise. Containing Physicke for the Soule (London, 1622), sig. A3v. For a similar sentiment, see also William Willymat, Physicke, to Cure the Most Dangerous Disease of Desperation (London, 1605), sig. A4v–A5r. Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. 1, eds. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989–2000), 22–23. For more on the interplay between religion and medicine in this period, see Wear, “Religious Beliefs,” 145–69. Thomas Adams, Diseases of the Soule (London, 1616), 7. Other examples of this sort of text include Abernethy’s A Christian and Heavenly Treatise (London, 1622) and Matthew Griffith’s The Catholique Doctor and his Spiritual Catholicon to Cure our Sinfull Soules (London, 1661). For more on classical metaphor theory, see I.A. Richards’s seminal The Philosophy of Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). David Harley writes about how ministers collected “metaphors and analogical arguments to illustrate their sermons” in much the same way that they collected biblical examples (“Medical Metaphors,” 399). Griffith, Catholique Doctor, 12. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 20. Healy also explores the relationship between “Bodies, texts and tropes” (Fictions of Disease, 11–13). For more general discussions of the construction of knowledge through discursive tools such as metaphor, see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Michael Arbib and Mary Hesse, The Construction of Reality (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986);

94 Erin Sullivan

41

42 43

44

James J. Bono, “Science, Discourse, and Literature: The Role/Rule of Metaphor in Science,” in Literature and Science: Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart Peterfreund (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990); and James W. Fernandez, ed., Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). By embodiment I mean the interior and seemingly invisible workings of a bounded body. Much has been written on this subject in the past 15 years; for a very helpful overview, see Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1–39; and also Paster, Humoring the Body, 1–24. Abernethy, Heavenly Treatise, 2. Interestingly, some demographers have suggested that John Graunt’s statistical methods grew out of his own experience as a shopkeeper, which required proficiency in accounting. See in particular Philip Kreager, “New Light on Graunt” Population Studies 42 (1988): 129–40. Tom Webster has identified many references in early modern religious writing that explicitly link spiritual and economic accounting; see Tom Webster, “Writing to Redundancy: Approaches to Spiritual Journals and Early Modern Spirituality” The Historical Journal 39 (1996): 45–46. In a more secular context, Gilman has highlighted the way in which Samuel Pepys may have attempted to balance figures from plague bills with accounts of his economic successes and erotic exploits, convincingly arguing that Pepys saw such “cross-indexing” as “a kind of magical accounting procedure” (Plague Writing, 225).

Part II

Governing Bodies in Plague-Time

4

Contagious Figurations Plague and the Impenetrable Nation after the Death of Elizabeth Richelle Munkhoff

Looking back across the plague epidemics of the seventeenth century, John Graunt asserts, “That the Opinions of Plagues accompanying the Entrance of Kings, is false, and seditious.”1 By 1662 it had thus become common opinion that the transition between monarchs marked a dangerous opportunity for pestilence to erupt. Despite Graunt’s condemnation of this “false and seditious” opinion, it had long and deep associations. This should not be surprising, given that significant outbreaks of plague did in fact accompany the transition from Elizabeth to James in 1603, and again from James to Charles in 1625. 2 In this essay I examine the fi rst of these monarchical shifts, arguing that the particular circumstances surrounding Elizabeth’s death generated associations in the cultural imagination between the queen’s body and the social and economic devastation caused by virulent plague–contagious figurations that reverberated across the century. In the spring of 1603, the fi nal illness and death of Queen Elizabeth coincided with the fi rst outbreaks of what was to become a devastating plague epidemic, one that would rage in London for nearly a year. For a populace long used to associating the queen’s physical impenetrability with national security, the blatant fact of her corporeal frailty produced apprehensions about threats to the realm, both internal and external. Given her lengthy reign and her lack of a designated heir, the queen’s death would have signaled distressing changes for her subjects, even under normal circumstances. But the events of 1603 were far from normal. As spring turned into summer, mortality rates increased dramatically, with the number of plague dead rising from 10 for the week of Elizabeth’s burial in April to 1,396 for the week of James’s coronation in July.3 The momentous transition between monarchs thus became symbolically entwined with the crisis of the plague epidemic. Yet little attention has been paid to the ways plague shaped cultural perceptions of Elizabeth’s death as disease disrupted social and economic order well into the following year.4 To see these shaping forces of epidemic disease at work, we need to read Elizabeth’s death not as something fi nite, occurring on a single day and receding into the past in a neat linear trajectory of nostalgia. Instead, we must pay attention to how cultural figurations of her body and death cir-

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culate in the immediate crisis of disease and its aftermath. In this essay I concentrate on three representative texts: Thomas Dekker’s The Wonderful Year (1603), his best known plague pamphlet; Elizabeth Southwell’s narrative of Queen Elizabeth’s death and subsequent lying-in-state; and Thomas Heywood’s two-part play, If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody (1605–6). Focusing on representations of Elizabeth as a living and dead body in the period 1603–6, I consider the powerful and confl icting ways that the queen’s body continued to signify in its material transition from life to death, particularly as it was reimagined and reinterpreted through the lens of plague. At the end of her reign, I argue, Elizabeth’s body—no matter how virginal—could not remain inviolate; it became permeable to disease, subject to decay from within, and thus figured as both a potential source of contagion and as a site of treason. In effect, the queen’s body betrayed itself and, by extension, the realm that it had come to represent.5 Alone, Elizabeth’s death might have revealed a chink in the armor of her iconography—a momentary emphasis on the queen’s “body natural” over her “body politic.”6 Following her death, however, were the deaths of over 25,000 Londoners.7 Plague’s connotative vigor thus produces a symbolic arena in which the interpenetrations of sexuality, contagion, and treason resonate with a populace simultaneously mourning their queen, reeling from social and economic disruptions caused by the epidemic, and dreading potential invasions. These feared incursions are not just of disease but also of a foreign king, one who might be understood as metaphorically infiltrating the realm as he marched south to claim the throne.8 As she yielded her body up to the hands of death, Elizabeth—and her realm—became literally and figuratively violated by mortality.

“Feares . . . bred in the womb of this altring kingdome Death and Plague in 1603 On March 9, 1603, London’s theaters closed for Lent with the expectation that they would reopen soon after Easter.9 By mid-March, however, the grave illness of Queen Elizabeth prompted the Privy Council to pass an order for “the restraint of stage-plays till other direction be given.”10 By the end of March, the queen was dead. In an effort to control potentially threatening public gatherings that might lead to rebellion against the succession, the Privy Council seemed unwilling to reopen the theaters until the arrival of King James into the city. It is likely that the theaters resumed play after Elizabeth’s funeral on April 28, but by early May plague was spreading quickly toward London—so quickly that on May 29, James, who after only a brief stay in London had moved his court to Greenwich, issued a proclamation “commanding all the nobles and gentry from out of town to depart for their homes until the coronation on July 25.”11 Although James was indeed crowned at Westminster in July, his “Triumphant Passage”

Contagious Figurations 99 through London did not take place until March 1604, nearly a year later. James had good reason to be afraid; between December 1602 and December 1603, over 25,000 Londoners died of plague—about 20 percent of the city’s population.12 The playwright Thomas Dekker is well known for his plague pamphlets, written during epidemics to augment his income while the theaters were closed. In The Wonderful Year, Dekker associates plague not only with the theater but also, suggestively, with the queen’s death. He invokes the metaphor of the stage right from the title page: Wherein is shewed the picture of London, lying sicke of the Plague. At the ende of all (like a mery Epilogue to a dull Play) certaine Tales are cut out in sundry fashions, of purpose to shorten the lives of long winters nights, that lye watching in the darke for us.13 Dekker’s use of this conceit should not be surprising; after all, he was a dramatist, but he consistently figures London as the stage on which the plague wreaks its havoc: “Oh it were able to fill a hundred paire of writing tables with notes, but to see the parts plaid in the compasse of one houre on the stage of this new-found world!” (sig. C1v). Certainly, the grim details Dekker records make it clear that the plague is no illusion. Quite the contrary. Dekker suggests that its horror can only be expressed through the most exaggerated of images, what we might call a kind of poetics of plague.14 By attempting to confi ne plague to the space and time of theatrical performance, Dekker seems to offer his readers not just a way to control physical disease but also the psychological means to bracket the experience. To do so, he presents a nightmare world of “long winters nights” that menacingly “lye watching in the darke for us,” a “new-found world” that works by association and connotation driven by fear.15 Most extraordinarily, Dekker implies symbolic connections between the queen and plague. He locates the beginning of the epidemic issuing from the place of Elizabeth’s death: “Westward (from the toppe of a Ritch-mount [Richmond]) descended a hidious tempest” (sig. B1v). But he develops the association further in an oddly elided passage where he seems to depict Elizabeth as a hideous tempest that scowled on the earth, and filling her hie forehead full of blacke wrinckles, tumbling long up and downe (like a great bellyed wife) her sighes being whirlewindes, and her grones thunder, at length she fell in labour, and was delivered of a pale, meagry, weake child, named Sicknesse, whom Death (with a pestilence) would needes take upon him to nurse. . . . Death made him his Herauld: attirde him like a Courtier, and (in his name) chargde him to goe into the Privie Chamber of the English Queene, to sommon her to appeare in the Star-chamber of heaven. (sig. B1v)

100 Richelle Munkhoff Clearly, it is the tempest who is “great bellyed,” but the “she” most evident in this passage is the queen herself. Although it seems merely Sicknesse who calls her to that Star Chamber above, that sickness is quite explicitly identified with pestilence; indeed, Sicknesse is a common term for the plague.16 The queen did not die of plague, but Dekker equates her with the tempest that breeds a sickness that then kills her. Disease seeks her in her “Privie Chamber,” as if to act like the tempest and to penetrate her body where natural seed did not.17 The loathsomeness of this act exposes itself in the description of “her hie forehead full of blacke wrinckles,” overtly personifying the enormity of the storm but also recalling the aging natural body of the queen. Dekker acknowledges the gendered if not sexual nature of this threat by stating that Elizabeth “obayed Deaths messenger, and yeelded her body to the hands of death himselfe” (sig. B2r).18 Her only heir becomes Sicknesse, pestilence. The fact that the queen’s death occurs nearly simultaneously with the fi rst outbreaks of plague along the coast must have seemed more than a little portentous to a people faced with potentially disruptive succession of a foreign king. Indeed, the magnitude of the fear engendered by this overlap is caught in Dekker’s ironic suggestion that the “report of her death (like a thunder-clap) was able to kill thousands” (sig. B2r). After opening his pamphlet with such horrific images, Dekker turns briefly to the soothing comfort offered by the new king. He writes over his own previous depictions to describe the recent months as beginning with the Queenes death, then the Kingdomes falling into an Ague upon that. Next, followes the curing of that feaver by the holesome receipt of a proclaymed King . . . a comfortable Sun out of the North, whose glorious beames (like a fan) dispersed all thick and contagious clowdes. The losse of a Queene, was paid with the double interest of a King and Queene. The Cedar of her government which stood alone and bare no fruit, is changed now to an Olive, upon whose spreading branches grow both Kings and Queenes. (sig. C1r–C1v) Here the virulent pestilence transforms into mere “Ague”; the threatening contagion easily dispersed by this “comfortable Sun.” The new king is not dangerous; in fact, he is beneficent, “dispers[ing]” all the infection left behind at Elizabeth’s death. The importance of generation implicit in the pun on the word “sun” (son) is picked up in the “spreading branches” of the new royal family in explicit contrast to the old queen’s barrenness.19 The celebration of the new regime does not account for much of Dekker’s pamphlet, however.20 Most of it is devoted to narrating scenes that depict the “feares that are bred in the wombe of this altring kingdome” (sig. B2v). The imagery and language of late Elizabethan penetrability and threats of treason are not easily laid aside, as here Dekker returns to the figure of the dying and dead queen’s contagious womb. The potential for treason in “this altring kingdome” is inescapable, as Dekker soberly points out:

Contagious Figurations 101 “[u]pon Thursday it was treason to cry God save king James king of England, and uppon Friday hye treason not to cry so” (sig. C1v). The immense cultural shift of succession must take place immediately, and yet it must simultaneously occur slowly and variously over a period of time. Given that Elizabeth’s body remained unburied for a month, spectacularly on display in effigy during her funeral procession, while James himself remained absent from London, it is not surprising that the populace had difficulties keeping their loyalties straight during this “altering” period.21 To describe the unsuspecting citizen who moves from lamenting the dead queen to welcoming the new king, while staring into the face of pestilence, Dekker chooses the image of Troy: Whilst Troy was swilling sack and sugar, and mowsing fat venison, the mad Greekes made bonefi res of their houses: Old Priam was drinking a health to the wodden horse, and before it could be pledgd had his throat cut . . . Behold, that miracle-worker, who in one minute turnd our generall mourning to a generall mirth, does now againe in a moment alter that gladnes to shrikes & lamentation. (sig. C2v–C3r) The title of the pamphlet, The Wonderful Year, invokes that other wonderful year: 1588, the glorious moment most associated with the queen’s literal and metaphorical impenetrability as England withstood the threat of the Spanish Armada. But the wonder of 1603 resembles not the celebratory wonder of 1588. What Dekker records are the “shrikes & lamentation” of a society violated by the dangers undetectable in the wooden horse and at the mercy of “that miracle-worker” who seems to behave arbitrarily. More seditiously, the Plague and “his tiranous band” of followers march “thorow Cheapside, and the capitall streets of Troynovant” bearing his purple standard (sig. D1v), again evoking perhaps the memory of Essex’s rebellion or, as Mardock suggests in his essay in this volume, evoking the memory of James’s own entry into London. Months into the plague epidemic, Dekker captures the disintegration of the body politic as new Troy is infiltrated by disease. Because Elizabeth’s body was figured as coterminous with the realm, this violent alteration of England requires, for Dekker, a reimagining of the corporeal decomposition of the queen.

“The case is altered with me” Elizabeth’s Treasonous Body To gain additional perspective on that reimagining effort, I want to examine another narrative—one that purports to capture fi rsthand precisely the disintegration of the queen’s dying and dead body. As a maid of honor in attendance upon the queen in March 1603, Elizabeth Southwell offers what she claims is an eyewitness account of her mistress’ death, including the

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rites of watching over the corpse.22 The narrative is a strange composition, almost dream-like in structure; it is also nearly universally dismissed by historians as politically motivated and therefore too tainted to be trustworthy. 23 I am less interested in fi nding the factual truth of Southwell’s text than in exploring the figural aspects of her representations of the dying and dead queen. Southwell describes Elizabeth’s fi nal illness, and ultimately her death, as stemming from a vision the queen has of her own body, which the queen links particularly with a mysterious mutability. In the account, the queen falls ill, unable to eat or sleep, and the cause being wondered at by my Ladie Scrop with whom she was verie privat and confident being her neare kinswoman her majtie told her, commanding her to conceale the same, [said] she saw one night in her bed her bodie exceeding leane and fearefull in a light of fi re. (ll. 17–21) The queen reveals to her “privat and confident” kinswoman the vision she had “one night in her bed,” and that spectacle has put Elizabeth off food and sleep. 24 The vulnerability of Elizabeth’s body in bed is striking, and perhaps suggests a more sinister link between violation and death than Dekker’s depiction of the queen “yeeld[ing] her body to the hands of death himselfe” in her privy chamber. That this fearful image must be concealed is highlighted here and in the following passage, where the narrative explicitly enlarges upon Elizabeth’s private vision to explore the ramifications of it in the more public aspects of her court. The attendant ladies of her chamber are joined by lords: now faling into extremitie, she sat tow daies and three nigh[tes] upon her stole ready dressed and could never be brought // by anie of her Councell to go to bed, or eat or drinke . . . she would not answere them to anie question, but said souftlie to my Lord Admiralls earnest perswasions: that yf he knew what she had sene in her bed he would not perswade her as he did: and . . . commanding . . . the rest to depart her chamber willing my lord admirall to staie. to whome she shuke her head and with a pitifull voyce said my lord I am tied with a chaine of yron about my neck. he allaging her wonted courage to her, she replied I am tied and the case is altered with me. (ll. 28–47) Where the “privat and confident” lady was allowed access to Elizabeth’s vision, here the Lord Admiral is denied knowledge of what ails the queen; her vulnerability must not only be concealed but also kept at a distance. She remains “ready dressed” and awake in order to fend off sexuality and disease that threaten her “in her bed.” Thus she seems to be imprisoned both by and in her body. That she is “tied with a chaine of yron about my neck”

Contagious Figurations 103 suggests that Elizabeth is bound both in mind and in person, fearful of her own altering body—the offensive image is specifically the queen’s “case,” her body (OED 3). Of course, the legal phrase, “the case is altered,” usually is deployed when new facts justify a complete reassessment of a situation, specifically to grant acquittal. 25 The tone here belies that reading: the queen speaks “with a pitifull voyce” and twice repeats “I am tied.” Indeed, the image of the queen as a shackled prisoner implicitly connotes the crime of treason. Thus this dream-like narrative fantasizes about the altered body and the recognition that Elizabeth’s frailty is a sign of penetrability, disastrous for a nation bound to the bodily integrity of its sovereign and an act warranting the most severe of punishments. Elizabeth’s failing body dominates Southwell’s description of her final days as she “grow[s] past recoverie” (l. 59); we learn she treats visiting bishops “cholericklie” (64) and that she is troubled with a “sower throt” (l. 69). This sets the stage for Elizabeth’s inability or refusal to name a successor: she desired to wash yt that she might answer more freelie to what the Councell demanded. which was to know whom she would have king. but they seeing her throt troubled her so much desired her to hold up her fi nger when they named whom liked her whereupon they named the K of france the K of Scotland at which she never stirred, they named my lord Beaucham whereto she said. I will have no raskalls son in my seat but [illegible] one worthy to be a king: Hereupon ynstantlie she died. Then the Councell went forth and reported she meant the K of Scots. (ll. 70–78) Examinations of this passage rightly focus on the political significance of Elizabeth’s movements and voice, or lack of them; indeed, as Catherine Loomis argues, Southwell’s account is interesting for how blatantly the “Privy Councillors . . . take it upon themselves to name the successor.”26 But the detail I fi nd striking here is the queen’s inability to have command over her own body. She desires that her sore throat be washed so that she might more easily communicate with her councilors. They ignore her and ask that she use her fi nger to indicate her choice. Perhaps the queen’s request for medical treatment is interpreted as yet another delaying tactic. But given the emphasis on the queen’s body in the rest of the narrative, this moment highlights Elizabeth’s failure to wield power by withholding—what one might call the power of virginity; indeed it turns the act of withholding against her, to render her helpless and ultimately inconsequential. The Privy Council and particularly Secretary Cecil determine what “she meant” and proceed accordingly. Cecil’s disregard for the queen’s desires continues immediately after her death, as Southwell recounts: the Council departs to proclaim James “leaving her bodie with charge not to be opened such being her desire, but Cecill having given a secret warrant to the surgions they opened her” (ll. 79–81).

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Patricia Phillippy argues well for the gendered and sexual implications of Elizabeth’s embalming.27 More recently, Kate Cregan has examined in terrific detail the “opening” of the queen’s body, and makes an argument similar to mine as to the violations of mortality with regard to national boundaries. 28 I want to draw our attention back to the connections between penetrability and disease to suggest that Elizabeth’s physical vulnerability remains an issue post mortem, not only from secret warrants that allow surgeons to open her body against her “desire” but also from the more frighteningly invisible threats of disease and of decomposition. Southwell narrates that the queen’s bodie being seared up was brought to whit hall. where being watched everie night by 6 severall Ladies. my selfe that night there watching as one of them being all about the bodie which was fast nayled up in a bord cofin with leaves of lead covered with velvet, her bodie and head break with such a crack that spleated the wood lead and cer cloth. (ll. 83–88) Like Dekker’s “hidious tempest,” the violence of Elizabeth’s bodily eruption is both spectacular and shocking. Despite having been “seared up,” “fast nayled up,” and protected “with leaves of lead,” the queen’s body explodes with such ferocity “that spleated the wood lead and cer cloth.” Although the line is ambiguous, the suggestion of treason and its punishment is hinted at in the imagined separation of Elizabeth’s “bodie and head.” Whether or not this event was actually witnessed by the “6 severall Ladies,” the Londoners who lined the streets to watch the queen’s funeral procession in April were not likely to have known of it. Yet the same symbolic discourse would be at work in the general understanding that Elizabeth had fi nally, in Dekker’s words, “yeelded her body to the hands of death himselfe.” For the average Londoner, the spectacular consequences of Elizabethan vulnerability would become visible over the following months. The reverberating echo of Elizabeth’s altering body, figured in Southwell’s “crack” and Dekker’s “thunder-clap,” signifies the destructive force of mutability, especially for a female monarch. That her personal disintegration should imaginatively intertwine with the social breakdowns caused by the plague epidemic cannot be underestimated, as plague deaths in London increased from 10 for the week of the Elizabeth’s funeral to 32 for the last week of May to 158 for the last week of June. 29 Perhaps these numbers do not seem striking enough to warrant social panic. Yet in his London Looke Backe, at that Yeare of Yeares 1625. And Looke Forward, Upon this Yeare, 1630, Thomas Dekker provides some sense of the fear generated by even small numbers of dead: Tis strange to observe, that if a Bell be heard to Ring out, and that tis voyc’d, in such a Parish within the walls of LONDON, a [man] is dead

Contagious Figurations 105 of the Plague, O what talke it breedes! If the next Weeke it mounts to two, then the Report stickes cold to the heart of the whole Citty. But if (as now) it rises to 41, Trading hangs the Head, and thousands fearefully suspect they shall bee undone. And is there not great reason for this, thinke you?30 Here Dekker captures the fearful watchfulness Londoners had of plague deaths, which they kept track of by reading the Bills of Mortality.31 The populace could never know when a few deaths would swell to the level of a mortality crisis: thus, “what talke it breedes” even to hear of a single victim. And more significantly, at 41 deaths, “Trading hangs the Head.” When “thousands fearefully suspect they shall bee undone,” therefore, more than physical suffering is at issue; they also fear economic and social upheaval. Dekker is writing here during the 1630 epidemic, addressing an audience that collectively remembers terrible outbreaks in 1593, 1603–11, and 1625. Thus his readers have some experience with the possibility of being “undone” as plague deaths mount to 41, which he captures in the eerie rhetorical question: “And is there not great reason for this, thinke you?” In April of 1603, Queen Elizabeth’s funeral took place with those in attendance well aware that a report of ten deaths loomed in the background, knowledge that might be said to strike “cold to the heart of the whole Citty.” As that number rose, the social and economic dislocations caused by plague would become further associated with Elizabeth’s posthumous bodily disintegration.

“As I am a true mayde” Bodily Integrity and the Work of Nostalgia The deep symbolic connections that Elizabeth had drawn between her physical and sovereign selves continued to figure meaningfully even after her death. Nostalgia for the late queen is often read in terms of comparisons with James’s reign.32 I argue, however, that this demand to reinvest Elizabeth with the status of Virgin Queen also signals a cultural need to rewrite the devastation caused by plague by reconstructing the disintegrated body politic. One instance of this kind of cultural healing working itself out representationally through evocations of the queen’s body is in Thomas Heywood’s very popular two-part play, If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody.33 As many scholars have noted, Heywood’s drama is an odd mixture of genres—part history play, part city comedy—with a seemingly disjointed narrative structure:34 printed in 1605, Part I focuses on Elizabeth’s difficult role as princess under a suspicious Queen Mary and ends with her accession to the throne; printed in 1606, Part II primarily presents the doings of London merchants and showcases two signature events highlighting Queen Elizabeth’s secure power: the building and dedication

106 Richelle Munkhoff of the Royal Exchange and the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Certainly at fi rst glance, the play seems unwieldy and held together only by the finest of narrative threads. But if read in terms of a social need to reincorporate the body of the Virgin Queen, as I am suggesting, Heywood’s choices not only begin to make narrative sense but they also offer insight into the psychological significance of the play for post-plague London in 1605–6. By presenting his audience fi rst with a virginal Princess Elizabeth, followed by a beloved “Bess” associated with economic prosperity, and ending with a martial queen withstanding the threatened Spanish invasion, Heywood actively reconstructs an Elizabeth whose bodily integrity returns to stand again for national strength. In doing so, he does more than articulate nostalgia for the old queen; he confronts the chaos of economic and societal breakdown that plague has wrought in London, and he offers a cure. Heywood begins his re-corporealization of Elizabeth in Part I by focusing on the princess’ body from her opening moments on stage; the princess has been so ill that her life is thought to be in danger, and the audience fi rst sees her prostrate: “Enter Elizabeth in her bed” (l. 188). This is a palimpsest moment: Heywood is at once showing us an Elizabeth before and at the very end of her reign. The plot depicts the young Princess Elizabeth, but the scene also evokes the elderly queen’s fi nal illness. Similarly, the threat of treason shrouds both Elizabeths: Mary and those around her continually suspect the princess of treason, as the Constable who cruelly guards her says, “Cause she an alyen is to us catholiques” (l. 721). Yet given the cultural association of the elderly Elizabeth’s failing body with a kind of treason, the play offers the audience an opportunity to write over the more recent history and return to the potency of the younger princess. Much of Part I portrays Elizabeth as maintaining fortitude against the corrupt bishops and foreign powers who threaten the nation from within.35 Thus, what appears as potential treason to Mary represents Elizabeth’s force of purity and purpose, figured in particularly Protestant terms. For Heywood, this Protestant force is represented as specifically textual. At one point Sir Henry Beningfield, at whose house Princess Elizabeth is sequestered, picks up one of her books and looks into it: “Marry a God! whats here an English bible? / Sanctum Maria pardon this prophanation of my hart” (ll. 1039–40). This is followed by an elaborate dumb show where a host of religious figures surround a sleeping Elizabeth and threaten to kill her. Two angels arrive not only to protect her but to open the Bible on her lap so that she awakens to a passage of scripture: “Whoso putteth his trust in the Lord, shall not be confounded” (ll. 1058–59). Elizabeth consistently benefits from divine protection throughout Part I of If You Know Not Me, and that divinity is figured throughout as textual.36 Despite this divine protection, by the end of the play it seems that Elizabeth’s enemies on all sides are again descending upon her. She has a dream where she sees “her selfe . . . cast into a dungeon, / Where enemyes environ’d her about, / Offering their weapons to her naked brest” (ll. 1348–50).

Contagious Figurations 107 Indeed, Elizabeth believes the end is near and states, “I looke each minute for deaths messenger” (ll. 1418); that messenger, when he arrives, does bring death, but not to Elizabeth. Instead he cries, “God blesse your majesty” (l. 1443). For the palimpsest Elizabeths portrayed here, this denial of death functions doubly: the Princess Elizabeth becomes queen, likely in a display of great iconography, 37 and the recently dead Elizabeth is revived in her vigorous, intact glory. Part I thus figuratively brings the dead queen back to life and reasserts her bodily purity as coterminous with state power. For Heywood, the body and the text become aligned, and the fi nal scene ends with Queen Elizabeth accepting an English Bible from the Lord Mayor of London and telling him, “You of our bodie and our soule have care, / This is the Jewell that we still love best” (ll. 1581–82). The “jewell” Heywood offers his audience is thus both the pearl of Elizabethan virginity and the textualization of it—the Virgin Queen as divine book, a body no longer subject to mutability. Having reembodied the queen and given her care over to London, Heywood relegates Elizabeth to the background for much of the second part of If You Know Not Me. With the story of Thomas Gresham and the building of his Burse, however, Heywood meditates on the fractures in social and economic relations caused by plague and attempts to heal those wounds by reimagining London’s prosperity. Given the disruptions to trade and economic life that an epidemic would cause, it is not surprising that Heywood presents a world in which trade is beneficial—even when, as with Gresham’s investment in Barbary sugar, it fails. A number of scholars have commented on the “lively picture . . . of a thriving commonwealth” that Part II depicts. 38 But the power of this picture for Heywood’s audience, it seems to me, lies precisely in its disjunction with recent experience, where, to use Dekker’s phrase, “Trading hangs the Head.” No one in the second part of If You Know Not Me “fearfully suspect[s] they shall bee undone”;39 rather, the hallmark of this plague-time play is fi xed, orderly, and ever-present wealth. Economic loss is consistently represented as trivial—from Hobson’s £10 to Gresham’s £100; even when Gresham receives only a dagger and a pair of slippers in return for his £3,000 sugar investment, he dons the slippers and decides to “daunce all [his] care away” (l. 1532). By building his Burse specifically to protect merchants from the elements, Gresham becomes identified with fi xing a structure of trade—giving it form and substance, as he says, “like a parish for good Cittizens / And their faire wives to dwell in” (ll. 1231–32). That almost domestic protection for the merchant and his wife, the Burse, is transformed by Queen Elizabeth’s dedication into the Royal Exchange. This act is a kind of metaphor for Heywood’s play itself; he offers a royal exchange of the diseased and dead Elizabeth for a newly revitalized queen overseeing her subjects with generosity and security. In a more local sense, he also exchanges the immediate past of disrupted commerce for a world of global trade and domestic expansion.40

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Part II ends with an abrupt switch to the threat of the Spanish Armada, and the representation of Elizabeth’s ability to withstand that violation. Having reestablished the queen’s bodily integrity and reasserted London’s economic viability, Heywood needs only to invoke the moment of inviolable physical and national boundaries for his audience to comprehend what has been at stake throughout both parts of If You Know Not Me. Through narrative disjunctions that at this distance might seem random or incoherent, Heywood contains the trauma of plague and its exacerbation of the political turmoil of Elizabeth’s death and James’s accession. An audience watching the play in the immediate aftermath of the epidemic reads these gestures as the reintegration of a body politic, one figured forth in the body of its late sovereign, the Virgin Queen. The queen and her subjects have been violated by mortality, and Heywood offers his spectators a means by which to feel again the power of an impenetrable nation.41

Notes 1 John Graunt, Natural and Political Observations . . . upon the Bills of Mortality (London, 1662), sig. A2v. An earlier example of this opinion is recorded in a short pamphlet, London Trumpet Sounding into the Countrey, within T[homas] B[rewer]’s A Dialogue betwixt a Cittizen, and a poore Countreyman (London, 1636), which suggests the current situation is not as bad as during previous outbreaks: “Not whole streets of houses are now shut up with Redde Crosses on the doores . . . as there were either at the coming of King James to his Crowne, or of King Charles our Soveraigne to his” (sig. B4v). 2 Although there was not an eruption of plague immediately after the execution of Charles, plague deaths were recorded in almost every year of his reign; particularly active was the period after the epidemic of 1636 with significant mortality running through 1648. See Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985; reprinted with corrections, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 146. Of course, for Graunt the most recent entrance of a king would be the restoration of Charles II, which indeed occurred without an outbreak of plague. 3 Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks, A True Report of All the Burials and Christnings within the City of London and the Liberties thereof, from the 23 of December, 1602 to the 22 of December 1603 (London, 1603). The July figure also includes the out-parishes and liberties, information which only began to be included the previous week. 4 Literary critics and historians alike have generally neglected the lacuna of 1603 and the social trauma that an epidemic, particularly one at such an historic juncture, engendered. James D. Mardock’s essay in this volume seeks to change this. In his recent Plague Writing in Early Modern England, Ernest B. Gilman makes a powerful argument for the trauma plague caused throughout the seventeenth century, and briefly discusses “regime change” in relation to plague (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 57, 156–62. There has, of course, been important work done on Queen Elizabeth’s late reign, James’s accession, and plague, but largely these have remained separate avenues of investigation; see, for example, John Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge: Cambridge University

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Press, 1995); Glenn Burgess, Rowland Wymer and Jason Lawrence, eds., The Accession of James I: Historical and Cultural Consequences (Basingstoke [England]; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.); and Slack, Impact. Even when there is overlap, as with J. Leeds Barroll’s Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theater (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), the political events of 1603–4 and the plague outbreak of that year are addressed separately. For the literary and cultural significance of plague more broadly, see Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave, 2001), esp. 50–122; and Rebecca Totaro, Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton, Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005). Elizabeth’s virgin body as coterminus with her realm is discussed, for example, in Louis Adrian Montrose’s reading of the Armada portrait in “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text,” Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, eds. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 303–40, esp. 315. Montrose develops this material at length in his Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 144–63. On the concept of the king’s two bodies, see Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). Leah S. Marcus discusses this concept in relation to Elizabeth specifically in Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 53–66. See also Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977). For further discussions of the political and social power asserted by Elizabeth through manipulations of gender, see, for example, Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), esp. 121–48; Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London; New York: Routledge, 1989). Slack, Impact, 151. Although he does not discuss the threat of James himself as a foreign body, Jonathan Gil Harris does argue for the metaphorical connections between bodily infi ltration and national security in this period; see Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. 19–47. Barroll, Politics, Plague, 102–4. The Privy Council order quoted in Barroll, Politics, Plague, 101. Barroll, Politics, Plague, 104. Slack, Impact, 151. Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks, True Report, tallies 30,578 plague deaths for the year. Historians of plague have generally been suspicious of mortality figures tabulated during epidemics because women on parish poor relief gathered the data; for a discussion of this bias and of the searchers’ role in gathering plague statistics, see, Richelle Munkhoff “Searchers of the Dead: Authority, Marginality, and the Interpretation of Plague in England, 1574–1665,” Gender & History 11, no. 1 (1999): 1–29; and “Reckoning Death: Women Searchers and the Bills of Mortality in Early Modern London,” in Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Vaught (Aldershot, England: Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, forthcoming). Thomas Dekker, The Wonderfull Yeare (London, 1603).

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14 Both Totaro in Suffering in Paradise and Gilman in Plague Writing discuss this concept, but neither uses the term “poetics” for the work of plague writing. See also Rick Bowers, “Antidote to the Plague: Thomas Dekker’s Storytelling in The Wonderfull Yeare (London, 1603),” English Studies 3 (1992): 229–39. Lawrence Manley examines Dekker’s pamphlets as documents that record new forms of urban experience in Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 355–71. 15 Similarly, Susan Sontag opens Illness as Metaphor with a sense of the nightmare of disease, what she calls “the night-side of life” or “the kingdom of the sick”; this kingdom, she argues, is fi lled with “punitive or sentimental fantasies” that must be banished to attain a more truthful approach to illness (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 1. Perhaps this is true for an individual’s relation to disease, but I would argue that for Dekker, communal survival of an epidemic needs the containment offered by metaphor. 16 In London Looke Backe, at that Yeare of Yeares 1625. And Looke Forward, Upon this Yeare, 1630, Dekker makes this point at length: whereas all other diseases “goe simply in their owne Habit” and “under their proper and knowne Names,” it is plague that dreadfull scourge . . . [that] hath for the singularity of the Terrors waiting upon it, This title; THE SICKNESSE. It hath a Preheminence above all others: And none being able to match it, for Violence, Strength, Incertainty, Suttlety, Catching, Universality, and Desolation, it is call the Sicknesse. As if it were, the onely Sicknesse, or the Sicknesse of Sicknesses, as it is indeede. (London, 1630), sig. A4v 17 Although virginity had successfully symbolized and enhanced the queen’s power as a sign of the inviolable state, here it only reminds the reader of the uselessness of her unproductive female body. Rather than accepting the natural penetration of seed to produce an heir, the queen’s body instead allows in disease and sickness, proving its permeability in the negative. For a discussion of the problems the aging queen faced as she tried “to maintain the fiction of her generative power,” see S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, “‘From Myself, My Other Self I Turned’: An Introduction,” in Gloriana’s Face: Women Public and Private in the English Renaissance, eds. Cerasano and Wynne Davies (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 14. 18 Ernest B. Gilman’s reading of this passage in terms similar to mine came to my attention as I was completing this essay; see Plague Writing, 160–61. The personification of death as a sexually aggressive being is not unique to Dekker; see for example, George Withers’s description of “many a lovely Bride, / He hath defloured by the Bridegroomes side” in Britain’s Remembrancer (London, 1628), fol. 126v. Thanks to Rebecca Totaro for this reference. This trope also has a long visual tradition, including Hans Baldung Grien’s well-known Death and the Maiden (c. 1517) in which death kisses a naked woman on the mouth. 19 James himself puns in a similar manner in a letter to the Earl of Northumberland written during Elizabeth’s fi nal illness, where he insists that he will only proceed “as the sonne and righteous aire of England” (Correspondence of King James VI of Scotland, ed. John Bruce [Camden Society, 1861; reprint London: Johnson Reprint Company, 1968], 75). 20 In Thomas Dekker’s Pamphlets, 1603–1609, and Jacobean Popular Literature Frederick O. Waage argues that, despite a tradition of scholarship sug-

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24 25

26 27 28

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gesting there is nothing seditious in Dekker’s pamphlet, this inattention to James would likely have offended authorities (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1977). On Elizabeth’s funeral, see Jennifer Woodward, The Theatre of Death: The Ritual Management of Royal Funerals in Renaissance England, 1570–1625 (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, New York: Boydell Press, 1997), 87–117. For a transcription of the account, written in 1607, and significant discussion of it, see Catherine Loomis, “Elizabeth Southwell’s Manuscript Account of the Death of Queen Elizabeth,” English Literary Renaissance 26, no. 3 (1996): 482–509. In citing “A True Relation of what succeeded at the sickness and death of Queen Elizabeth,” I follow Loomis’s line numbers. Southwell’s text is also included in Elizabeth I and Her Age: Authoritative Texts, Commentary and Criticism, eds. Donald Stump and Susan M. Felch (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), 524–26. For example, in the recent Early Modern Catholicism: An Anthology of Primary Sources, editor Robert S. Miola includes Southwell’s account under “Fiction” ([Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007], 465–68). For a strong counter-argument to historians’ dismissals, as well as a discussion of Southwell’s account, see Montrose, Subject of Elizabeth, 245–47. Loomis suggests that Lady Scrope is a direct source for some things Southwell could not witness herself because Scrope was Southwell’s great-aunt (“Elizabeth Southwell’s Manuscript,” 489). The phrase is associated with Edmund Plowden and is discussed in Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 25. For more on legal defi nitions of treason, as well as how these interact with the imagination, see Rebecca Lemon, Treason by Words: Literature, Law and Rebellion in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), esp. 1–10. Loomis, “Elizabeth Southwell’s Manuscript,” 493. Patricia Phillippy, Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 54–57. Kate Cregan, “Early Modern Anatomy and the Queen’s Body Natural: The Sovereign Subject,” Body & Society 13, no. 2 (2007): 47–66. Cregan is particularly interested in the overlapping technologies of anatomy and cartography. Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks, True Report. Dekker, London Looke Backe, sig. A4. For more on the London Bills of Mortality, please see Erin Sullivan’s essay in this volume. See, for example, Julia M. Walker, “Reading the Tombs of Elizabeth I,” English Literary Renaissance 26, no. 3 (1996): 510–30, and “Bones of Contention: Posthumous Images of Elizabeth and Stuart Politics” in Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana, ed. Julia M. Walker (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 252–76; and Curtis Perry, “The Citizen Politics of Nostalgia: Queen Elizabeth in Early Jacobean London,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23 (1993): 89–111. For more broad considerations of Elizabeth’s posthumous significance, see John Watkins, Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson, England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Thomas Heywood, If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, ed. Madeleine Doran, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Malone Society by J. Johnson at the Oxford University Press, 1935). All citations are from these editions:

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35 36 37

38 39

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Richelle Munkhoff Part I from volume I and Part II from volume II, hereafter cited parenthetically by line number. For a discussion of the play’s popularity, see Teresa Grant, “Drama Queen: Staging Elizabeth in If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody,” The Myth of Elizabeth, eds. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (Basingstoke [England]; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 120. See, for example, Jean E. Howard, “Competing Ideologies of Commerce in Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Part II,” in The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England, ed. Henry S. Turner (New York: Routledge, 2002), 163–82; and Dieter Mehl, “The Late Queen on the Public Stage: Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Parts I and II,” in Queen Elizabeth I: Past and Present, ed. Christa Jansohn (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2004), 153–71. For how these threats, especially from Catholics, were viewed in James’s early reign, see Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies, 48–75. For a reading of the play focused particularly on religious controversy, see Watkins, Representing Elizabeth, 36–55. Watson and Dobson briefly discuss the play’s role in “restoring a royal icon” and its costuming possibilities in England’s Elizabeth, 57; see also Jean E. Howard, “Staging the Absent Woman: The Theatrical Evocation of Elizabeth Tudor in Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part I,” in Women Players in England, 1500–1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage, eds. Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2005), 263–80. Dieter Mehl, “The Late Queen,” 159. Even John Tawney-coat, who does momentarily fear that he shall be undone, is miraculously helped to economic success by the generosity of Hobson; see ll. 1596–1700. We learn later that Tawney-coat is “now an able Citizen late chosen / A Maister of the Hospitall” (ll. 2129–31). On the “productivity of loss” see Valerie Forman, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 1–24. See also Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). The power of Heywood’s message was not lost on later audiences. Teresa Grant argues that “At times of national threat, it seems to have become de rigueur to perform Heywood’s play to reconfigure by recollection England’s military might” (“Drama Queen,” 135–36).

5

“Thinking to pass unknown” Measure for Measure, the Plague, and the Accession of James I James D. Mardock

Any discussion of topical allusions in Measure for Measure seems inevitably to touch upon the idea that the Duke in Shakespeare’s dramatic fiction is somehow, however tangentially, connected to the figure of King James I and his accession in 1603, the year of the play’s composition. Critics, editors, and literary historians have repeatedly qualified strictly occasionalist readings of Measure for Measure as overly reductive—the kind of readings that Richard Levin, issuing a caveat in 1979 against the growing historicist trends in Shakespeare criticism, called the “King James Version” of the play.1 Levin’s careful argument effectively dismissed as inconclusive the echoes of Basilikon Doron that twentieth-century critics had begun to fi nd in Measure for Measure, and he rejected the notion that the play had been written as a politically savvy act of flattery for the new king. Such simplistic intertextual readings of the play as a dramatic exploration of James’s political theory or—even more unlikely—as a political treatise directed at the king, are indeed tiresome, and I have no wish to repeat them here. Rather than dismissing out of hand any connection between James’s accession and Shakespeare’s play, however, I would argue that we can benefit from a reexamination of the coincidence of two cultural phenomena during the course of what Thomas Dekker called the “Wonderful Year” of 1603: the visitation of plague and the accession of James. In the popular consciousness, the reception of Elizabeth I’s successor by his new English subjects was thoroughly colored by, if not swallowed up in, the experience of a virulent outbreak of the bubonic plague. It was during this period of public trauma, the perfect storm of perceived societal upheaval created by the arrival of an unknown foreign king during a devastating pestilence, that Shakespeare composed his comedy. * * * * The persistence in literary studies of the idea of a connection between the new king and Shakespeare’s play is perhaps unsurprising, but that we have largely ignored the plague context is remarkable. Historicism managed to survive Levin’s 1979 attack, of course, and readings of topical allusion in the play have become more careful and nuanced than the reductive arguments of which he complained. What also survived was the even less

114 James D. Mardock rigorous idea that Shakespeare’s Duke Vincentio is a subtle portrait, either approving or critical, of James I in terms of his personality and style of rule. This idea has in turn produced a widespread, but skewed picture of the monarch that we might call the Measure for Measure version of King James. An examination of James’s plague-time arrival in England in 1603 will allow us to understand the survival of this view of the king, and ultimately to offer a more nuanced one. The traditional—and astonishingly long-lived—portrait of James that has proved the most influential in supporting a personality-based connection between James and Vincentio is drawn from seventeenth-century historian Arthur Wilson. In the section of his Life and Reign of King James the First (1653) that deals with King James’s royal entry into London in March 1604, Wilson depicts a king who values privacy above public display and only grudgingly participates in the requisite shows of royal pomp, who “naturally did not love to be looked on”: The King, with the Queen and the Prince . . . rode from the Tower to Whitehall; the City and Suburbs being one great Pageant, wherein he must give his ears leave to suck in their gilded Oratory, though never so nauseous to the stomach. He was not like his Predecessor, the late Queen of famous memory, that with a well-pleased affection met her peoples Acclamation . . . in his publick appearances (especially in his sports) the accesses of the people made him so impatient, that he often dispersed them with frowns, that we may not say with curses. 2 This received view of King James as eternally withdrawn, almost paranoid in his aversion to crowds, has become almost canonical among literary historians keen to delineate a contrast between Elizabethan and Jacobean styles of rule. David Bergeron, for example, betrays the influence of Wilson’s picture of James when he argues that aloofness was to the new king what conspicuous self-display had been to Elizabeth: “James raised to a high art the posture of inscrutability: it exists as a means of defining his power.”3 What is more, Wilson’s portrait seems to accord suggestively well with the sentiments of Measure for Measure’s Viennese duke, with his aversion to performing his rule before unruly crowds of subjects. The key Shakespearean passage, of course, is the duke’s declaration that I love the people, But doe not like to stage me to their eyes: Though it doe well, I doe not rellish well Their lowd applause and Aves vehement. (TLN 76–79)4

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The habit of reading this passage as being directly aimed at Shakespeare’s new patron has a long pedigree, extending at least to 1766, when Thomas Tyrwhitt rather disgustedly claimed that its intent was to “flatter that unkingly weakness of James the fi rst,”5 but it begs too many questions to be sustainable: why would such an association be flattering to the monarch? Would James even notice such a subtle association? Moreover, the Wilson-derived view of James as habitually withdrawn— either for psychological or strategic reasons—is already suspect. Although his view of the king’s reluctance to participate fully in his royal entry ceremony might be partially corroborated by Thomas Dekker’s description of that entertainment, we must take Wilson’s larger implications about James’s personality with a grain of salt.6 Wilson—just eight years old at James’s accession in 1603—was hardly a reliable eyewitness, and his history’s notable anti-Stuart bias was conditioned by his having lived through the civil war. Modern historians have long regarded the Wilsonian portrait of James as an exaggeration. Jenny Wormald, for example, in one of the most valuable correctives to the biases of the traditional English historiography of an agoraphobic King James, traces the negative English views of James to the conflict between English expectations, conditioned by Elizabeth’s ruling style, and the very different style of rule James brought with him from Scotland.7 The boundaries between academic disciplines can be frustratingly impermeable however, and despite repeated caveats from historians against making assumptions about King James’s alleged aversion to his subjects, literary historicists have persisted in the practice. Perhaps the single most influential historicist work on the subject, Jonathan Goldberg’s James I and the Politics of Literature (1983) unproblematically maintains, without citing a source, the orthodox view of James in his 1604 royal entry: “his responses . . . were negative, drawing back from his people . . . displaying boredom and fatigue.”8 Such is the persistence of this Wilsonian historiography and the corollary sense of a parallel to Shakespeare’s Vincentio that 26 years after Goldberg’s book, scholarship on James is still working to counter it.9 Instead of attempting to reify these views of King James’s ruling style and personal predilections toward crowds, which contributes little either to historiography or to our understanding of Measure for Measure, I intend to treat the king’s behavior and its appropriation by his subjects in 1603–4 as a dramatic cultural phenomenon, like Shakespeare’s play, produced in large part by the pressures of the plague. The visitation of 1603 not only infected the population of James’s overcrowded new capital city, but it also formed the primary social and moral context framing the production and performance of both James’s rule and Shakespeare’s play.10 * * * *

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The king’s performance of his royalty was received differently before the country’s experience of the 1603 plague outbreak than afterwards. Without Arthur Wilson’s half-century of hindsight, Elizabethan England’s fi rst encounters with and imaginings of King James seem not to reflect the later picture of royal aloofness. The accounts of James’s royal progress southward from Edinburgh in April 1603 show the king to be quite concerned with displaying his majesty in his own person, with staging himself to the eyes of the people. When Elizabeth breathed her last on March 24, 1603, there was no hesitation on the part of the city to acknowledge James’s right to the throne. The Court of Common Council immediately wrote up a lengthy proclamation of the queen’s death and the king’s succession, taking some pains to establish James’s legal claim, and had it printed on a broadside for public distribution.11 The Court of Aldermen, the more elite branch of the city government, took care of other matters. Queen Elizabeth had died in debt to the Corporation of London to the tune of £60,000, and the aldermen, perhaps more urgently because they were conscious of the expenses that the coronation ceremonies would incur, began to petition the new king for repayment of the debt, a petition they would repeat with increasing frequency over the following months.12 The city’s anxiety over royal debts was no doubt compounded by the absence of the king himself. The ordering of new liveries for the mayor, the aldermen, and the citizenry would cost money, as would the commissioning of pageants to be written and triumphal arches to be built. The return on this investment would be the ostentatious display of London’s importance and place in the government of the nation, as they ritually asserted their ancient right to approve and appoint a new king. Before the city could take on this role however, the king had to appear—and James was in no particular hurry. He had had his own capital city for years, and on March 31, 1603, a week after Elizabeth’s death, it was Edinburgh and not London that saw the fi rst civic entertainment for James. After making an oration of farewell to the burgesses and people of that city, his Majestie with great solemnitie and pompe, was proclaimed King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, at the Market Crosse of Edenbrugh, in presence of the whole Officers of Estate of the Realm, and many of the Nobilitie of Scotland, and sundry Knights and Gentlemen of England. And in the evening of that day, there were many hundreds of Bonefi res made all about the Citie, with great feasting and merriment held, till the appearing of the next day.13 James’s geographical perspective was not that of London; to him the North was not a provincial hinterland but the heart of his new realm, and his long progress south during the month of April made it clear that his top priority was not maintaining the traditional ritual of exchanged affi rmation of

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authority with the government of London—the capital city of what had only recently been a foreign power. The aldermen hastily made plans for the king’s arrival, ordering new liveries for their retinue and arranging for heralds to determine the correct order of precedence for the citizenry at the coronation ceremony at Westminster. James forestalled their royal welcome by taking his own time in making his way to London. The king’s postponement of the inevitable ceremonies in the capital did not stem from personal antipathy to public entertainment, as Arthur Wilson’s account would suggest. On the contrary, James, like Elizabeth, knew the role of royal spectacle in marking the beginning of his reign, and he made his trip southward a series of royal entries that would culminate, not begin and end, with the London entertainment. The pattern of his leisurely progress from town to town was quickly established, and again, it belies the traditional view of James. At each stop, he enjoyed the reception of the local civic government, did public devotion at a central church, pardoned prisoners, made knights, heard petitions, and inspected his military. The fi rst of several royal entries mentioned by Thomas Millington in his description of this progress was at Berwick, significantly a border town whose considerable fortifications had been rendered unnecessary by James’s peaceful unification of Scotland and England. Here the king enjoyed a display of the town’s ordnance, even going so far as to fi re off a cannon shot from the walls himself.14 When the council wrote to convince James of the need to come to London quickly and—like Duke Vincentio—“in privat manner,” James refused, citing the need to make a royal entry into York so as not to disrespect that city.15 This entry, although not as lavish as the London entry would be, was nevertheless spectacular. The officials of York’s civic government met him according to their degree at the outermost bounds of their respective jurisdictions, with the Sheriffs greeting him at the extremes of the city’s liberties and the mayor and his retinue at the gates. During his progress to York Minster, the city’s conduits ran with claret, and the king voluntarily made himself a spectacle by refusing a coach to walk to the Minster, “for,” as he declared, “the people are desirous to see a King, and so they shall, for they shall as well see his body as his face.”16 James’s leisurely pace, and his insistence that his time in the North was necessary, was viewed with some concern in the South, but for reasons having little to do with the king’s personality. An empty English throne carried the perennial threat of civil war, and the king’s continued absence appeared to threaten the continuity of succession. John Chamberlain’s brief letter on April 12th attests to English anxiety that spring, complaining that “We have no certaintie where the King is.”17 An anonymous balladeer captures the popular sentiment and warns of barely contained discontent, pleading, “O noble King to England haste. . . . For nothing now breedes our despight / but that we want our Prince his sight.”18 Protocol dictated that Queen Elizabeth could not be buried until the arrival of her successor, and

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her corpse continued to lie in state at Whitehall for more than a month, an increasingly inadequate substitute for the living king’s body. For the balladeer, “though her Corpse be wrapped in Lead”—and allegedly the queen’s decomposing body burst its cerements and began to offend despite these wrappings19 —“King James is hee by whose sweete breath / wee still possesse Queene Elizabeth.” The symbolic continuity of royalty, crucial to the popular sense of national well-being, and here imagined to pass like breath from one royal body to another, is gravely threatened by lack of the king’s physical presence. James, remaining in York, eventually breached tradition further by sending instructions to the Privy Council to bury Elizabeth without him; nevertheless, if this was a misstep, which understandably fueled popular anxiety, it came not from his aversion to ceremonial self-display but from his insistence on spreading such ceremonies around. When, in early May 1603, the king fi nally arrived in the vicinity of London, the anticipation of his arrival had reached a fevered pitch, but it was tinged with anxiety, partly due to the temporary increase in population that his visit occasioned. The novelty of the fi rst king in 50 years drew unprecedented crowds, and in mid May the Venetian ambassador noted 100,000 temporary visitors to London—an increase of more than a third of the city’s population—and assemblies of more than 40,000 at court. 20 Such anxiety is apparent from contemporary accounts, but contrary to what we might expect from traditional descriptions of the king’s temperament, it is not readily apparent in the king himself. When James took up residence at Theobalds, Sir Robert Cecil’s house in Essex, he found the estate crowded with well-wishers. John Savile, in his printed account of James’s stay at Theobalds, repeatedly expresses his indignation over the unruly crowds, both noble and vulgar, that thronged to his majesty. Eventually he gives up his attempts to count the mob, and complains about their ruining the entertainments planned for the king by their very mass. 21 Remarkably, however, the multitudes do not seem to have troubled the king unduly; indeed, to satisfy the sight of the people “hee showed himselfe openly, out of his chamber window, by the space of halfe an houre together.”22 On May 7, the king fi nally made a ceremonial approach to London, meeting the mayor and aldermen on Stamford Hill and receiving from them the keys to the city. On May 11, as Elizabeth had done before her coronation, James rode from the Charterhouse through Aldersgate into London, thence to Whitehall and onto a barge, in which he was rowed to the Tower. But this was to be the only public ceremonial interaction between the king and the city in the whole of 1603. With the warmer weather and the overcrowded city, a new hindrance to the coronation entry had begun to rear its head: the plague. The visitation of the plague that summer would lead to a turning point in James’s relationship with his English subjects, and it was the coincidence of the plague with the king’s arrival that lay the groundwork for the Measure for Measure version of King James, the enduring perception of a temperament common to the new monarch and Shakespeare’s fictional duke.

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* * * * During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, England was never truly free from plague; the disease always present, at the least in rodent populations, with a mortality crisis in the human population occurring roughly once a decade.23 Because of James’s accession, however, the summer of 1603 was a special case. By early May, when James reached London, the weekly death rate from plague in the city had risen to a troubling ten. It would peak in the week of September 1st, when 3,000 died. In all, over 30,000 in London and the vicinity would die of the infection over the course of 1603, making it the worst civic visitation for a decade, and “the deadliest in absolute numbers,” as Charles Mullett notes, “since the fourteenth century,” although the royal court and London’s government were slow to take notice.24 During the summer, while the civic government kept levying funds for the construction of triumphal arches, as well as for the erection of railings along the parade route and the gravelling of the streets, the rising mortality rates made the possibility of a July coronation entry seem more and more remote. The costs of these old ceremonies continued to mount, as well. In early July, the Common Council was still levying hundreds of pounds from the guilds and disbursing them for “the fynishing of the pageauntes, shores, and railings of the streetes on bothe sydes from the Tower to the Temple Barr.”25 In spite of this, hopes remained high that the coronation would go forward as planned: as late as June 28, in a week wherein plague claimed 158 Londoners, Dudley Carleton writes that although the legal term had been adjourned, “the Coronation holds at the appointed time, which shall be performed with much solemnity and all the old ceremonies observed.”26 Within just more than a week, however, the plan was altered. On July 6, James issued a royal proclamation ordering the city to “deferre all shewe of State and Pompe accustomed by our Progenitors.”27 The coronation ceremony itself would go forward at Westminster Abbey, albeit with the retinues of nobles attending greatly restricted. London’s government was not entirely excluded from the proceedings—a total of 39 citizens, including the Lord Mayor and aldermen, would attend—but their minimal representation constituted a snub to civic dignity. After the proclamation, the Court of Common Council raised yet more money and formed more committees to organize the dismantling and storage of the triumphal pageants they had painstakingly built for James. 28 There were few able bodies to dismantle them, and the pageants remaining along the processional route seemed to mock London’s aspirations, as John Chamberlain documents on July 10: Powles growes very thin, for every man shrinckes away and I am half ashamed to see myself left alone. Our pageants are prettely forward but most of them are such small timbred gentlemen that they cannot last long and I doubt yf the plague cease not the sooner they will rot and sincke where they stand. 29

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The anthropomorphic metaphor is telling. Chamberlain, the last gentleman in his circle remaining in the city, draws a parallel between the temporary architecture of the royal entry, themselves “small timbred gentlemen,” and the diseased and dwindling population around him. The plague of 1603 seemed to have been aimed not just at the people of London but specifically at their celebration for James, and popular literature inevitably, if delicately, linked the arrival of the new king to the arrival of the pestilence. The poet Henry Petowe, in his England’s Caesar (an understandably dejected sort of panegyric on James’s coronation), makes this sense of divine cancellation of the royal entry explicit. If for Petowe it is God and not the king himself who has prevented the royal entry, James is still implicated in the divine judgment. “Now London feels thy scourge,” Petowe prays: She wants her Sov’raigne, which procures her smart, His sight would lull her in her joyes asleepe. But thou say’st no; for by thy mighty hand, What she and hers intended to performe; In James his honour, thou dost countermand.30 Such poetic formulations of divine causality are not uncommon in times of plague and other natural disasters and are hardly surprising in this instance; the two most important immigrants to London in 1603—the new king and the plague—were both divinely ordained, and the visitation of both at once, it seemed, could hardly be coincidental. The response of the printers of literary ephemera certainly seems to tie the two events together: in one day—August 1, in a week that saw 1,922 plague deaths in London31—two different ballad printers each registered one ballad on the coronation and one lamentation on the plague. The epitome of such ephemera, Thomas Dekker’s proto-journalistic pamphlet The Wonderful Year, which he brought out to commemorate the common man’s view of both the accession and the plague (and to make up for his pecuniary disappointment while his role as designer of the royal entry was postponed), is by turns moving, patriotic, grimly funny, and bitterly satirical. Among its many vivid passages is a description of the plague’s arrival in the metaphorical terms of siege warfare; having pitched its tents in the suburbs, the disease finally breaches the walls and infects London proper. Here Dekker’s metaphor subtly and remarkably turns to the kind of civic pageantry intended for King James: the Plague’s “purple colours were presently (with the sound of Bow Bell instead of a trumpet) advaunced, and joynd to the Standard of the Citie; he marched even thorow Cheapside, and the capital streets of Troynovant.”32 In Dekker’s conceit, the plague prevents the royal entry, but it embarks on its own processional pageant down the traditional ceremonial thoroughfare. In Dekker’s macabre substitution, the plague performs publicly as king in the mytho-historical city of New Troy.33

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London’s dismay, both at the governmental and popular level, is understandable. They had awaited the arrival of the new king for months and spent thousands on preparation for his triumph only to be hit with plague and have their efforts deferred by a monarch now becoming justifiably reclusive. The 1603 plague and James’s response to it began to establish the popular perception of James’s attitude toward his subjects that Arthur Wilson would later portray. In August, the court began a continual progress as an attempt to protect the royal family, but as Sir Thomas Edmonds wrote in a letter of August 10 to the Earl of Shrewsbury, this attempt was counterproductive and even dangerous in itself: “The Court hath ben so contynuallie haunted wth the sicknes, by reason of the disorderlie companie that doe followe us, as we are forced to remove from place to place, and doe infect all places where we come.”34 As the correspondence of courtiers like Edmonds makes clear, the pressures of the plague began to cause the English perception of the king to sour, at least in some circles. The Privy Council at least, if not the whole of the “disorderlie companie” Edmonds describes, was required to remain accessible to the king, who with the queen, her ladies of the privy chamber, and a handful of Scottish advisors remained otherwise invisible to the people at large. Principal secretary Robert Cecil complained with outrage on September 17 that “neyther Chamberlain, nor one English Counsailor, have a room.”35 The bulk of the royal household and the remainder of the court resided in tents at the outskirts of the estates, where inadequate quarantine and hygenic conditions even worse than usual guaranteed that “our camp volant,” as Cecil called it, “every week dislodgeth.”36 While more and more affairs of state mounted—the Spanish ambassador, for example, was put off for weeks as his retinue sickened and died—the repeated withdrawal of the king, even in the absence of any alternative, came to seem intolerable. The king and his court could only stay in one place, wrote Cecil, as long as ye Plague can escape us, which drives us [up] and down so rownd as I think we shall come to York. God bless the King; for once a week one or other dyes in our Tentes. This place is unholsom, all ye house standing upon springs.37 * * * * It is possible, even probable, that the “disorderlie companie”—the mob of tent-dwelling courtiers, councilors, gawkers, and hangers-on that skirted and besieged the stripped-down royal household in the latter half of 1603— would have included Shakespeare’s playing company, the newly renamed King’s Men. As the company, now transferred to royal patronage, had been ordered to be in attendance at court from early August, it seems likely that it took part in this evasive royal progress. The playhouses had been closed for the bulk of the year, and although players would entertain at court over the Christmas season, their playing schedule would have been considerably light, and it was perhaps from this liminal position, withdrawn from

122 James D. Mardock London but submerged in a plague-scared population, that Shakespeare fi rst drafted Measure for Measure. If so, then the conditions in which the play was written justify our reading it as an occasional piece, without having to resort to arguments about James’s personal attitude to his subjects, which were in a state of apparent flux, and to which, at any rate, Shakespeare clearly had no access. The contexts of 1603–4 London, with its removed court, its absent ruler, and its disease-afflicted city spaces, with an unruly populace left to the ineffectual control of civic deputies, are certainly reflected in the Vienna of the play. The device of a withdrawn duke in Measure for Measure has less to do with any comment about James than with the dramatic vogue for plays about disguised rulers begun with Marston’s popular The Malcontent (1603), which the King’s Men had prepared to play before James at court that winter.38 What sets Shakespeare’s play apart from other disguised-duke dramas is its thematic concern about spatial restriction, confi nement, and the imposition of order on unruly populations. Like Isabella, who “wish[es] a more strict restraint” upon the convent in which she seeks to confi ne herself (TLN 352), London’s civic government in 1603—following the plague orders that the Privy Council had printed in 1578 and renewed for each visitation—had an imperative to impose order upon its public and private spaces. The infection required all afflicted persons and their families to be kept in their homes and out of public haunts. Starting in April, strict measures had been taken to restrict the movements of London’s inhabitants, with watches appointed to keep the stricken in their place. Rogues, vagabonds, and others who had no place were rounded up and sent to Bridewell prison.39 Throughout the summer, royal proclamations restricted or postponed public assemblies, adjourned the legal term, and cancelled annual fairs. In Measure for Measure, of course, the duke apparently abdicates his rule, leaving responsibility for enforcing the “strict Statutes . . . Which for this foureteene yeares, we have let slip” (TLN 309–11) in the hands of the precisian Angelo, and the comedy’s plot is driven by the moral dilemma occasioned by Angelo’s excessively enthusiastic application of the “needfull bits” (TLN 310) to the city’s unruly populace, as exemplified in the person of Claudio, sentenced to die for fornication for impregnating his betrothed before legally affi rming their marriage. But Angelo does not only attempt to assert control over the sexual behavior of Vienna’s citizens, an attempt that, as Pompey casually points out, is doomed unless he plans to “geld and splay all the youth of the City” (TLN 676–77). Angelo also exerts control over the spaces of the city, and in this he is more lastingly successful. The fi rst real public outrage at Angelo’s regime is a reaction to the deputy’s act of civic spatial control, the “proclamation” that “All howses in the Suburbs of Vienna must bee pluck’d downe” (TLN 184–86). Whereas Claudio’s arrest for fornication causes some little concern in his friend Lucio, the destruction of the houses in the suburbs provokes a fervent, if ironic, cry of

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dismay from Mistress Overdone that registers Angelo’s threat to individual and state alike: “Why heere’s a change indeed in the Commonwealth: what shall become of me?” (TLN 193–94). As J.W. Lever suggests, Angelo’s fictional proclamation ordering the destruction of Viennese buildings may well be an allusion to King James’s historical proclamation restricting building in London, issued on September 16 during the king’s continued seclusion from the royal palace of Woodstock.40 Although the proclamation is a reprise of several Elizabethan acts, its rhetoric is specific to the 1603 plague, and it is worth quoting at some length: Whereas . . . the great confluence and accesse of excessive numbers of idle, indigent, dissolute and dangerous persons, And the pestering of many of them in small and strait roomes and habitations in the Citie of London, and in and about the Suburbes of the same, have bene one of the chiefest occasions of the great Plague and mortality, which hath . . . most dangerously overspread, and infected very many principall, and other parts of this Realme, (which Almighty God cease at his good pleasure) His Majestie . . . doth straightly prohibite and forbid, That no new Tenant or Inmate, or other person or persons, be admitted to inhabite or reside in any such house or place in the saide Citie, Suburbes, or within foure miles of the same, which have bene so infected, during the continuance of this Plague and mortalitie. . . . And that such of the said Roomes, Houses, or places as . . . are ordered or appointed to be rased or pulled downe, shall foorthwith . . . be rased or pulled downe accordingly.41 The euphemistically neutral “howses in the Suburbs” to be plucked down in Shakespeare’s Vienna are brothels, of course, not the overcrowded tenements that James’s proclamation tried ineffectually to control, but whether the threat to the “principall” parts of the realm is plague, as in London, or pox (and the behavior that spreads it), as in Vienna, the order from an absent ruler to pluck down suburban houses of dissolution and disease establishes an irresistible parallel. Indeed, the fact that the 1603 proclamation does not mention brothels suggests an ideologically discursive project in Shakespeare’s adaptation of his contemporary contexts. Measure for Measure constructs, in Vincentio’s Vienna, a recognizable, but highly artificial and safer version of James’s London. In a social and cultural environment wherein popular associations between the visit of the plague and the visit of the king had become nearly inescapable, however dangerous, Shakespeare presents a situation at the same time parallel and alien by sexualizing the disease that affl icts his fictional city, shifting the emphasis from plague to pox.42 By drawing a parallel in his play to the crisis of 1603, and then substituting a poxy city for a plaguey one, Shakespeare removes any possible link between the divinely

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appointed ruler and the divinely sent disease. He avoids creating a dangerously ambivalent discursive space in which disturbing connections could be drawn between the disease and the behavior of the ruler. Pox, after all, for all the mystery of its sudden appearance in Europe in the late fifteenth century, is a disease with a clear cause, or at least an obvious method of contagion. Where a plague epidemic is presumably ascribable to divine disfavor, the source of that disfavor remains distressingly unknowable and susceptible to association with any major event in the vicinity—the death of a queen or the accession of a foreign king, for example.43 Pox, on the other hand, ascribable only to the very visible sin of fornication, is almost comfortingly knowable and controllable. Shakespeare’s play establishes an artificial, but comforting, alternative to the uncertain relationship among king, city, and populace in 1603. James may or may not have been blameworthy in vanishing from the public eye in the face of the crisis, leaving his ill-equipped deputies in the London civic government to go about the sticky business of quarantine and space-management, but Measure for Measure has no claim to make on the subject. Shakespeare’s play is not concerned with flattering or critiquing the king, or with responding to an anachronistic sense of his personality, but it does explore London’s experience of and uncertain reaction to the display and exertion of royal power in an uncertain urban environment of epidemic disease. * * * * By the following spring, in early March of 1604, public perceptions of King James had begun to harden into the portrait that Arthur Wilson would draw of a king now unable, like Vincentio, to relish loud applause and aves vehement. The king and his household had moved into the Tower of London in anticipation of the rescheduled royal entry, now set to commemorate not the coronation but the opening of James’s fi rst parliament. The plague had closed the theaters for months, and the King’s Men, forced like the court to withdraw from the public eye, had spent the winter playing exclusively for court audiences.44 Although Measure for Measure would not see such a court performance until the following November, it is likely that James had seen the company play Marston’s Malcontent or another of the popular “disguised duke” plays it had spawned. Perhaps inspired by such dramas, perhaps simply stir crazy after months of isolation, James and Queen Anne attempted to visit the Royal Exchange incognito, “for their recreation, and thinkeing to passe unknowne.”45 Gilbert Dugdale, a Chester pamphleteer in London to watch his kinsman Robert Armin march in livery as a member of the King’s Men, gives an account of the visit, and as he relates, their attempt at subterfuge was predictably compromised: the wylie multitude perceiving something, began with such hurly burly, to run up and downe with such unreverent rashnes, as the people of the

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Exchange were glad to shut the staire dores to keepe them out, heare they lost the pleasing sight they might have enjoyde but for their rashnes. when his Highnes had beheld the Marchantes from a Windowe all below in the walkes not thinking of his comming, whose presence else would have binne more, they like so many pictures civilly seeming all [b]are, stood silent, modestie commanding them so to doe, which sight so delighted the King, that he greatly commended them saying: he was never more delighted then seeing so many of divers and sundry Nations so well ordred and so civill one with the other, but with all discommended the rudenes of the Multitude, who regardles of time place or person will be so troublesome. (sig. B1v) It would be tempting, but simplistic, to deduce from this anecdote that King James had become the Measure for Measure version of the monarch that Arthur Wilson handed down to posterity or even to reverse the causality of the old argument: James imitating a Vincentio (or Malevole) rather than Vincentio as a reflection of James. Such a deduction would be spurious: it is as impossible for an early modern monarch as it is for a plague visitation literally to “passe unknowne,” but like the agency behind the pestilence, the subjectivity of the king does remain unknown, and fundamentally unknowable. James’s visit to the Exchange, like Measure for Measure, says less about the king’s personality, attitudes, or ruling style than it does about the city of London and the practice of appropriation. As with Shakespeare’s play, we benefit from reading Dugdale’s account of the would-be disguised king in the deeper context of a London populace reeling from the plague.

Notes 1 See Richard Levin, New Readings vs. Old Plays: Recent Trends in the Reinterpretation of English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 171–93. 2 Arthur Wilson, The History of Great Britain, Being the Life and Reign of King James the First (London, 1653), 12–13. In the proem to his history, Wilson apologizes for even daring to write about a king during the interregnum, and his audience’s anti-Stuart bias may be one reason why the human portrait of James sometimes seems biased in favor of grumpiness and foible. Wilson wants to portray majesty, but whether out of a sense of fairness or the spirit of the times, his portrait can err sometimes on the side of roughness. 3 David Bergeron, Royal Family, Royal Lovers (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 47. 4 Citations of Shakespeare are taken from the fi rst folio of 1623 and use Charlton Hinman’s system of through line numbering (TLN) of the folio text. See The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare, prepared by Charlton Hinman, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1996). Original spelling of early modern texts has been retained with the exception of u/v and i/j regularization. 5 Thomas Tyrwhitt, Observations and Conjectures upon some Passages of Shakespeare (Oxford, 1766), 36.

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6 See Thomas Dekker, The Magnificent Entertainment (1604); Richard Dutton’s edition of the royal entry texts and description of their historical contexts in Jacobean Civic Pageantry (Stafford: Keele University Press, 1995); and my recent discussion of the event in Our Scene is London: Ben Jonson’s City and the Space of the Author (New York: Routledge, 2008), 42–44. 7 Jenny Wormald, “James VI and I: Two Kings or One?” History 68 (1983): 187–209. 8 Wormald’s review of Goldberg’s book, incidentally, criticizes its many historical inaccuracies (History 70 [1985]: 128–30). 9 See, for example, Jane Rickard’s excellent Authorship and Authority: The Writings of James VI and I (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). 10 Catherine I. Cox’s recent essay, “‘Lord Have Mercy Upon Us’: The King, the Pestilence, and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure,” Exemplaria 20 (2008): 430–57, provides an extended, often fascinating close reading of Measure for Measure through the lens of the English plague experience. Cox goes further than any other critic in fi nding specific references to pestilence and disease control in the play—in the Duke’s traditionally sententious “Be absolute for death,” speech (447), in Isabella’s kneeling for mercy (448), and even in Angelo’s name, in which she fi nds a reference to James’s use of the “Angel” coin to cure scrofula. Her argument betrays the traditional assumptions of James’s ruling personality that I hope to critique, however, and it maintains the familiar argument that Shakespeare’s play is “a compliment to James” (451), rather than, as I argue, a product of the plague experience that arose in parallel to James’s performance of kingship. 11 Journal of the Court of Common Council, xxvi, fol. 73–74. 12 Repertory of the Court of Aldermen, xxvi, pt. 1, fol. 120v. In February 1604 James was still writing to the City asking them to accept a delay in repayment (State Papers Domestic, vi, 50), and the inherited debt was not entirely repaid until 1608, by which time James had received two more loans from the Corporation of London. For details, see Robert Ashton, The Crown and the Money Market 1603–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 114–18. 13 T[homas] M[illington], The true narration of the entertainment of his Royall Maiestie (London, 1603), sig. B4r. 14 Thomas Millington, true narration, sig. C2v–C3r. 15 John Nichols, The Progresses, Processions, and Magnifi cent Festivities of King James the First, 4 vols. (London: J.B. Nichols, 1828), 1.121. 16 Millington, true narration, sig. D3r. 17 John Chamberlain, Letters, ed. Norman McClure, 2 vols (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), 1.192. 18 “An excellent new Ballad shewing the Petigree of our Royall King Iames” (London, 1603). 19 The symbolic implications of this historically dubious event, narrated by Elizabeth Southwell, one of the ladies in waiting attendant upon the queen’s corpse, are discussed at length by Richelle Munkhoff in this volume. 20 See also Great Britain, Public Record Office, Calendar of State Papers and manuscripts relating to English affairs, existing in the Archives and collections of Venice, and in other libraries of Northern Italy; ed. by Rawdon Brown [and others], 1202–1675 (London: Longman, 1864–1947): 10.33. On the population of London in 1603, see Roger Finlay’s Population and Metropolis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), which provides an extended discussion of the evidence and analysis of the demography of early modern London and synthesizes the population estimates of several

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21

22 23

24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

127

reliable historians, especially Appendix 1 (155–57). Using the number of recorded baptisms and allowing for under-recording, Finlay estimates the population of the city in 1603 at between 144,000 and 167,000 (155). On the king’s passage to the Charterhouse, for example, Savile complains that the singing of the children of Christ’s Church Hospital was “all displaced by reason of the rudenesse of such a multitude,” and that “the shouts and clamours were so great, that one could scarce hear another speake” (sig. B3r). John Savile, King Iames his entertainment at Theobalds (London, 1603), sig. B1v. As Rebecca Totaro points out, scholars had until recently overlooked this frequency, producing narratives that focus on the well-documented bookends (the black death of the mid-fourteenth century and the great plague of 1665–66), but notable exceptions are Charles F. Mullett’s monumental study, The Bubonic Plague and England (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1956) and J.F.D. Shrewsbury’s A History of Bubonic Plague in the British Isles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) as well as biographies by Shakespeare scholars. See Totaro, Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005), especially 1–8, 26–36. As Mullett notes, this hesitation had much to do with the changeover of monarchial authority; many earlier Elizabethan plague orders still had force, and local officials “at fi rst felt less compulsion to frame new ones” (105). The bills of mortality for 1603 record a total of 30,561 plague burials for London and the out-parishes, although the latter were only included in totals from July 14 onward (see the British Library’s Collection of Bills of Mortality, 1603, BL 74/C. 160 C.10). These bills are the best records for the numbers of plague deaths that we have, although as Paul Slack argues, bills of mortality are not wholly reliable—dependent as they are on fallible parish burial records for numbers and the opinion of locally appointed “searchers of the dead” for cause of death—and plague deaths are likely under-recorded (The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003], 149–50). Even a low estimate of 30,000 plague deaths would be evidently devastating, given that it represents, according to Roger Finlay’s numbers, about 18–21 percent of London’s 1603 population. For an excellent discussion of the role of these usually female, usually old, officially expendable “searchers,” see Richelle Munkhoff, “Searchers of the Dead: Authority, Marginality, and the Interpretation of Plague in England, 1574–1665,” Gender & History 11 (1999): 1–29. Journal of the Court of Common Council, xxvi, fol. 163. Nichols, Progresses, 1.190. Stuart Royal Proclamations: Royal Proclamations of King James I 1603– 1625, eds. James Larkin and Paul Hughes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 38. Journal of the Court of Common Council, xxvi, fol. 186. Chamberlain, Letters, 1.195. Henry Petowe, England’s Cæsar (London, 1603), sig. D1r. F.P. Wilson, The Plague in Shakespeare’s London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 93. Thomas Dekker, The Wonderful Year (London, 1603), sig. D1v. Robert Maslen points out that rather than criticizing London’s citizens and its government as would Dekker’s later plague pamphlets like A rod for run-awayes (1625), this early work focuses instead on the plague itself,

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34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42

43

anthropomorphizing it into “a flesh-eating lord of misrule” (introduction to News from Gravesend, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds. Taylor and Lagavino [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008], 128–29). I would add that this trope in the pamphlet responds not only to the medieval misrule tradition in general but to the specific contexts of the royal entry. See also G.R. Hibbard’s introduction to Three Elizabethan Pamphlets (New York: Harrap & Co., 1951). Nichols, Progresses, 1.258. Letter to the Earl of Shrewsbury, in Nichols, Progresses, 1. 273. Nichols, Progresses, 1.272. Ibid. See Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Playing Companies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 352. Repertory of the Court of Aldermen, xxvi, pt. 1, fol. 124v; Journal of the Court of Common Council, xxvi, fol. 78v, 82r, 82v. See also Mullett, Bubonic Plague, 110–11. Slack (Impact, 207–16) gives a detailed history of the evolution of London’s plague-time control measures. The national plague orders were locally enforced and had the force of statute only with the Plague Act of 1604, a law possibly occasioned by James I’s experience of the plague in 1603 (see Slack, Impact, 211, and Shrewsbury, History of Bubonic Plague, 186, 262). See Lever’s introduction to his Arden edition of Measure for Measure (London: Methuen, 1965), xxxii–xxxiii. Larkin and Hughes, eds., Stuart Royal Proclamations, 47–48, emphasis mine. The plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries almost never mention plague in a literal sense, let alone depict the disease onstage, but as Paula Berggren demonstrates in this volume, characters commonly employ the word figuratively, as some variant of the oath “plague on’t.” In Measure for Measure, however, Shakespeare studiously avoids the word plague and its variants even as oaths, although the less common use of “pox” as an oath appears twice in the play: Barnardine’s “A pox o’your throats” (TLN 2101), and Lucio’s “show your knaves visage with a poxe to you” (2734). Vienna’s signature disease is pox, not plague, and the bawdy opening of the play’s second scene is a veritable punning catalogue of syphilitic symptoms and their remedies: lesions, scabs, sciatica, hollow bones, velvet patches, and sweating tubs. It has long been the contention of the Oxford Middleton editors that the relevant passage of Measure for Measure 1.2 was added by Middleton in 1621. See Gary Taylor and John Jowett, Shakespeare Reshaped 1606–1623 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 101n., 164–65; and Jowett’s introduction in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds. Taylor and Lavagnino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1542–43. We should therefore perhaps be careful about using the scene’s catalogue of pox symptoms as evidence. For what it is worth, it should be noted that Middleton also lived through the 1603 plague, and that he was, like Dekker, involved in London’s festivities for James, having contributed a 60-line speech to one of the central pageants of the royal entry. It is perhaps relevant that Shakespeare’s previous play, Troilus and Cressida, entered in the Stationer’s Register in early 1603 well before the infection had reached crisis levels, contains “plague” and its variants eleven times, either as oaths or as nonspecific divine punishments on Troy—a use of “plague” that would have begged difficult political and moral questions in the contemporary London context had the play been performed after the visitation.

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44 After receiving their royal patent in May 1603, the King’s Men spent the summer touring in the west and in East Anglia, but were required to attend the royal court between August 9 and 27 (Gurr, Shakespearean Playing Companies, 304), a period during which the king’s household relocated nine times, as documented in Nichols. A royal performance was ordered on December 2 at Lord Pembroke’s house in Wilton, Wiltshire, one of the three locations where court was held on a rotating basis during the autumn. During the winter, the company gave eight more plays there for James and one for Prince Henry, a larger number than Elizabeth had ever called for during such a period. See E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 2.209–10. 45 Gilbert Dugdale, The Time Triumphant (London, 1604), sig. B1v.

Part III

Performances, Playhouses, and the Sites of Re-Creation

6

“Sweet recreation barred” The Case for Playgoing in Plague-Time Nichole DeWall

In “‘You Need Not Fear Not The House’: The Absence of Plague in The Alchemist,” Patrick Phillips explains part of the role played by the early modern theater in plague-time, commenting specifically on the purpose of Ben Jonson’s popular play: by creating a plague comedy Jonson provided viewers with a form of mirth that had the power to purge “bad conceits” and replace them with a healthy, health-preserving image of a plague-less London. In the end, it was this medicinal function that made the trip to the theatre worth the risk: the promise of a “wholesome remedy” for the unavoidable and potentially fatal fear that gripped almost everyone as the sickness grew hot in 1610.1 In this paper, I establish the broader context for Phillips’s claims regarding the healing power of mirth in plague-time, demonstrating their less than certain acceptance in early modern England, especially among antitheatricalists who in plague-time had as much at stake as dramatists when it came to the interpretation of plays, playhouses, and the practice of playgoing. In the fi rst section of this essay, I consider antitheatricalists’ appropriations of plague-time anxieties in their own tracts where they used the threat of plague to argue for the permanent closing of theaters that they believed spread it. Turning in section two to an investigation of the consequences of plague-time trauma manifested particularly as fear and melancholy, I then proceed in section three to consider the salubrious role of the playhouse in the lives of individuals who were living in the shadow of the plague. In the final section, the complexities of categorizing theatrical experience emerge in a critique of the antitheatricalist commonplace that legitimized the linking of plague and the playhouse. * * * * Contrary to claims that because antitheatricalists were reliant upon classical and scriptural precedents, their tracts afford little insight into their immediate environment, Jonas Barish reminds us that these writers were

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not “merely witlessly parroting their ancestors.”2 In other words, antitheatricalists shaped their texts in ways that would resonate in their local contexts. It is telling, for example, that as early as John Northbrooke’s A Treatise against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes, with Other Idle Pastimes in 1577, antitheatrical tracts exploit with variety and vigor the rhetorical potential of the bubonic plague, and a brief survey of these tracts demonstrates the persistent employment of the plague trope. For both Anthony Munday in A Second and Third Blast of Retreat (1580) and Stephen Gosson in Plays Confuted in Five Acts (1582), for example, the playhouse is the “chair of pestilence”; for William Prynne in Histrio-mastix. The players scourge, or, actors tragædie, divided into two parts (1633), it is “a pestiferous Fish-pond.”3 Players are “so noisome a pestilence to infect a commonwealth” in John Northbrooke’s A Treatise.4 Both the theater’s and the plague’s spectacular modes of transmission made warnings like William Rankins’s against the “infectious sight of playes” pervasive in antitheatrical discourse.5 Plague language was such a fi xture in antitheatricalist discourse that it elicited this response from Philip Sidney to Stephen Gosson’s The School of Abuse (1579): “the most important imputations laid to the poor poets [is] that [poetry] is the Nurse of abuse; infecting many pestilent desires.”6 This reference to the plague is indirect but it is drawn from the discourse employed by antitheatricalists who used both literal and figurative statements about the plague to blast the theaters and theatergoers. Antitheatricalists relied on the argument that common stage plays and playhouses were evidence of and an invitation to sin “infecting” those “pestilent desires.” Perhaps it is because the trope was so apt that there is little correlation between the number of plague references in any particular antitheatrical tract and the proximity of its publication date to an outbreak. The plague trope is just as prevalent in John Rainold’s The Overthrow of Stage-Plays, written during 1599 when the plague was not raging, as it is in Henry Crosse’s Virtue’s Commonwealth, written during the devastating outbreak of 1603. Antitheatricalists’ consistent use of the plague trope both during and between outbreaks also testifies to the intertextual nature of their discourse: that is, later antitheatricalists employed plague imagery because earlier ones did.7 Certainly the plague proved an irresistible subject and sign to antitheatrical writers who assured their readers that whereas all disease was a result of The Fall and mankind’s sinfulness, the plague in particular carried with it religious significance more potent than any other bodily affliction. For those familiar with its Latin, Greek, and Hebrew origins, the word for plague could mean at once “blow,” as in a punishment, and “word,” referring to the justified word of God’s judgment, as Ernest B. Gilman explains in Plague Writing in Early Modern England. 8 Scripturally speaking, the plague had always been an instrument of God’s wrath, and antitheatricalists argued not only that attendance at the playhouses provoked outbreaks but that the avoidance of theatrical entertainments

“Sweet recreation barred” 135 promised immediate cessation of the horrific plague. In a passage worth quoting in full, Prynne explains, If then the inhibiting of publike Stage-playes hath beene such a common antidote to asswage those fearefull Plagues, which God in justice hath inflicted on us; we may then conclude from the rule of contraries, that our resort to ribaldry Stage-playes (which God without all question, as appears by all the new receited judgements, cannon but abhorre) is a grand occasion both of the engendring and propagating these late, these present plagues which yet we feele, and suffer. As therefore we would fl ie and feare this dreadfull fatall sicknesse, which that a long time hovered over our heads, and hath almost quite depopulated some particular places of this Kingdome (and God knoweth how soone, how fast it may increase to sweepe us all away) let us henceforth cast out these our lewde pestiferous Enterludes, and rase down these our Leprous Play-houses. (sig. I2r) Prynne draws a direct line between the activity of play-going (“our resort to ribaldry Stage-playes”) and God’s judgment that makes itself manifest as the plague. The activity, he claims, both causes and spreads the disease (“engendring and propagating” it). In this way, antitheatricalists assured readers of their own agency, and supported their assertions with the many New Testament episodes in which Jesus dramatically lifts bodily affliction from the faithful.9 The trope’s consistency also testifies to how deeply fears of the plague permeated early modern culture not just during but between outbreaks. Its traumatic physical and social effects lingered, driven, in Gilman’s words, by the “dual forces of memory and foreboding” (57). Anthitheatricalists hoped not only that readers of their pamphlets would avoid playhouses and call for their closing but that city officials who were largely unresponsive or opposed to their campaigns would feel compelled by civic duty to do the “right” thing. In addition to proving particularly useful as a rhetorical strategy, the overwhelming presence of the plague in antitheatricalists’ writings may also be symptomatic of the deep psychic schisms wrought by the epidemic in both individual and collective ways. As trauma theorist Geoffrey Hartman argues, literary texts produced during personal and collective traumas often display a “perpetual troping,” and this troping may be symptomatic of what he calls “an unresolved shock: a rhythmic or temporal stutter.”10 Although many references writers make to the plague are intentional, they also may signal in part an involuntary, figurative return to the site of the traumatic event in order to repair and soothe the rupture caused there. In this case, the fracturing experience of the plague becomes inscribed upon the corpus of antitheatricalists’ writings, as visibly in many ways as tokens on the body of a plague victim.

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By diagnosing the physical and spiritual risks of contagion associated with the public playhouses, antitheatricalists offered themselves as physicians to an ailing body politic—often quite explicitly. Gosson, for example, often described himself as a physician and his words as medicines. Whereas Gosson portrays himself as the highest in the medical hierarchy, a “Phisition,” the players become the lowest, scamming apothecaries: “Were not we so foolish to taste every drug, and buy every trifle,” he writes, “players would shut in their shops, and carry their trash to some other country” (The School of Abuse, 28). Antitheatricalists’ employment of medical language demonstrates their participation in what Elizabeth Lane Furdell has called the early modern “culture of medicine,” a culture that “extended far beyond those teaching, learning, or practicing.”11 Partially due to fears over plague infection, nonmedical writers found rhetorical energy in metaphors of health and disease, and medical models further penetrated political, religious, and literary realms of discourse. In reference to the similarly plague-infected language of Francis Bacon, Gilman writes, such proliferation of plague language “may be seen as the plague’s overflow, as it were, into adjacent areas of discourse. . . . plague will communicate itself to all precincts of language” (64), from medical regimens written for the lay reader to entertainments staged in open air theaters to antitheatricalists’ use of relatively specialized medical discourse to disseminate their religious rhetoric. * * * * Above all, antitheatricalists exploit what Margaret Healy calls the “strong and potentially manipulable emotions surrounding bodily chaos” that permeated their immediate culture both during and between outbreaks.12 Despite the fact that by Shakespeare’s day the plague had been endemic to England for nearly 250 years, the causes and cures of the disease were still largely unknown. Whereas preventative medical regimens, plague prayers, and prognostications offered individuals and communities some sense of control, contemporary accounts betray anxieties over the effectiveness of these methods. When Londoners witnessed the preacher dying alongside the prostitute, or the perfumed nobleman sharing a mass grave with the vagabond, it demonstrated the futility of their preventative efforts, or worse, as Gilman remarks: What cannot be thought, much less said, in this discourse is that the plague is in fact unjust and merciless, or a merely natural and casual event . . . or, worse, that it is the work of a God who has no interest in justice; or, worse yet, that the plague has no particular significance because there is no God. (67) Most writers, physicians and poets alike, carefully weighed available interpretive models. Physician Francis Herring observes in his 1604 plague regimen A Modest Defence of the Caveat Given to the Wearers of Impoisoned

“Sweet recreation barred” 137 Amulets, as Preservatives from the Plague, for example, that although “one man hath carefully vsed some soveraigne and apposit Preservative, [and] another hath neglected or contemned all such courses,” one “scorneth and refuseth Physicians and Physicke, or els sendeth to the Physician,” God would decide one’s fate; yet it was not this simple, as he is careful to caution: “All men are not poysoned that drinke poyson; nor all killed with the sword or shot, that goe to warre”; yet “poyson is lethall, and the sword devoureth as well one as another.”13 Like other practitioners, Herring found himself in a precarious situation, prescribing faith and active disease management at once, hoping to combat this shape-shifting disease by the best means available, in spite of the poor results. Equally distressing was that the disease refused to acknowledge social hierarchies, as Rene Girard argues: “The distinctiveness of the plague, is that it ultimately destroys all forms of distinctiveness.”14 The danse macabre tradition that most likely grew out of the plague epidemic garners much of its horrifying impact because the skeletal death figure embraces everyone: men and women, rich and poor, priests and sinners, old and young.15 Because it serves as a symbol for the plague’s offenses against distinctions, plague writers seem to fi xate on the image of the mass plague-grave in the same type of perpetual troping displayed in antitheatrical texts. Even the disease itself seemed to disrespect boundaries; most writers generally agreed that when the plague was raging, for example, it subsumed other diseases. For playwright and pamphleteer Thomas Dekker, this made the plague the “Protean Climactericall” and the “Hydra-Sicknesse with so many Heads.”16 The harrowing accounts of plague outbreaks give voice to the psychic toll of plague. Individual authors seem to rehearse the particular aspects of the plague experience that they found most terrifying: for Daniel Defoe’s narrator in Journal of a Plague Year, for example, the claustrophobia experienced by quarantine victims emerges as most frightening.17 Most salient for physician William Kemp were the gruesome sights and sounds of the 1665–66 breakout: you are forsaken of Friends, and hear nothing but complaints of Neighbours, the crying of Wives and Children, the mourning of Husbands and Parents, the sorrowing of Kinsfolks and Allies, the Sickness spreading, the Pestilence raging, and the Plague encreasing from Tens to Hundreds, from Hundreds to Thousands, and now ready to seize upon your self, as it hath done already upon others.18 Soon the sounds, Kemp fears, will all cease in a mass extinction, or at least as the result of death’s fi nal seizing of the self. Like Kemp, many writers found the unpredictability and swiftness of the disease to be especially traumatic, making the origin of the word plague, from the Latin plaga for “wound” or “stroke,” all the more relevant for those who felt

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to early modern subjects like they could be struck down at any minute. Although typically the bubonic plague had an incubation period of six or seven days,19 early modern writers described it striking much more suddenly: spouses might wake to fi nd their husbands and wives lying dead next to them. Plague writer William Muggins, for example, describes in London’s Mourning Garment how “The ioyfull Brydegroome married as to day, / Sicke, weake, and feeble before table layde, / And the next morrow dead and wrap’t in clay, / Leaving his Bride, a widdow, wife and mayde”:20 and Dekker describes in The Wonderful year the horror of family members who had loved ones literally die overnight: “How often hath the amazed husband waking found the comfort of his bedde lying breathlesse by his side!” (40). Because, as Gail Kern Paster explains, “all being-in-the-humoral-body involved a turbulent interior plenitude capable of absorbing and being physically altered by the world around it,”21 including by the force of emotions, the experience of living during plague-time all the more threatening. According to the principles of Galenic medicine, disturbed mental states like the ones Kemp, Muggins, and Dekker describe above could have dire and immediate consequences to one’s physical well-being, especially while the plague was raging. In Galen’s system, an individual’s overall health was determined by the complex interaction among his or her “naturals” (humors, spirits, faculties, members, sex organs), “non-naturals” (air, food and drink, exercise, venery, passions), and “contra-naturals” (diseases). A sudden or prolonged change in any non-natural, including the passions, could upset the body’s humoral equilibrium, resulting in an overabundance of one humor. Melancholy and fear were considered the most detrimental emotions to experience during plague-time because they were thought to make individuals more susceptible to infection. Plague accounts reaching as far back as Thucydides’s description of the plague of Athens, in fact, note the increase in plague deaths among those struck by melancholy. “The most terrible thing of all,” writes Thucydides, “was the despair into which people fell when they realized that they had caught the plague; for they would immediately adopt an attitude of utter hopelessness and, by giving in in this way, would lose the powers of resistance.”22 Early modern medical writers interpreted the greater incidence of plague deaths among the melancholic in slightly different ways, but they were unanimous in warning against negative emotions. Writing during the outbreak of 1593, the physician Simon Kellwaye explains in A Defensative against the Plague that melancholy opens the body’s pores, making it more soluable: “Beware of anger, feare, and pensivenes of the minde, for by their meanes the body is made more apt to receive the infection.”23 Plague writer William Austin, on the other hand, articulates the common notion that melancholy left the body dangerously cold in plague-time:

“Sweet recreation barred” 139 There’s none will doubt but melancholly soon Can put our bodies organs out of tune. For cooling, and so binding heart, it stops The spirits, and detains them from their shops. Thus bodies trading fails. Parts want, and can at market get no meat. Hence humor makes a melancholly mood, Cardan thought fit to call the Devils food. This passion, when it may befriend the Pest, In mischief will be sure to do its best. For weak’ning then the noble parts, they are Neither condition’d to resist nor dare. 24 Here melancholy cools the heart and derails its life force, the “spirits” necessary to create motion in the body. In this elaborate marketplace conceit, with its reference to Gerolamo Cardan (1501–76), the famous Italian physician, mathematician, astrologer, and gambler, the dangers of melancholy during plague-time are clear; bodily and economic transactions hung in the balance. What may seem most foreign about the humoral model to modern readers is the extent to which the emotions were thought able to physically alter the body in an exchange that Gail Kern Paster calls “psychophysiology”: “the material body as phenomenologically indistinguishable from its passions, indeed as constituted by its passions and governed with great difficulty by the rational soul.”25 Because passions could affect the body so significantly, control of them was an essential part of any regimen, the surest way to keep the body free from disease. This control, however, was not easily achieved, as emblem literature from the period suggests by representing the passions as waters in an ocean, forever changing, forever escaping containment (2). According to many medical writers, fearing the plague made one not only more susceptible to contracting it but could cause the plague itself. Flemish Paracelsian physician Jean Baptiste van Helmont argues, in an English translation of The Plague-Grave, that the “Image of terrour” can plant itself in the intellect and destroy the body’s Archeus or “controller,” leading to a plague infection even worse than one contracted through miasma: “For Plagues which are bred only through terrour, are more swift and more terrible than those which proceed from an infected air.”26 German physician Daniel Sennert concluded in 1618 that “the passion of the soul affectively accelerates the plague and alters the body” after he recorded that many of his patients contracted the plague merely by passing a mass plague grave or hearing the plague cart’s bells as it passed by.27 In England, the ideas of Paracelsus, van Helmont, and Sennert are found in works such as George Thomson’s Loimotomia; or the Pest Anatomised (1666), in which

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it is reported that some people avoid the plague largely by the force of their imaginations. Similarly, Nicholas Culpepper warns in his translation of Simeon Partlicius’s A Treatise of the Pestilence (1655) to “avoid the fear of [the plague], for fear changeth the blood into the nature of the thing feared.”28 Plague writers’ detailed warnings against the dangers of melancholy and fear were accompanied by equally detailed descriptions about how to procure the surest antidote: mirth. Including mirth in one’s regimen was one of the best ways to keep one’s body healthy: “If you read, you may happilie laugh,” Thomas Dekker writes in the dedication to The Wonderful Year, “because mirth is both Phisicall, and wholesome against the Plague” (3). In The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton quotes from Juan Luis Vives’s well-known work De anima et vita (Of the soul and life [1538]), to explain the power of mirth, which “purgeth the blood, confi rms health, causeth a fresh, pleasing, and fi ne colour, prorogues life, whets the wit, makes the body young, lively and fit for any manner of employment. The merrier the heart the longer the life.”29 For Burton, as for many medical writers, medical intervention was useless unless accompanied by mirth: fi rst quoting Marsilius Ficinus, Burton writes, “‘for without this mirth, which is the life and quintessence of physic, medicines, and whatsoever is used and applied to prolong the life of man, is dull, dead, and of no force.’ . . . I say be merry” (238). Whereas most medical writers agreed that mirth was generally good for the body, plague writers in particular emphasized mirth’s importance in bolstering the body against infection. For physician William Bullein in 1558, mirth is particularly important in one’s efforts to ward off the plague: “the best companion of life, putter away of all diseases: the contrarie in plague time bringeth on the pestilence, through painefull melancholie.”30 As part of their emphasis on mirth, early modern physicians and natural philosophers prescribed its musical form to dispel melancholy and prevent disease. Burton, for example, devotes an entire section of his Anatomy to “Music a remedy,” extolling music’s ability to “expel many other diseases [in addition to melancholy]” and deeming it a “sovereign remedy against despair and melancholy” (227). In The passions of the minde in generall, Thomas Wright recalls that in the book of Samuel, David uses music to calm Saul, who was either “possessed or at least much vexed with the devil.” In reasoning through the relationship between the music and Saul’s cure, Wright explains, The devill being a spirite, cannot be expelled from a bodie naturally by the virtue of musick, but as we may conceive and inferred out of the scriptures, either Saul was really possessed by the devill, and then not the naturall forces of Davids songs and sounds, but the assistance of God and his help expelled the devil, at what time David sung his sacred hymnes. Or the devill was not really in Saul, but onley molested him with the vehemencie of some melancholy madnesse: and then as

“Sweet recreation barred” 141 this perverse malignant humour casueth feares, sadnesse, and such like melancholy passions; so musicke causeth mirth, ioy, and delight, the which abate, expel, and quite destroy their contrary affections, and withal, rectifie the blood and spirits, and consequently digest melancholy, and bring the body into a good temper. 31 Wright reasons through the options for the seeming cause and effect of music and restored “good temper.” He cannot rule out God’s direct intervention as a sole cause, timed perfectly to coincide with the music of course, but Wright does spend more time explaining why, if Saul’s condition was instead brought about indirectly by Satan and directly through his melancholic passion, David’s music did indeed “rectifie” Saul’s psychophysiological imbalance. This regained state of equilibrium would make Saul stronger against the devil, but it was also the condition thought best maintained in plague-time. * * * * Based on early modern medical writings, it appeared that individuals’ chances of surviving a plague outbreak depended in part on whether or not they incorporated mirth into their regimens. And many, it seems, associated health-giving mirth with the entertainments found in London’s suburbs. Plague writers often complain over the lack of mirth-moving recreation during plague-time, Thomas Dekker asking, For (alack) what string is there (now) to bée played upon whose tench can make us merry? Play-houses stand empty (like Tavernes, that have cast out their Maisters) the dores locked up, the Flagges (like their Bushes) taken down, or rather like Houses lately infected, from whence the affrited dwellers are fled, in hope to live better in the Country.32 The sight of the shut-up playhouse seems to provoke the same sense of terror for Dekker as the sight of a quarantined house. The place of mirth now stands marked as a place of death. Protheatrical apologists may have found in these associations between playgoing and mirth a justification for comedy’s existence and a sound reply to antitheatricalists’ rhetoric. In their texts, many defendants of theater challenge the notion that the players are infectious members of the body politic; rather than vagabonds and rogues, actors become player-physicians. Physician, plague writer, and playwright Thomas Lodge, for example, traces the noble and historical place of players in ancient societies in his A Reply to Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse (1580): “it was necessary that they [the poets], like good physicians, should so frame their potions that they might be applicable to the queasy stomachs of their wearish patients.”33 For Thomas Heywood, it is the antitheatrical writers who practice bad medicine and make its consumers “wearish” or sickly (OED): they “would but like artless physicians, for experiment’s sake, rather minister pills to poison

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the whole body than cordials to preserve any of the least part.”34 The preservative cordials, of course, include restorative entertainment, including poetry, as Philip Sidney and George Puttenham explain in their defenses of the art. In An Apology for Poetry (1581), Sidney says of poetry that it is a “Phisicke” and “best rampire to our often-assaulted bodies”; and in The Arte of English Poesie (1589), Puttenham likens the poet’s ability to improve upon nature to the “arte of phisicke,” able “by helping the naturall and concoction, retention, distribution, expulsion, and other vertues, in a weake and unhealthie bodie.”35 The many moments in the drama that articulate and dramatize the medicinal effects of theatrical entertainments demonstrate the ubiquity of the claim for the healing quality of art. Among them is the situation described by Shakespeare’s Abbess in the fi nal scene of The Comedy of Errors (1592). The Abbess blames the lack of mirth-moving entertainments—“Sweet recreation barred”—for Antipholus of Ephesus’s melancholy and vulnerability to infection: Sweet recreation barred, what doth ensue But moody and dull melancholy, Kinsman to grim and comfortless despair, And at her heels a huge infectious troop Of pale distemperatures and foes to life.36 The atmosphere in Ephesus described here by the Abbess may reference plague-time London. Not only were “sweet recreation[s]” like bear-baiting, theatrical entertainments, and public festivals “barred” during outbreaks, but the pervasive sense of “moody and dull melancholy” that Antipholus experiences is akin to the collective sense of despair that Londoners felt in the face of the epidemic. And whereas many diseases were thought to corrupt the flesh and souls of early modern subjects during the period— syphilis, the sweat—only the plague was described in military terms: an invading army, “a huge infectious troop,” that threatened to overcome the fortified walls of one’s body-bulwark, and only the plague closed theaters and forced kings and queens on regular progress.37 The Comedy of Errors is most explicit in its warnings against the dangers of melancholy; The Taming of the Shrew (1593) dramatizes the power of theater to cure it. In the Prologue to Taming of the Shrew, the Lord who gives Christopher Sly new robes, a fake wife, and a false identity gives him a fabricated disease and remedy as well: For so your doctors hold it very meet, Seeing too much sadness hath congealed your blood, And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy. Therefore they thought it good you hear a play And frame your mind to mirth and merriment,

“Sweet recreation barred” 143 Which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life. (127–32) Recalling William Austin’s description of the effects of melancholy on the body, this prescription by Sly’s false doctors turns The Taming of the Shrew itself into medicine. The players who perform the play, then, are not only accomplices in the Lord’s ruse; they are also physicians, their “mirth” a curative that “lengthens life.” Years later, in Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), the epicurious Merrythought, who has a song for every situation, touts the healing power of mirth in one of his catches: ’Tis mirth that fills the veins with blood, More than wine, or sleep, or food; Let each man keep his heart at ease No man dies of that disease. He that would his body keep From diseases, must not weep; But whoever laughs and sings, Never he his body brings Into fevers, gouts, or rheums, Or lingeringly his lungs consumes, Or meets with aches in the bone, Or catarrhs or griping stone; But contented lives for aye; The more he laughs, the more he may.38 Plague does not appear in this list of diseases, but the promise is that laughter and song bring longevity if not immortality. This particular passion, mirth, would seem to out-perform all other non-naturals. Certainly, these passages from The Comedy of Errors, Taming of the Shrew, and The Knight of the Burning Pestle express traditional tenets of humoral medicine not specifically intended toward the prevention of the plague. When Romeo notes that the “Dry sorrow [of melancholy] drinks our blood,” he may or may not be thinking about the risk of infection.39 And plays like Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553) that were never intended for the public playhouses also include similar messages. An early English play to make explicit the restorative potential of mirth is the anonymous Jack Juggler (1555). A raucous retelling of Plautus’s Amphitruo, the play begins with the following passage: “Therfore intermix honest mirthe, in suche wise / That your streght may be refreshid, & to labours suffise . . . For the conseruacion, and helth of the bodye” (21–22, 24).40 Nevertheless, these moments must have seemed reassuring to audience members who suffered the trauma of living with the plague both during and between outbreaks.

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Intended to be more directly of psychophysiological comfort, perhaps, are the moments in which the plays dramatize the restorative effects of music. In Taming of the Shrew, Christopher Sly’s therapy includes the “dulcet and heavenly sound” of music as well as a play (Prologue 213). During the fi nal scene of The Tempest (1610), when Prospero has driven his enemies to near madness, he commands “Some heavenly music . . . To work [his] end upon their senses” (5.1.26–27). Music, Prospero says, is “the best comforter / To an unsettled fancy cure thy brains, / Now useless, boil’d within thy skull!” (5.1.31–33). It is music, too, that begins to calm the “great rage” in King Lear’s mind (4.7.55), and is prescribed for Pericles’s “melancholy state” (5.3.18). We know that music was an integral part of the theater-going experience, with songs woven into the fabric of the plays, and separate musical interludes before, during, and after the shows: theater historian Andrew Gurr tells us that Mary Frith (a.k.a. Moll Cutpurse), for example, is most famously said to have “played upon her lute and sange a song” before the stage performance.41 As Lucentio notes in Taming of the Shrew, music could “refresh the mind of man / After his . . . usual pain” (5.1.13)—an ideal recreation in plague-time.42 The healing power of laughter emphasized by so many medical writers was a corresponding benefit of the play-going experience, and contemporary documents report laughter as an integral part of the theater experience, particularly during comedies. As discussed in the previous section, the cathartic release of laughter worked to restore the body’s humoral balance. In many ways, Berowne’s entire future with Rosaline at the end of Love’s Labor’s Lost (1593) depends on his ability to heal through laughter. His assignment is to spend a year healing the sick with his “wit,” as Rosaline explains: You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day Visit the speechless sick and still converse With groaning wretches; and your task shall be, With all the fierce endeavor of your wit To enforce the pained impotent to smile. (5.2.211–15) A difficult task in any century, this assignment leaves Berowne incredulous: “Mirth cannot move a soul in agony,” he replies (5.2.218), although the audience senses that based on the linguistic feats he has displayed throughout the play, he should have the skill to cure many “speechless sick” and “groaning wretches” before he returns to marry. We do not have access to the minds of early modern play-goers or playwrights, and we cannot know with certainty the degree to which they consciously sought out and/or created theatrical entertainments as a form of psychophysiological relief; it is telling, however, that in a culture which promoted the flight away from places of infection as its primary response

“Sweet recreation barred” 145 to the plague, London’s citizens continued to venture into places that were thought to be peculiarly capable of spreading the disease.43 Moreover, recent studies like Charles Whitney’s Early Responses to Renaissance Drama suggest that audiences expected—and demanded—their theatrical experiences to have practical applications for their lives. A play did not end after the stage’s traffic but, rather, lived on through their appropriation and assimilation of it into their lives, perhaps even or especially in plaguetime. This “use-oriented aesthetic,” as Whitney describes it, demanded that audience members “carry their theatrical experiences with them from the theater and continue to absorb, assimilate, and apply them.”44 In addition to the mirth experienced during the performance, then, theater-goers may have benefited each time they participated in their appropriations of that performance through recitation, reflection, and memory. * * * * It was certainly in dramatists’ best economic interests to emphasize the healing power of theater: counteracting the playhouses’ associations with bodily harm was a savvy business move. Mirth, after all, was a valuable commodity in a plague-stricken culture. Yet this examination of “mirth” is perhaps too simple to describe the many ways in which the plays might have offered cultural and psychophysiological relief for playwrights and audience members. Shakespeare’s plays in particular demonstrate a “general preoccupation with the air” similar to the one that Rebecca Totaro has identified in the works of plague-time authors John Milton and Margaret Cavendish, for example.45 The patches of bad air, putrid breath, smelly sins, foggy vapors, contagious clouds, and odor-emitting corpses that populate Shakespeare’s plays—and, to a similar extent, those of his contemporaries—form one of the most persistent clusters of images in his oeuvre. Given the pervasive early modern fear of miasma-induced plague, it is notable to fi nd it appearing so often in the plays. We might assume that Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and their audiences would have preferred to imagine only sweet airs and healthful climates. According to sociologist Sander L. Gilman such references to the specific effects of any trauma, but particularly of disease, offer benefits to survivors. In Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (1988), Gilman concludes that depictions of various diseases (syphilis, madness, AIDS) from visual art, drama, fiction, and iconography provide a space in which their consumers can “fantasize about our potential loss of control, perhaps even revel in the fear it generates within us, but we always believe that this fear exists separate from us.”46 The fear of disease, then, is controlled by its being made to serve other functions, appropriated out of its deadly context and into the form in which it becomes like an inoculation. If the many descriptions of miasma that pepper Shakespeare’s plays disturbed his audience members, perhaps they did so in a way that allowed them to participate in polluted, contagious fictive worlds, and leave unharmed, if not stronger for it.

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Other moments in the drama make the plague less terrifying through displacement. The less lethal sickness that so often infects characters in early modern plays, erotomania, often feels very much like the plague, for example.47 In Love’s Labor’s Lost, Shakespeare may have given us one of the keys to this conundrum of how and to what purpose one should deal with the plague in the theater. Boyet tells the Princess that “Navarre is infected” with love (2.1.230). In the opinion of Berowne, who has sworn off love, there is a lover’s plague, and it has infected Boyer, Navarre, and Longaville: Write, “Lord have mercy on us” on those three; They are infected; in their hearts it lies; They have the plague, and caught it of your eyes; These lords are visited; you are not free, For the Lord’s tokens on you do I see. (5.2.11–14) Utilizing one of the most conventional plot devices in the drama—love at fi rst sight—Shakespeare appropriates the plague in a benign but satisfying way.48 He offers to audiences a deadly plague, detailing its danger, for “in their heart it lies”; its origin, “caught it of your eyes”; and its symptoms, “the Lord’s tokens” that in plague-time are plague sores. In the theater the dangers, causes, and signs of plague have become their opposites, the very manifestations of mirth to send the audience home happy and eager to return time and again to the playhouse. And return they did, despite the loud but far less successful (or mirthful) protests of the antitheatricalists.

Notes 1 Patrick Phillips, “‘You Need Not Fear the House’: The Absence of Plague in The Alchemist,” Ben Jonson Journal 13 (2006): 46. 2 Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California, 1981), 88. For a summary of claims to the contrary, see Jean Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 1994), 22. 3 Anthony Munday, A Second and Third Blast of Retreat in Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook, ed. Tanya Pollard (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004), 65; Stephen Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Acts, in Pollard, 91; William Prynne, Histrio-mastix. The players scourge, or, actors tragædie, divided into two parts (London, 1633), 410. In all early modern texts, I have retained original spelling except for the transposing of u and v as well as s and f for clarity. 4 John Northbrooke, A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, in Pollard, 10. 5 William Rankins, A mirrour of monsters (London, 1587), title page. In addition, they often emphasize the danger of miasma associated with the playhouses, and use phrases like “close fistulas,” “outward sores,” and “the greatest virulency” to suggest the plague less explicitly. See, for example,

“Sweet recreation barred” 147

6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Rankins’ warning that the idleness bred at the theater had a “stink that was able to infect a mortal man . . . with foul black swealth and foggy mist, forming a chaos of congered substance, over which fl ieth no fowl but presently dyeth with the infectious stink of this hideous hole” (127). For a consideration of Hamlet’s antitheatricalist discourse and its Puritan concern with corruption, see Grace Tiffany, “Anti-Theatricalism and Revolutionary Desire in Hamlet (Or, the Play without the Play),” Upstart Crow 15 (1995): 61–74; and Grace Tiffany, “Hamlet and Protestant Aural Theatre,” Christianity and Literature 52 (2003). Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, in Pollard, 152. Antitheatricalists did not uniformly make the same argument about everything, of course; those writing in the 1630s, for example, responded to an increase in governmental control over efforts at church reform—something their sixteenth century predecessor did not face to the same extent. As their religious and political context shifted over time so did their discourse, but the use of plague language is notably consistent, making it nothing short of an ironic commonplace in their texts. Ernest B. Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009), 94. See for example Matthew 4:23, 12:13–15; Luke 6:19; Acts 10:38. Geoffrey Hartman, “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies,” New Literary History 26, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 539, 554. Elizabeth Lane Furdell, Publishing and Medicine in Early Modern England (Rochester, New York: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 35. Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues and Politics (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 3. Francis Herring, A Modest Defence of the Caveat Given to the Wearers of Impoisoned Amulets, as Preservatives from the Plague (London, 1604), sig. B1v. See Rene Girard, “To Double Business Bound”: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 137. For a discussion and bibliography of the connection between the plague and the danse macabre, see the Appendix to Michael Neill’s Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 375–76. Thomas Dekker, The Wonderfull yeare, in The Plague Pamphlets of Thomas Dekker, ed. F.P. Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 12; Dekker, Newes from Graves-end, in Wilson, 71. For a discussion of Defoe’s concerns regarding quarantine, see David McNeil, “A Journal of the Plague Year: Defoe and Claustrophobia,” Southern Review 16, no.3 (1983): 374–85. William Kemp, A brief treatise of the nature, causes, signes, preservation from, and cure of the pestilence (London, 1665), 25–26. Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 9. William Muggins, London’s Mourning Garment (London, 1603), sig. C4r. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), 13. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Penguin, 1954), 154. Simon Kellwaye, A Defensative against the Plague (London, 1593), fol. 13r.

148 Nichole DeWall 24 William Austin, Epiloimia Epe, or, the Anatomy of the Pestilence a Poem in Three Parts : Describing the Deplorable Condition of the City of London under Its Merciless Dominion (London, 1665), 72. 25 Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 22. 26 Jean Baptiste van Helmont, The Plague-Grave, in Van Helmont’s works containing his most excellent philosophy, physick, chirurgery, anatomy: wherein the philosophy of the schools is examined, their errors refuted, and the whole body of physick reformed and rectified: being a new rise and progresse of philosophy and medicine, for the cure of diseases, and lengthening of life (London, 1664), 1132. 27 Daniel Sennert quoted in Sheila Barker, “Poussin, Plague, and Early Modern Medicine,” The Art Bulletin 86, no. 4 (2004): 660. 28 George Thomson’s Loimotomia; or the Pest Anatomised (London, 1666), sig. A3r–A3v; Nicholas Culpepper, A Treatise of the Pestilence (London, 1655), 90. For more on Thomson’s fi rst recorded anatomy of a plague victim in England, see Gilman, Plague Writing, 94ff. 29 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. John C. Nimmo (London, 1886), 238. 30 William Bullein, A newe booke entituled the governement of healthe wherein is uttered manye notable rules for mannes preseruacion, with sondry symples and other matters, no lesse fruiteful then profitable: colect out of many approved authours. Reduced into the forme of a dialogue, for the better understanding of thunlearned. Wherunto is added a sufferain regiment against the pestilence (London, 1558), sig. S2v. 31 Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Mind in General (London, 1604), 159. 32 Thomas Dekker, The seven deadly sinnes of London drawne in seven severall coaches, through the seven severall gates of the citie bringing the plague with them (London, 1606), sig. B1r–B1v. 33 Thomas Lodge, A Reply to Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse, in Pollard, 41. 34 Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors, in Pollard, 216. 35 Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesy, ed. Albert S. Cook (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1890), 38; George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (Menston, Yorks: Scolar Press, 1968), 253. 36 William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 4th ed. (Chicago: Addison-Wesley, 1997), 5.1.77–81. I will draw all subsequent references to Shakespeare’s plays from this edition, citing them in the text by act, scene, and line. 37 For more on theater closings in plague-time, see Matthew Thiele’s essay in this volume; for more on the degree to which the plague altered the schedules of kings and queens, see the essays by Richelle Munkhoff and James D. Mardock also in this volume. 38 Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, in Drama of the English Renaissance II: The Stuart Period, Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1976), 2.481–94. 39 Other Shakespearean scenes, moments in addition to this one in Romeo and Juliet, may have reminded playgoers of the dangers of melancholy, as well as the benefits of mirth. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, for example, Proteus warns Valentine against, “A pack of sorrows which would press you down, / Being unprevented, to your timeless grave” (3.1.17–18). Melancholy proves fatal for Lady Montague in Romeo and Juliet, Brabantio in Much Ado About

“Sweet recreation barred” 149 Nothing, and Katherine’s sister in Love’s Labours Lost: “He [Cupid] made her melancholy, sad, and heavy,” Katherine says to Rosaline, And so she died: had she been light, like you [Rosaline], / Of such a merry, nimble, stirring spirit, / She might ha’ been a grandam ere she died: / And so may you; for a light heart lives long. (5.2.71–75)

40

41

42 43 44 45

46 47 48

In Richard II, upon the king’s exile, a servant warns the Queen about the dangers of too much sadness: “Madam, your majesty is too much sad,” he says, and implores her “To lay aside life-harming heaviness / And entertain a cheerful disposition” (2.2.1–4). Jack Juggler, in A Select Collection of Old English Plays, vol. 1, ed. Robert Dodsley (London: Reeves and Turner, 1874–76; reprint Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, available online at http://www. archive.org/stream/dodsleysplays01hazluoft/dodsleysplays01hazluoft_djvu. txt [accessed November 9, 2009]). Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (1987; reprint Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3. For more on early modern music and drama and the relationship between hearing and health, see for example Bruce Smith, “Hearing Green,” in Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotions, eds. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England, Material Texts Series (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia, 2007). For more on re-creation and recreation in plague-time, see Glending Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1982). For more on the special problems for those seeking to assess original playgoing experience, see Andrew Gurr, Playgoing. Charles Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 10, 5. Rebecca Totaro, Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton, Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005), 170; see especially chapter nine, “The Rectification of Air and the Pursuit of Paradise.” Sander L. Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 2. For more on the associations between plague and pox, please see essays in this collection by James D. Mardock, Kelly J. Stage, and Paula S. Berggren. For more on this passage, see Ernest B. Gilman, Plague Writing, 53–54. In Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humor (London, 1598), it is jealousy, not love, that comically infects Kitely’s mind. Suspicious that his wife has cuckolded him, in this scene the plague becomes the destructive—but not lethal— disease of jealousy: “For, like a pestilence, it doth infect / The houses of the brain” (2.3.70–71).

7

Shakespeare’s Dual Lexicons of Plague Infections in Speech and Space Paula S. Berggren

Although Shakespeare had close and frequent experience with the devastating effects of bubonic plague, his linguistic exploitation of words associated with it, like “plague,” “infection,” and “pestilence,” suggests a surprising nonchalance. The rote imprecation “a plague on’t,” often uttered in Shakespeare’s work by those who challenge the established order, conveys little sense of the disease itself. Yet when Twelfth Night’s Olivia diagnoses her instantaneous attraction to the disguised Viola as “the plague,” the medical metaphor takes on a new power. A broader vocabulary of contagion in the poems and plays speaks of erotic longing as a condition more threatening to health than bubonic plague itself. Ultimately, Shakespeare’s allusions to plague as an inescapable condition of his world have greater impact in the manipulation of theatrical and conceptual spaces than in any verbal echoes. Mimicking the enforced closures that idled the theater companies of London on a regular basis, closed spaces in Shakespeare’s plays serve as incubators of dangerous erotic desire. In Shakespeare’s verbal lexicon of plague, the word quarantine is never spoken, but works like Othello, The Winter’s Tale, and, most explicitly, Romeo and Juliet, dramatize the profound impression that isolating the sick seems to have made on the English populace. In The Wonderful Year, for example, Thomas Dekker writes of Londoners desperately trying “to steal forth dead bodies / lest the fatal handwriting of Death should seal up their doors.”1 These citizens would sooner spread infection abroad than risk incarceration in their own homes until the plague subsides. At least two of Shakespeare’s tragedies allude to the sealing of the doors that quarantine required, but perversely, their protagonists actively prefer morbid interiors from which few emerge alive. Romeo and Juliet (1594) and Othello (1604) were both produced directly after sustained outbreaks of plague, and both plays enact ambivalent reactions to the closed rooms that sequestered victims or protected those outside of them. Because Friar John, in Romeo and Juliet, is more efficiently trapped and refused egress from a house under quarantine, Romeo and Juliet end their lives in the Capulet tomb, a place of horrors that conjures up the kind of

Shakespeare’s Dual Lexicons of Plague 151 suffering associated with bubonic plague. Othello invokes the Ten Plagues of Egypt, which invaded domestic spaces, and sees himself as a Job-like figure affl icted with plague-like marks. The last acts of his tragedy imagine the marital chamber as a shambles and a brothel, sites of communicable disease unfit for the healthy to enter. Only by opening up the confi nes of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theaters’ inner spaces could tragicomedies turn sickness to cure, as in the wonders enacted at the end of The Winter’s Tale. In contrast to Othello, who compulsively draws the curtain around the bed upon which he, Desdemona, and Emilia together lie dead, Leontes refuses to let another Emilia close the curtain over the statue of Hermione and thus rescues himself and her from 16 years of purgative enclosure. Shakespeare’s verbal lexicon of literal plague references is easily described. The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare enumerates 23 instances of “infection”; 23 of “infected”; 22 of “infect”; and 7 of “infectious” in the Shakespearean canon; less often used but still significant similar words include “contagion” (7) and “contagious” (11); “corruption” (19); “pestilence” (14); “pox” (23); and “murrain” (2). 2 “Plague,” used 98 times; “plagues” used 14; and a few other words formed from “plague,” outnumber all the others by a considerable margin. It would be tedious to scrutinize each of these references, but a quick sorting permits us to draw some conclusions. “Pox,” of course, generally means syphilis, not bubonic plague, and is used almost in every instance as a curse. As a curse, it seems interchangeable with “plague.” In All’s Well That Ends Well, for example, Bertram, who is about to witness the interrogation of the blindfolded Parolles, mutters to the two French lords who have organized the plot, “A plague upon him! Muffled! He can say nothing of me.”3 In response to Parolles’s all-toowilling disparagement of him and his friends, Bertram then twice lashes out with “A pox on him” (l. 277). In the same scene, Parolles, in an aside before his blindfold is removed, regrets his boasting: “A plague of all drums!” (4.3.301). Neither bubonic plague nor venereal disease is genuinely being evoked in these kinds of expostulations, which account for most of the occurrences of the word plague in Shakespeare’s writing. Bertram and Parolles, each unsavory in his own way, typify the speakers who utter these rote curses. Moreover, as in this case, “a plague on” and “a pox on” occur in clusters. Most famously, perhaps, in 1 Henry IV, Falstaff deplores the conduct of his comrades during the Gad’s Hill robbery with a series of reiterated imprecations, all more or less calling down “A plague of all cowards” (2.4.112,130–31, 149; 153, 168). Nowhere are Falstaff’s sardonic insults of his erring companions more evident than in his challenge to Poins, Hal, Bardolph, and Peto before the robbery: “A plague upon it when thieves cannot be true one to another! Whew! A plague upon you all! Give me my horse, you rogues, give me my horse, and be hanged!” (2.2.26–29).

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These essentially unserious exclamations tend to be spoken by figures in conflict with the established order. Hotspur parallels Falstaff in many ways, and Hotspur twice bursts out with “A plague upon it,” fi rst when he tries to recall the name of Berkeley Castle (1.3.205), and again, when he sits down to divide England with Mortimer and Glendower and fi nds he has forgotten to bring the map (3.1.5). These frustrated exhortations to plague echo throughout the history plays, most often from the mouths of ambitious climbers thwarted in their pursuit of power. Shakespeare’s last use of the term darkens it considerably: in one of the central scenes of Henry VIII, Wolsey, accused of arrogance and about to be stripped of the royal seal, is excoriated by Surrey—“Plague of your policy” (3.2.260)—and publicly charged with sins that overstate the case against him. Political maneuvering in competitive courts is tantamount to a sickness from which the sufferer rarely recovers. Most of these references to plague function at a metaphoric level, although, as Ernest B. Gilman implies in the Afterword to this collection, plague is hardly a dead metaphor; the virulence with which plague could suddenly reemerge may have generated a certain frisson in the audience and given life to the stock curse uttered by these varied characters who might all be said to prey on society in some way that conjures up, if faintly, the depredations of the plague. Genuine signs of physical distress inhere in other oaths invoking plague, as in King Lear, where sickness has profound literal as well as metaphoric manifestations. When Kent attacks Oswald in the scene that ends with Cornwall’s putting him into the stocks, he reviles the steward for playing up to Goneril by dishonoring her father: “A plague upon your epileptic visage” (2.2.82). The formula carries deeper weight in Lear’s fi nal curse on the ineffectual inheritors of his kingdom who forgot to ask about his and Cordelia’s welfare until it was too late: “A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all! / I might have saved her; now she’s gone forever!” (5.3.274–75). Toward the end of Timon of Athens, when plague becomes synonymous with the human condition, Apemantus and Timon vie with each other in the virulence of their mutual accusations. TIMON: Would thou were clean enough to spit upon! APEMANTUS: A plague on thee! Thou art too bad to curse. (4.3.364–65) In “The Paradox of Timon’s Self-Cursing,” William O. Scott considers the oddity of this paradoxical exchange: “what degree of goodness is needed in the object of a curse to make the curse worthwhile?”4 Apemantus curses Timon because he eludes his cursing. In seventeenth-century London, one might expect plague to be the most formidable of evils. Yet in Timon’s world, so rife with curses, and in Shakespeare’s lexicon as well, “A plague on thee” has lost much of its power. Certainly an actor might pause a moment to reflect on the barrenness of his words in the midst of this flyt-

Shakespeare’s Dual Lexicons of Plague 153 ing match. The editors of the third Arden Shakespeare edition of Timon of Athens go so far as to suggest, with justice, that this kind of invective “is something like a bloodsport or a boxing match, with the same capacity for engaging hot emotions; and it is funny as well.”5 The most poignant statements of the curse are probably Mercutio’s in Romeo and Juliet. Although the reference to plague in this play has particular resonance, as we shall see, it might be noted that Q1 reads “A pox on both your houses,”6 thus demonstrating how easily plague and pox could be transposed. Lynette Hunter argues that “The self-conscious change to ‘plague’ . . . in Q2 presumably recall[s] the recent devastations of the 1590s plagues in England and the concurrent claims by Puritans that the disease was visited on Londoners as punishment for their sins,”7 distinguishing between pox (syphilis), which was deemed curable, and plague, which seemed incurable. Mercutio, in either case, would have no prophetic knowledge of an outbreak of plague somewhere between Verona and Mantua; as his punning speech indicates, even with his death wound draining away his life, he maintains his nonchalance. If his choice of “A plague on” seems at fi rst consistent with Apemantus’s disparagement of the term, the inflections brought by the actor surely intensify as Mercutio realizes that he is indeed “a grave man” (3.1.97). Mercutio repeats his curse three times, with the last mention of plague apparently serving as the antecedent for the pronoun in the last lines he speaks. “They have made worm’s meat of me. I have it, / And soundly too. Your houses!” (106–7). No longer a casual curse word, plague is suddenly associated with the implacable agent of destruction that takes away a young man’s life and as such, looks forward to the more painful uses of the term in Shakespeare’s work. Sociolinguist Geoffrey Hughes reminds us that in Middle English, the standard random curse has to do with Christianity: “the grisly invocation of Christ’s body, blood and nails in the agony of the Crucifi xion seems as grotesque and bizarre to us now as modern genital, copulatory, excretory, and incestuous swearing would have seemed to medievals.”8 There was, of course, no shortage of “zounds” and “’sblood” and the like in the Elizabethan era, even prior to the Act of 1606 to Restrain Abuses of Players. Whatever caution these clipped bits of profanity imply in the Tudor era under monarchs who cursed heartily themselves, early in the reign of James Stuart, the Act of 1606 declared That if any time . . . any person or persons do or shall in any stage play, interlude, show, maygame, or pageant jestingly or profanely speak or use the holy name of God or of Christ Jesus, or of the Holy Ghost or of the Trinity, which are not to be spoken but with fear and reverence, [such] shall forfeit for every offence by him or them committed, ten pounds. This was, of course, a huge sum in the early 1600s.9

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One might hazard a guess that the loss of casual blasphemy was not as severe a deprivation for the theater’s discourse of vituperation as it might have been, for calling down the plague had already preempted it to some degree. Between the medieval habit of desecrating the name and the person of God and our contemporary recourse to self-reflexive sexual acts as the pejorative mode of choice, bubonic plague and syphilis had provided new possibilities for verbal abuse. Hughes lists the p words—pestilence, pox, plague, and their cognates—and notes that for “pestiferous” and “plaguey,” the fi rst recorded uses mark “an imprecatory sense prior to their literal sense” (190). Basing his argument on the OED defi nition, “plaguey,” he says, is used as a curse in 1574, 30 years before it appears as a simple adjective in 1604. From biblical curses, we recognize the tendency to wish sickness on persons to whom one objects (see, for example, Deuteronomy 28:21–29). It seems noteworthy that in our own age of plague, an understanding of how AIDS is transmitted may have robbed this communicable disease of its power as a curse. Even when “plague” is employed beyond its use in a curse, its association with the literal disease does not necessarily increase, but there are exceptions. Lear’s horrified and horrifying description of Goneril, for example, offers the most detailed image of bubonic plague that I can fi nd in Shakespeare’s work: Thou art a boil, A plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle In my corrupted blood. (2.4.224–26) This is of a piece with the physicality, indeed sensuality, with which Lear has addressed his daughters from the start, endowing them with lands that betoken fecundity and then threatening them with sterility and debility. Other depictions of suppurating skin may imply bubonic plague, too, although a nineteenth-century physician, Dr. John Moyes, identifies the following as “doubtless typhus fever”: in Coriolanus, “the red pestilence” that Volumnia wishes upon the mob when Rome has cast Coriolanus out (4.1.13); “the red plague” called down by Caliban upon Prospero in The Tempest (1.2.364); and the “red murrain” that Thersites invokes in reviling Ajax in Troilus and Cressida (2.1.19).10 * * * * For Shakespeare, it seems to me, “plague” excites the most febrile emotion when it denotes the sudden onslaught or deleterious effects of erotic desire. If “pox” and “plague” seem interchangeable, the slippage between the two terms may be instructive. In Shakespeare’s lexicon, one defi nition of “plague” should surely indicate a reference to sexual distress. In examining representations of mortality in the sonnets, Katherine Duncan-Jones remarks that “the word ‘plague’ is used merely as a rhetorical metonym for

Shakespeare’s Dual Lexicons of Plague 155 something deeply unpleasant.”11 As she extends her analysis to the images of death in Venus and Adonis, however, she characterizes that narrative poem as an aetiological fable. . . . the five stanzas in which Venus prophesies that all human love will in future be blighted are the poem’s generic climax. They explain the way the world is now with reference to the story we have just read. The second of these stanzas speaks of ways in which love will cause sorrow in the future (our) age: It shall be fickle, false, and full of fraud, Bud and be blasted in a breathing while; The bottom poison, and the top o’erstrawed With sweets that shall the truest sight beguile. The strongest body shall it make most weak Strike the wise dumb and teach the fool to speak. (1141–46) Venus here in effect declares that henceforth all love will be indeed venereal, the source of its own destruction. Love, then, has the power to make us sick, and not just because of syphilitic infection. In Twelfth Night, for example, Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek bluster about plague. Sir Toby’s opening lines—“What a plague means my niece, to take the death of her brother thus? I am sure care’s an enemy to life” (1.3.1–3)—nicely enfold the different levels of healththreatening states that besiege the main characters, whose fundamental complaint is lovesickness. At the end of the fi rst act, having just met the page Cesario whom Duke Orsino has sent to reinforce his love suit, Olivia muses: “Even so quickly may one catch the plague?” (1.5.290). To Orsino, Olivia herself embodies the cure: “Oh, when my eyes did see Olivia fi rst, / Methought she purged the air of pestilence” (1.1.18–19). It is commonplace in all of Shakespeare’s writing to equate love with “infection” and “contagion.” Offhand references in the comedies extend this lighthearted vocabulary of communicable disease to the appurtenances of courtship; Sir Toby and Sir Andrew seek for the mot juste, for instance, in deciding whether Feste’s “What is love?” is mellifluous or contagious, and Toby wisely splits the difference: “it is dulcet in contagion” (2.3.53– 56). Sir Toby’s witticism makes more sense than he intends. As Adrian Poole has pointed out, in the romantic comedies, love is “fearful, fascinating, delicious . . . a force that creeps up on us,” contagious as laughter is contagious.12 At the end of comedies, we pity those whose love is not infectious and simply leaves them unrequited. Who would prefer to be Malvolio if he could be Sebastian?13

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In other plays, infection in matters of love is deadly serious. Othello likens his diagnosis of his wife’s fault to plague when Iago reminds him of her supposed liaison with Cassio: “Oh, it comes o’er my memory / As doth the raven o’er the infectious house, / Boding to all—he had my handkerchief” (4.1. 20–22).14 Iago’s musings about giving his wife a handkerchief, of course, prompt Othello to this seeming non sequitur. Several brilliant essays, like those of Lynda Boose and Peter Stallybrass, have looked at the symbolic implications of Desdemona’s handkerchief, linking it to her virginity and Othello’s honor.15 The handkerchief enters the play, however, when Desdemona offers it to bind Othello’s painful forehead (3.3.300–303); this is the fateful moment when he rejects her too diminutive “napkin” so that it falls and Emilia picks it up. Desdemona, it would appear, in her innocence considers a handkerchief an item that promotes good health. For Othello’s mind to drift from “the infectious house” to his handkerchief suggests that he at least subconsciously connects it with the stanching of infection. In times of plague, one would be well served by having a handkerchief. Primarily, the picture of the raven hovering over the infectious house suggests that it is public humiliation that most concerns Othello. Like the suspicious husbands in Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale, he convinces himself that his decision to murder his wife has a nobler intention. Othello means to restore the public health by murdering his wife before she can spread disease: “Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men” (5.2.6). Posthumus calls the mole on Imogen’s breast a “stain” (2.4.143); he wishes to discover a way for “men to be” (2.5.1) without the participation of females and wishes that he could excise “The woman’s part” (2.5.22) from his body. Leontes, who has fathered a male child with Hermione, is grateful that she did not nurse their son and tries to inoculate Mamilius by removing him from Hermione’s influence: “Bear the boy hence; he shall not come about her” (2.1.60). (As syphilis spread throughout Europe, “physicians gradually found out that . . . a nurse with syphilis [could] infect her sucking child”).16 All of the relatively frequent uses of “plague” in Othello focus on disease even if not on bubonic plague itself. The fi rst is Iago’s instruction to Roderigo to rouse Brabantio: “And though he in a fertile climate dwell, / Plague him with flies” (1.1.75–76). This imperative seems to refer to the Ten Plagues of Egypt, many of which torment Othello as well as Brabantio. As Iago’s poison insinuates itself into Othello’s imagination, he sees himself as a Job-like figure: Had it pleased heaven To try me with affl iction, had they rained All kinds of sores and shames on my bare head, Steeped me in poverty to the very lips, Given to captivity me and my utmost hopes,

Shakespeare’s Dual Lexicons of Plague 157 I should have found in some place of my soul A drop of patience. (4.2.49–55) Brooding on Iago’s insinuations, Othello reflects on how he has been afflicted by Desdemona’s supposed infidelity: I had rather be a toad And live upon the vapor of a dungeon Than keep a corner in the thing I love For others’ uses. (3.3.269–72) The second plague, which invaded the most intimate spaces and contaminated food preparation, was frogs, “which,” according to Exodus, “shall go up and come into thine house: and into thy chamber, where thou slepest, and upon thy bed, & into the house of thy servants, and upon thy people, and into thine ovens, and into thy kneading troghes.”17 Othello’s agony intensifies his fear of pollution when he speaks directly to Desdemona in the speech that begins with his boast of maintaining patience if faced with sores, shames, and poverty. But there where I have garnered up my heart, Where either I must live or bear no life, The fountain from the which my current runs Or else dries up—to be discarded thence! Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads To knot and gender in! (4.2.59–64) To Desdemona’s reply—“I hope my noble lord esteems me honest” (67)—Othello counters, “Oh, ay, as summer fl ies are in the shambles, / That quicken even with blowing” (68–69). Compare the fourth biblical plague: “and there came great swarmes of flies into the house of Pharaoh, and into his servants houses, so that through all the land of Egypt the earth was corrupt by the swarmes of flies” (Exodus 8:24). Living in a time of rampant venereal disease, Othello intensifies his source. The unbridled generative activity of the summer flies alarms the viewer, whereas the fountain, like a syphilitic reproductive organ, seems either to be rendered sterile or to have its purpose inverted, becoming a site of strenuous, contaminated copulation rather than a source of life-giving sustenance. As horrible as they were, the Ten Plagues of Egypt were at least reversible. What Othello faces seems to him far worse. He concludes the soliloquy that introduces the image of the toad with this reflection:

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Paula S. Berggren Yet ’tis the plague to great ones; Prerogatived are they less than the base. ’Tis destiny unshakeable, like death. Even then this forked plague is fated to us When we do quicken. (3.3.272–76)

To be cuckolded is to be a victim of the plague most fearsome to Othello, Posthumus, and Leontes, to name only the most prominent of the tormented husbands in Shakespeare’s plays. As Othello here indicates, the forked plague is the fate of all great men, almost a genetic disorder that cannot be cured. To the degree that Othello thinks of himself as a selfmade man—having not boasted of fetching his “life and being / From men of royal siege” (1.2.21–22)—his condition must be doubly painful. He has brought the forked plague upon himself. The most momentous incidence of bubonic plague in Shakespeare’s plays occurs in Romeo and Juliet. The fi nal disaster hinges on the failure of Friar Lawrence to communicate with Romeo. The earliest version of “the Veronese legend,” according to J.J. Munro, was by Masuccio Salernitano, “published in Naples in 1471.”18 The heroine, here called Giannozza, herself writes a letter to her secret husband explaining that she will have taken a sleeping potion, “but her messenger and his ship were taken by pirates and her letter was lost” (xxxvii). Matteo Bandello transforms the story by bringing it up to date; rejecting the trappings of Greek romance, his Giulietta e Romeo (1554), a trendy urban novella, introduces plague as the reason for the messenger’s detention (xxxiv). Basing his English verse narrative on the intervening French translation of Bandello’s novella by Boiastuau (1559), Arthur Brooke provides a detailed description of the catastrophe that impedes the progress of Friar Lawrence’s brother Friar John: And, for because in Italy is a wonted guise That friars in the town should seldom walk alone, But of their convent aye should be accompanied with one Of his profession, straight a house he fi ndeth out, In mind to take some friar with him, to walk the town about. But entered once he might not issue out again, For that a brother of the house, a day before or twain, Died of the plague—a sickness which they greatly fear and hate— So were the brethren charged to keep within their convent gate, Barred of their fellowship that in the house do wone; The townfolk eke commanded are the friar’s house to shun, Till they that had the care of health their freedom should renew; Whereof, as you shall shortly hear, a mischief great there grew. (2488–2500)

Shakespeare’s Dual Lexicons of Plague 159 Editors of Shakespeare’s play (most notably Jill Levenson, as cited later) draw from this leisurely account of quarantine, a strategy to prevent the spread of plague perfected by a number of Italian city-states early in the sixteenth century,19 to clarify Friar John’s shorter explanation of his failure to deliver Friar Lawrence’s letter to Romeo. In searching for a traveling companion to fulfill the dictates of his religious order, the friar voluntarily enters an enclosure, a significant spatial gesture, as we shall see. In appropriating this long-winded narrative, Shakespeare cuts but also adds a telling detail: the searchers of the town, Suspecting that we both were in a house Where the infectious pestilence did reign, Sealed up the doors and would not let us forth, So that my speed to Mantua was stayed. (5.2.8–12) Sealed doors were standard “during outbreaks of the plague in London” by the end of the sixteenth century.20 Although he follows his source’s scrupulous documentation of quarantine procedures in cases of bubonic plague, Shakespeare does not here speak of plague, and, as noted earlier, in the First Quarto, neither does Mercutio when he rebukes Romeo for coming between him and Tybalt in their duel. I would like to suggest that those sealed-up doors reflect the impact of plague on the artist’s imagination more than does the very word “plague,” which, as we have seen, carries such varying weight in the mouths of different speakers in widely divergent contexts. * * * * Beyond the verbal lexicon of plague sketched here, the fundamental rhythms of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy may owe something to the ways in which he and his contemporaries experienced the disease. Plague manifested itself spatially in unpredictable ways, closing people in, or out, depending on where one stood, for weeks at a time. Leeds Barroll attends minutely to the evidence of theater closings caused by outbreaks or feared outbreaks of plague and attributes to these closings a distinctive rhythm in Shakespeare’s dramatic production. 21 In his recent Soul of the Age, Jonathan Bate suggests that Shakespeare probably took off for Stratford whenever the theaters were closed by plague and points to the frequent interruption of dramatic activity between May 1603 and February 1610, when he was writing Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Cymbeline. “This fact,” argues Bate, “had huge consequences for Shakespeare, not always fully perceived by biographers.”22 Even without reference to the events in the playwright’s life, it seems to me that we can discover a spatial lexicon of plague in Shakespeare’s plays, and in Elizabethan and Jacobean

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drama as a whole, that reflects these alternating patterns of access allowed and denied, of movement out and movement in. All Elizabethan and Jacobean plays took advantage of a physical theater that encouraged the juxtaposition of inner and outer action. To what extent does the contrast between scenes set on the public streets and those that take place within cloistered confi nes mimic the rhythms of opening and closing playhouses and other places of entertainment? To what extent does the stifl ing sense of imprisonment “in the vault, / To whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in” (4.3.33–34) that Juliet fears as she prepares to drink the potion bespeak a simultaneous horror of—and fascination with—quarantine? As Paul Slack explains, public policy for dealing with plague borrowed from continental models but deviated from them by making the isolation of the sick more onerous. No one was let out of or into houses where plague was deemed to lodge. “The incarceration of whole families in infected houses characterized English policy between 1578 and 1665” and was the cause of much controversy. 23 This rigor probably explains the effort to disguise a plague death that playwright Thomas Dekker records, as noted earlier. In Lanthorne and Candle-Light, Dekker returns to this fascination with the politics of quarantine in terms that juxtapose the contrasting treatments of plague and pox: When the dore of a poore Artificer (if his child had died but with one Token of death about him) was close ram’d up and Guarded for feare others should have been infected; yet the plague that a Whore-house layes upon a Citty is worse yet laughed at. 24 Plague and the whore house coalesce in the dreadful imagery of the Dark Lady poems. The only two uses of “plague” in the sonnets, which may have been written during periods when the theaters were closed, echo and intensify the ambivalence with which quarantine was viewed in Tudor and Stuart England. In the concluding lines of Sonnet 137, the speaker acknowledges the corruption of his judgment: Why should my heart think that a several plot Which my heart knows the wide world’s common place? Or mine eyes seeing this, say this is not, To put fair truth upon so foul a face? In things right true my heart and eyes have erred, And to this false plague are they now transferred. He speaks here the language of enclosure, realizing that he has deluded himself into thinking he has sole access to a woman who is in fact open to all. And it need not be sheep that graze this common place, the Dark

Shakespeare’s Dual Lexicons of Plague 161 Lady’s “hell” (144.12), a kind of plague pit, where bodies indiscriminately pile up. 25 In the couplet of Sonnet 141, he refers again to his sick sensuality: “Only my plague thus far I count my gain, / That she that makes me sin awards me pain.” Plague attracts even as it disgusts the infected lover and, it seems, has a purgative function that counteracts the speaker’s sins by punishing him even as he indulges in them. * * * * Romeo and Juliet enacts its own confusion about closed and open spaces. The adolescent lovers lack a place to call their own. Romeo upsets his parents by locking himself up in his room rather than being “sociable,” as Mercutio wishes him to be (2.4.88); the lovers seek seclusion in Juliet’s bedroom and comfort in the Friar’s cell. Because Friar John cannot escape from a house with sealed up doors, Romeo and Juliet meet one last time in the Capulet vault, whose sealed doors he pries open. As he drinks his poison, Romeo kisses Juliet: “And lips, O you / The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss / A dateless bargain to engrossing death” (5.3.113– 15). Finding her husband dead beside her, Juliet refuses the Friar’s plea to leave the tomb. Arriving at the scene of carnage, the Prince requires the assembled families to “Seal up the mouth of outrage for a while, / Till we can clear these ambiguities” (5.3.216–17). Like Romeo and Juliet, Othello was produced in the wake of bubonic plague, and like the earlier tragedy of love, it shifts from closed to open and then back again. Brabantio enters the play “above,” shortly after Iago urges Roderigo to plague him with flies. Filling the night calm with unaccustomed noise, Iago impels the distinguished Venetian senator to open his window and expose himself to hear that his well-guarded daughter (“How got she out?” 1.1.173) has given herself to “an extravagant and wheeling stranger” (1.1.139). Othello himself confi rms this description of a wideranging and therefore (to Brabantio) threatening form of vagrancy when he assures Iago that he is “fast married” (1.2.11): For know, Iago, But that I love the gentle Desdemona, I would not my unhoused free condition Put into circumscription and confi ne For the sea’s worth (1.2.24–28) The fi rst act moves from the streets of Venice to the Duke’s council chamber, the second from a Cypriot port to public square, while Desdemona and Othello exit to the “citadel” (2.1.211), from which they return to the sounds of a riot. As he will argue in justifying the need to kill Desdemona, Othello takes upon himself the responsibility to regulate and preserve the public welfare:

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Paula S. Berggren What? In a town of war To manage private and domestic quarrel? In night, and on the court and guard of safety? (2.3.207–10)

The rest of the play hinges on just this confusion of private and domestic quarrel with the “court and guard of safety,” as the citadel (the fortification of which Othello goes off to inspect in the tiny second scene of Act III, just before Iago launches his assault on Othello’s ear) ceases to protect from external threats and devolves into a contaminated space, a shambles, a cistern in which toads engender, a trysting place for sexual encounters, and a quarantine of infection. As the play progresses, the action moves into the citadel. When Othello tries to make Emilia accuse Desdemona of infidelity, Emilia counters with an impassioned defense of her mistress: I durst, my lord, to wager she is honest, Lay down my soul at stake. If you think other, Remove your thought; it doth abuse your bosom. If any wretch have put this in your head, Let heaven requite it with the serpent’s curse. (4.2.13–17) By this time, we have heard what Emilia has not: Othello’s conversations with Iago, whose own infection has been transmitted to his General. Having confessed that the thought of Othello’s possible seduction of Emilia “Doth, like a poisonous mineral, gnaw my innards” (2.1.298), Iago proceeds to “pour . . . pestilence into” Othello’s ear (2.3.350) and to infect all the cavities of Othello’s body. Calling up “black vengeance, from the hollow hell” (3.3.462), Othello opens himself up to contamination: Yield up, O love, thy crown and hearted throne, To tyrannous hate! Swell, bosom, with thy freight, For ’tis of aspics’ tongues! (3.3.463–65) He has abused his bosom by believing Iago’s assertion that circumstantial evidence can lead “directly to the door of truth” (3.3.423). In Othello, the verbal and spatial lexicons of plague mesh, as Iago drives Othello more and more deeply into pestilential enclosures. After his epileptic fit, brought on by the working of Iago’s medicine (4.1.45), Othello is instructed to “encave” himself to watch Cassio’s encounter with Iago and Bianca’s entrance with the handkerchief that had been thrown into Cassio’s chamber (3.4.189). Michael Neill has drawn attention to this “marvelous coinage” in his discussion of inwardness, morbidity, and their

Shakespeare’s Dual Lexicons of Plague 163 relation to the new science of anatomy in early modern texts. 26 Many other critical perspectives have been brought to bear on representations of interiority in Othello, among other plays. Patricia Parker has noted, the play repeatedly eroticizes the offstage chamber linked with Desdemona’s sexuality and hidden behind a door before that chamber, and its bed, are fi nally uncovered (if only partially) to vision in the play’s last scene . . . But what is in this almost literal sense fi nally exposed or brought to light—the hidden place of Desdemona’s sexuality and her “crime” (5.2.26)—is, almost as soon as it is shown, rehidden and reclosed. 27 Parker has written extensively of the compulsion in a number of Shakespeare’s plays to uncover secrets, linking this activity, as does Katharine Eisaman Maus, to the brutal techniques of interrogation practiced in Tudor and Stuart England, based on a vision of the human body as a place of hidden cavities. 28 These critics probe the penetrations of these spaces that aim to open them. I am suggesting that we attend as well to the theatrical impact of the closing of such spaces. The scene in which Othello, convinced that Desdemona is unfaithful, treats Emilia like a “simple bawd” who lacks the sophistication of his Venetian wife, “a subtle whore, / A closet lock and key of villainous secrets” (4.2.21, 22–24), enacts the confusion of which Dekker writes in his plague pamphlets. The wrong spaces are being sealed. * * * * The very staging of this disturbing scene requires an act of imagination on the part of the audience that makes us complicit with Othello’s fantasies. As Alan Dessen reminds us in Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary, for all the talk of locks, keys, and doors in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, there would have been few verisimilar structures literally opened and closed in the playhouses of the English Renaissance. Acknowledging the work of Richard C. Hosley in distinguishing between “theatrical” (literal equipment that the audience sees) and “fictional” signals, Dessen argues persuasively that many modern stage directions that call for large props must be false to the performance conventions of the plays. He proposes instead that we consider how small items function metaphorically and encourage us to see parallelisms that we might otherwise fail to perceive. 29 Othello’s calling Emilia “a closet lock and key” and then directing her to “Leave procreants alone and shut the door” (4.2.30) suggests that he and Emilia exchange a set of keys as he pushes her out of an imagined room. Spectators in the theater must evaluate the protagonist’s delusion in turning a private chamber of the citadel into a brothel as they eavesdrop on the agony with which Othello sees his heart become “a cistern for foul toads / To knot and gender in” (4.2.63).

164 Paula S. Berggren In Proverbs 5: 15–18, to which the image of the cistern alludes, a husband is urged to drink from his own well; the passage warns as much against the husband’s infidelity as the wife’s.30 Desdemona insists that she has preserved “this vessel” (4.2.86) for him, but Othello is consumed with the sense that all containers—in the manner of the biblical plagues—have been corrupted: I should make very forges of my cheeks, That would to cinders burn up modesty, Did I but speak thy deeds. What committed? Heaven stops the nose at it and the moon winks; The bawdy wind, that kisses all it meets, Is hushed within the hollow mine of earth And will not hear’t. (4.2.76–82) The facial cavity from which Othello’s speech should issue, like the hollow mine of earth, insulates—quarantines?—the pollution, it would seem. Desdemona’s deeds are so heinous that neither Othello nor the bawdy wind can bring themselves to spread the news of them. Othello ends this interview by summoning Emilia, the keeper of the gate of hell (96), to return, receive her payment, and “turn the key and keep our counsel” (98). The play concludes, of course, within the bosom of the citadel where a curtained bed takes center stage and Othello compulsively opens and closes the curtains. The key is now in his hands to let Emilia, no longer the brothel keeper but a messenger, into the space that contains a corpse. Told at the end to “forsake this room” (5.2.339), thought to have been disarmed, Othello produces one last weapon, stabs himself, and falls upon the bed. Lodovico draws the curtains one last time: “The object poisons sight; / Let it be hid” (5.2.375–76). Would not this voice of municipal authority instructing that contamination be covered over and sequestered recall the imposition of quarantine in a theater just recently released from restrictions in a time of plague? * * * * During the last phase of Shakespeare’s career, as Paul Slack recounts, “there were frequent cases of plague between 1606 and 1610” and, according to Bate, the theaters were closed “for most of the time from July 1606 to February 1610, apart from a brief reopening between April and July 1608.”31 Perhaps it is not totally coincidental that the late romances, and The Winter’s Tale, in particular, have to do with healing after great pain. The spatial patterns of the play show both the horror and the cleansing associated with quarantine. The sealing up of houses where infection was suspected and the closing of the theaters seem to have so deeply impressed themselves on the playwright’s mind that perhaps we may speak of metaphoric reenactments of such motifs as appropriations, in the sense that

Shakespeare’s Dual Lexicons of Plague 165 Charles Whitney points to in a recent article: “Appropriation may go beyond mere discursive action to physical action,” he remarks.32 Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences needed no prompting to read the meanings of embedded references to plague and its appurtenances when a character like Hermione explicitly interprets her husband’s treatment of her as a familiar therapeutic regimen. At her trial, Hermione speaks directly of the medical abuses to which she has been unfairly subjected, having been “barred, like one infectious” (3.2.98) from her son, while her innocent baby daughter has been “Haled out to murder” (3.2.101). Prison has proved to her a refuge violated, for she has been “hurried / Here to this place, i’th’open air, before / I have got strength of limit” (3.2.104–6). When Hermione collapses, Paulina urges Leontes to watch “what death is doing” (3.2.149) and, suddenly penitent, Leontes vows to “visit / The chapel” where the dead bodies of his son and wife are to be laid (3.2.234), a more salubrious version of the Capulet tomb, but a place that we never see. Instead, it is in “a removed house” (5.2.108) of Paulina’s that Hermione has been quarantined, a place that functions variously as a “gallery” (5.2.10) and a “chapel” (5.2.86). The Capulet tomb, the chamber in Othello’s citadel, and Paulina’s gallery sequester their inhabitants. Assuming a “minimalist” staging in which a stage bed serves as “a form of onstage synecdoche wherein the part generates the whole,” Alan Dessen sees “a strong visual analogy between the two moments” in which a bed might be thrust forward in Romeo and Juliet, the fi rst in Juliet’s bedchamber, the second in the tomb (193). The same economy of means links two visions of Desdemona, the subtle Venetian whore of Othello’s painting in Act 4 and the innocent victim of Act 5, the first to be locked in a brothel, the second curtained off from view. Hermione, by contrast, moves out of constriction; forced from her prison “into the open air,” standing as to her trial in Act 3 of The Winter’s Tale, presumably on some fictional or theatrical structure that would be echoed in the posture of the statue that begins to move at the end of the play, she leaves the removed house and resumes a public life. The theaters for which Shakespeare wrote provided a stage space ideally suited to frequent alternations between public and private spheres. A great dramaturgical tradition found infi nite ways to play on that contrast. At some deep level of the unconscious, the lovers of the two tragedies born out of plague closings, Romeo and Juliet and Othello and Desdemona, choose to shut themselves up in places associated with plague. All-consuming erotic attachments separate star-crossed lovers from salubrious open spaces. The “freewheeling and extravagant” soldier prefers to expire on a corpse-laden bed; the little girl whose cries shook the dovehouse and “could have run and waddled all about” (1.3.38) refuses to abandon a “nest / Of death, contagion, and unnatural sleep” (5.3.151–52). In Shakespeare’s lexicons of word and place, plague perversely fuses death with desire; the familiar pun that equates orgasm with death informs this eroticizing of infectious interiors. The spatial structures of this and many other Shakespearean dramas

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lure their protagonists into conceptual spaces that wall out threats even as they wall in death. The fi nal scene of most of his plays end in the open air; Romeo and Juliet, like Othello and The Winter’s Tale, end instead in closed places that have been opened up. Only in the late play, where infection has been purged by the influx of innocent lovers (WT 5.1.169) and the husband’s diseased imagination has been cured, do the protagonists recover. Leontes passes the test Emilia sets for him as she offers three times to cover over the statue of Hermione, confi ned to the chapel for 16 years: “Do not draw the curtain” (5.2.59).

Notes 1 Thomas Dekker, The Wonderful Year; The Gull’s Horn-Book; Penny-Wise, Pound-Foolish; English Villanies Discovered by Lantern and Candlelight; and Selected Writings, ed. E.D. Pendry, The Stratford-Upon-Avon Library 4 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 43–44. 2 Marvin Spevack, The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press-Belknap, 1973). 3 William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 5th ed. (New York: Pearson Longman, 2004), 4.3.266. All references to Shakespeare’s plays are from this edition, cited in the text by act, scene, and line number. 4 William O. Scott, “The Paradox of Timon’s Self-Cursing,” Shakespeare Quarterly 35 (1984): 301. 5 Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton, eds. William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens. Arden Edition, Third Series (London: Cengage Learning, 2008), 100. 6 On Q1 and the use of “pox” instead of plague, see Jill Levenson, ed., Romeo and Juliet, Oxford’s World Classics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 394–95. 7 Lynette Hunter, “Canker in Romeo and Juliet,” in Disease, Diagnosis and Cure on the Early Modern Stage, eds. Stephanie Moss, Kaara L. Peterson (Aldershot, England: Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2004), 181. 8 Geoffrey Hughes, Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English (New York: Penguin, 1998), 55. 9 “An act to restrain the abuses of players,” cited by Michael Best, in “Censorship,” Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 2001–5), available online at http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/literature/censorship.html (accessed November 7, 2009); see also 3 James I, c. 21, Statutes of the Realm. 10 Cited in F. David Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 217. 11 Katherine Duncan-Jones, “Playing Fields or Killing Fields: Shakespeare’s Poems and Sonnets,” Shakespeare Quarterly 54 (2003): 135. 12 Adrian Poole, “Shakespeare and the Risk of Contagion,” Shakespeare Studies 40 (2002): 108, 110. 13 In Plague Writing in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), however, Ernest B. Gilman reminds us of at least one moment in an early comedy when the infection kills, this being in Love’s Labor’s Lost, which ends, of course, in mourning that postpones marriages. Berowne’s sentence, to bring daily cheer to the hospitalized for a year, “will demonstrate,”

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says Gilman, “the limits of [his] high-flown rhetoric to plumb the depths of pestilential suffering” (53–54). For more on this passage in its plague-time context, see Nichole DeWall’s essay in this volume. Although Othello does not here explicitly make the verbal link between bubonic plague and the infected house, the words “plague” and “raven” appear in the same sentence in Much Ado About Nothing. Benedick, in an aside, deplores Balthasar’s singing of “Sigh no more, ladies”: “I has [sic] as lief have heard the night raven, come what plague could have come after it” (2.3.83–85). Lynda Boose, “Othello’s Handkerchief: ‘The Recognizance and Pledge of Love,’” English Literary Renaissance 5 (1975): 360–74; Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Othello: Critical Essays, ed. Susan Snyder (New York: Garland, 1988), 251–74. Johannes Fabricius, Syphilis in Shakespeare’s England (London: Jessica Kingsley, 1995), 22. For more on syphilis in early modern England, see Kevin Siena, ed., Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2005). Exodus 8:23–24 in The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition. With an Introduction by Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). This is the translation with which Shakespeare was presumably most familiar, cited here in my slightly normalized version. Arthur Brooke and J.J. Munro, Brooke’s “Romeus and Juliet”: Being the Original Of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” (1908; Whitefish, Montana: Kessinger Publishing, 2007), xxxvi–vii. Subsequent quotations from Brooke’s text and Munro’s introduction are parenthetically inserted. See especially Paul S. Sehdev, “The Origin of Quarantine,” Clinical Infectious Diseases 35 (2002): 1072. Jill L. Levenson, ed. Romeo and Juliet, Oxford’s World Classics (New York: Oxford University Press 2000), fn. L.11. J. Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theater: The Stuart Years (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 19. Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare (New York: Random House, 2009), 335. Bate begins his book by noting that a few months after Shakespeare’s birth, Stratford was devastated by the plague, “the single most powerful force shaping his life and those of his contemporaries” (4). In an earlier biography, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), Park Honan suggests that Mary Shakespeare’s presumed attentions to her newborn son’s well-being in time of plague—“Windows were sealed; doors admitted no visitors. William in infancy probably knew a hot, airless house . . . ” (17)—contributed to the future playwright’s psychological development. This sequestration, although stifl ing, also bespeaks maternal love: “William’s confidence cannot be dissociated from the emotional support he must have found at home” (18). The simultaneous attraction to and revulsion from protective enclosure that I detect in this essay may stem from Shakespeare’s earliest experience of life. Paul Slack The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985; reprinted with corrections, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1985; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 210–11. As quoted by Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues and Politics (Houndswell, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001), 154. I am grateful to Ernest Gilman for bringing the metaphoric equation between the grave pit and the female “common place” to my attention.

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26 Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Neill makes much of the remarkable word “encave,”and in the section of his book devoted to Othello, discusses “the terrible double compulsion both to discover and to conceal” (156), citing among other influences the “science of anatomy” and the “defiant reimagining of the human encounter with mortality” (102) to which Jacobean tragedy contributes. I recognize that the spatial and verbal patterns to which I am connecting efforts to contain bubonic plague have been analyzed by many excellent critics who have seen them through other lenses. As always when we deal with an artist of Shakespeare’s scope and complexity, to suggest one source of aesthetic phenomena of this sort does not exclude the possibility of others as well. 27 Patricia Parker “Othello and Hamlet: Spying, Discovery, Secret Faults,” Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 251. 28 See Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and the Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 29 Alan Dessen, Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). In a section called “An Assortment of Keys,” Dessen argues that the presence of a key onstage links together the scenes in which it would be referred to, noting in Romeo and Juliet a progression from Juliet’s garden, to the Friar’s cell, to the street in Mantua where the apothecary dwells (169). These are among the sequestered spaces sought out by Romeo and Juliet; it is noteworthy that the apothecary’s shop is itself a kind of charnel house, a virtual space of infection. I have further expanded on Dessen’s argument in the discussion of Othello in this essay. 30 In his footnote to this passage in the New Cambridge edition of Othello, Norman Sanders points out that the Geneva Bible includes a marginal note next to Proverbs 5:15–18: “God blesseth marriage and curseth whoredom.” 31 Slack, Impact, 67; Bate, Soul of the Age, 335. 32 Charles Whitney, “Appropriate This,” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, guest edited by Christy Desmet and Sujata Iyengar 3.2 (Spring/Summer 2008): 1–22, available online at http:// www.borrowers.uga.edu/cocoon/borrowers/request?id = 781730 (accessed November 7, 2009).

8

“A plague on both your houses” Sites of Comfort and Terror in Early Modern Drama Barbara H. Traister

Plague was of great concern to the men and boys involved in the early modern London theater. In addition to the anxiety which the constant threat of plague and its intermittent epidemics raised in every London citizen, theater people ran an additional risk in time of plague: if plague deaths mounted beyond a certain threshold, theaters closed, by order of the Privy Council, and did not reopen until after the wave of deaths subsided. Thus, plague threatened actors, producers and playwrights, not only as a deadly disease to which they and all Londoners were vulnerable, but also with loss of employment that could last for weeks, months or occasionally more than a year.1 Despite this material threat to all those who worked in the theater and the many dramatic narratives that London’s experience with plague made available—witness the stories of heroism, cowardice and greed recounted, for example, in Thomas Dekker’s The Wonderful Year (1603)—no dramatist in the period chose to dramatize those directly affected by plague such as victims or survivors mourning the loss of family or friends.2 A few plays, however, flirt with actual plague and its material manifestations, usually by focusing, not on plague victims or mourners for plague victims but instead on houses, those threatened by plague or quarantined to protect the uninfected on the outside from it. When we understand how prominent the house becomes in the plays that do deal with plague, Mercutio’s famous curse, “A plague o’ both your houses,” takes on a new resonance, for example. Usually and properly read as referring to family lineage, Mercutio’s curse seems directed at the families of both the Capulets and the Montagues, a curse that is realized in the destruction of the entire younger generation of both families by the play’s end. But perhaps early modern audiences would have also heard the curse more literally: as a wish that the physical houses of these families be visited by the actual plague. Theaters were, of course, not the only buildings shut up in time of plague. As Paul Slack stresses in his summary of England’s plague orders, “Above all, infected houses in towns should be completely shut-up for at least six weeks, with all members of the family, whether sick or healthy, still inside them.”3 In The Plague Act of 1604, which strengthened earlier

170 Barbara H. Traister plague orders, the watchmen were legally allowed to use “violence” to keep people shut in their houses.4 In addition to being shut up, houses harboring plague victims were also marked. The exact form of the marking changed over time, but it usually consisted of some kind of a cross, originally blue but later red, either painted directly on the house door or actually nailed to the door. In addition to or occasionally instead of the cross, a “large sheet of paper printed with a great red circle of the circuit of a foot and breadth of two inches and the words Lord have mercy upon us, printed in the midst” was posted on the door.5 Thus, all passersby or potential visitors were warned to keep their distance as if by the house itself which was made to stand as a striking symbol of plague and its attendant suffering. Early modern plague pamphlets and poetry show the general apprehension surrounding the home in plague-time. In The Triumph of Death: Or, The Picture of the Plague according to the Life; as it was in Anno Domini. 1603, John Davies of Hereford captures the metamorphosis of the home in plague-time: A Beggars home (though dwelling in a Ditch If farre from London it were scituate) He might rent out, if pleas’d him, to the Rich, That now as Hell their London homes doe hate.6 The plague can turn a home that was heaven into a hell worse than any beggar’s hovel and, in fact, alter the very nature of the home, particularly as here with respect to its proximity to the epicenter of the outbreak. In The Weeping Lady: or London Like Ninivie in Sack-Cloth (1625), Thomas Brewer reinforces and broadens this message by opening with a passage from Jeremiah 9.21: “Death is come up into our windows, and entered into our Houses.”7 This verse underscores for Brewer and his readers the horror of a form of death that creeps unsuspected into one’s most personal of lived spaces. Another biblical passage involving houses provides John Donne the text for a sermon preached at St. Dunstan’s in January, 1626, just after the abatement of the horrific epidemic of 1625. Ernest B. Gilman describes that powerful sermon: The St. Dunstan’s sermon is organized as a survey of the four “houses” Donne draws out of his text from Exodus 12:30, “For there was not a house where there was not one dead”: the houses of the Egyptians, our own houses, the “house” of the human body, and the church as the house of God. . . . These are all, alike, “so many places of Infection, so many temporal or spiritual Pesthouses,” as though we could reckon all human experience as a recurrent disease that can be described in—or, rather, contracted to—the single phrase from Exodus that provides Donne with the text of his sermon. (204–5)

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Donne here moves beyond the association of plague and houses to portray man’s relationship with a series of houses, the most important, of course, being man’s spiritual house, the Church. But it is the dead in each house, surely partly inspired by the experience of the 1625 plague, which starts Donne on his meditative riff. The most dreaded house in plague time, mentioned by Donne in his sermon, was the pesthouse. Typically a London pesthouse was a large building into which city officials put all those suffering from plague who were found in the streets, either homeless or inexplicably outside their own homes. There the sick were enclosed, offered minimal palliative treatment and left to live or die, usually the latter. Forty years after Donne’s sermon, little had changed in London with regard to treatment of plague sufferers. William Austin’s description of plague-time suggests that all of London has become a pesthouse: “And to speak our condition at the best / Our City’s merely but great house of Pest.”8 Within the city, inhabitants are shut up to await their fate. No description could be more powerful. One London resident who experienced and wrote about being shut up in his home because of suspected plague was Simon Forman, an occult physician who practiced in London and who had earned something of a reputation for staying in the city and treating patients during epidemics of plague. In several places in his manuscripts Forman writes of the day in 1606 when his only son was born. On that day his house was boarded up because one of his servants, who had been away nursing a sick patient, had herself fallen ill. The neighbors brought the sick woman back to her employer’s house and, thinking that she was ill with plague, promptly boarded up the house with the sick maid, Forman, his newly delivered wife and his newborn son inside. In real life, this experience was very frightening, and Forman reports it with great anger in one of his treatises on plague written three years after this incident, recalling, the great Injury done unto the doctor his wife servants child and household [sic], when you beat up his doors and brought in the sick maid in the same day that Clement his son was born, and how you railed on him and on his wife being but 3 hours before delivered. He goes on to warn other medical practitioners, take heed, be wise and take example by me. Let not money buy you to visit those that have the plague lest you take the plague into your houses. And so have your doors shut up, and be left destitute and be so much abused as I was.9 In other references to this incident, he complains that the household was also denied food and drink, with the family forced to make do with what was already inside the home. Forman’s account, like the others, suggests

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that the horror of the plague came not only from the gruesome physical symptoms but also by the transformation of homes, once places of comfort, into virtual prisons and houses of death. In striking contrast, by their focus on houses and their avoidance of “real” plague and plague victims, the dramatic representations of plague underscore the disinclination or outright refusal by playwrights to represent plague straightforwardly while nevertheless dramatizing its most basic attendant fears. My essay examines three plays that dabble with plague: Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Jonson’s The Alchemist and Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed or, The Woman’s Prize—each written and published in years following severe plague outbreaks.10 Because the references to plague in both Romeo and Juliet and The Alchemist have been discussed by other critics, I will focus most of my attention on the lesser known play by John Fletcher. It offers the most detailed early modern dramatic picture of measures to be taken when plague was present. Although F.P. Wilson mentions Fletcher’s plague scene as offering “a slice of life” (69) in plague-time, the play’s presentation of plague has otherwise received very little attention. Reading The Tamer Tamed in the context of the other two plays, however, reveals some remarkable similarities in their treatment of plague. In each play, plague is thought to be present, is called by its name (“plague” and/or “pestilence”), becomes associated more with a house than with an infected human body, and has an effect on the plot’s outcome in spite of its not appearing in the form of infected bodies. No character, not even the cat in The Alchemist, sickens or dies of plague; instead houses figure in each reference to plague in these plays, and by the end of each play those houses are open and plague-free. In Romeo and Juliet, where the reference to actual plague is very brief, Friar John, charged with carrying Friar Lawrence’s letter to Romeo in Padua, is sealed up, like Forman, in a house which officials suspect harbors “the infectious pestilence” (5.2.20). The theater audience is kept at a remove from this situation, hearing about the possible plague only after it is no longer thought to be a threat. Friar John is released fairly quickly, without the usual period of quarantine (normally 28–40 days)11 suggesting that the diagnosis of plague was—as in Forman’s case—inaccurate. The actual plague does not appear in Romeo and Juliet. But its threat is enough to disrupt social circulation, preventing the delivery of a letter and ultimately resulting in Romeo’s hasty and misinformed return to Verona. Thus, plague has an effect on the play’s plot; it provides one of the coincidences that work against the star-crossed lovers. Despite Mercutio’s curse, however, none of the play’s numerous fatalities can be directly attributed to the plague bacillus. In The Alchemist, the literal disease is announced in the fi rst line of the play’s Argument: “The Sickness hot, a master quit for fear / His house in town, and left one servant there” (ll. 1–2). It is responsible for the situation on which the play depends.12 Plague threatens and has emptied London of

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its wealthier inhabitants, like “master” Lovewit who packs up and flees. Remaining in London, however, are servants like Lovewit’s Jeremy as well as rogues, newcomers from the country, religious enthusiasts, and residents who watch their neighborhood from inside their houses, through open windows but behind closed doors. Because the neighbors emerge near the play’s end (Doll estimates that 40 neighbors surround Lovewit as he stands outside in the street [4.7.112]) to give their accounts of what has been going on in the house supposedly shut up during its master’s absence, The Alchemist gives the impression that only Lovewit has fled this particular London street. This appears at fi rst to be in direct contrast to the situation more commonly reported during epidemics, as Ernest B. Gilman explains, “In plague times, the image of London life changed from one of pestering multitudes to deserted streets”(130).13 But Jonson suggests that there is a bustling traffic of other sorts in plague-time. Although the neighbors may have shut themselves in their respective dwellings, none of the victims who freely enter and exit Lovewit’s house pays much attention to plague’s presence, and the rogues mention plague only to reassure themselves that the epidemic’s continuance will allow them more time for their schemes. In fact, in Jonson’s play the plague exists almost exclusively on the level of metaphor, a plague of crime and deception as Michael Neill has noted: “[The Alchemist] implicitly equates the pestilence raging outside Lovewit’s usurped house with the moral disease rampant within it.”14 The actual plague is obvious neither in the street nor in the characters’ concerns. The disease of plague is actually useful to Subtle, Face and Doll as a means of extending their crime wave, and they anxiously check the statistics to reassure themselves that Lovewit will not yet dare to return and claim his house. When he does return, of course, his house is open to a crowd of gulls rather than shut up against the plague as he had ordered. In an article subtitled “The Absence of Plague in The Alchemist,” Patrick Phillips examines “not the presence of plague in the play but its surprising erasure in the fi nal act, when the ‘visitation’ of Lovewit’s house is revealed to be only another illusion of the cony-catchers Subtle and Face.”15 Phillips goes on to argue that by creating a comedy with plague as the backdrop Jonson provided his audience with a prophylactic against the actual plague, “ a form of mirth that had the power to purge ‘bad conceits’ and replace them with a healthy, health-preserving image of a plague-less London” (46). More specifically, by turning a house that has been ordered by its owner to be shut up against the plague into a site for profit and gulling, Jonson reverses the plague house anxiety by making the house the locus of mirth. Such a prophylactic purpose might also be claimed for Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed, another comedy. Ironically, the most extensive and detailed treatment of plague in early modern drama occurs in this husband-taming farce, fi rst staged around 1610–1116 several years after the great plague epidemic of 1603. During the period between 1603 and 1611, plague had a continual presence in London (Slack, 146) and the theaters were intermittently

174 Barbara H. Traister closed during those years (Wilson, 125–27). Written in answer to Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, Fletcher’s play also features Petruccio and a bride, this time a demure woman named Maria whom he marries after the death of his fi rst wife, Kate. Knowledge of Petruccio’s reputation as a wife-tamer and encouragement from Kate’s sister, Bianca, spur Maria to transform into a husband-tamer immediately after her wedding. She barricades herself, along with several female supporters, in her bedroom in her father’s house, barring Petruccio from the bedroom and from consummation of the marriage. Eventually she emerges from her barricade and moves into Petruccio’s home where she undertakes expensive remodeling, but she still refuses to consummate her marriage. In addition, she orders for herself a very elaborate wardrobe despite protests from her husband about her extravagance. Maria becomes the plague that closes his home to him, taking it over, and denying him comfort. In this role, she might have reminded early modern audiences of the proverbial shrew that “plagues” her husband nearly to his death, as in Thomas Dekker’s tale “A Medicine to Cure the Plague of a Woman’s Tongue, Experimented on a Cobbler’s Wife” from The Raven’s Almanac.17 Unfortunately for him, Petruccio has no such medicine. Increasingly distraught, he tries to fi nd ways to change Maria back to the sweet woman he had thought he was marrying. When she pretends to flirt openly with his best friend, Sophocles, Petruccio despairs: My heart aches. Something I must do speedily. I’ll die, If I can handsomely, for that’s the way To make a rascal of her. I am sick. And I’ll go very near it, but I’ll perish. (3.3.167–71) Hoping to get if not Maria’s sympathy then at least the sympathy of his community who will term Maria an unfeeling “rascal,” Petruccio wastes no time putting his plan into practice. As scene 3.5 opens, his two serving men are on stage reacting to his illness. Pedro, who appears to know nothing of Petruccio’s deception, is concerned for his own future if Petruccio is seriously ill: “O Jaques, Jaques, what becomes of us? / O my sweet master!” (ll.1–2). Jaques’s response—suggesting by its excess that he may be a party to Petruccio’s fakery—is to send Pedro for a physician, apothecaries, “mountebanks,/ skilful in lungs and livers,” the neighbors, bottles of aquavita and the parson (ll. 5–6). In other words, he summons the community whom Petruccio hopes will bear witness to Maria’s cruelty to him. Already having devised a counter-move, Maria diagnoses Petruccio’s illness, not as one where he can sicken “handsomely,” but as the plague, the sickness most likely to disperse community and leave the sufferer shunned and alone.18 Maria enters in 3.5 having stripped their home of its

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fabrics, plate, and other movables, threatening to flee with all of the goods, presumably under the pretense that such goods would otherwise become tainted by plague-carrying vapors and rendered useless. This might be a wise move on the part of a homeowner concerned for his or her valuables, but Petruccio does not really have the plague, as Maria well knows, and so this move is yet another blow to his manhood. She traps him in his own home and absconds with the goods that she has only recently acquired through marriage. When Jaques announces his intention to enter the house to see his master, Maria responds with the fi rst of several pronouncements meant to distance his friends and allies from Petruccio in this war of the sexes: “Thou art undone then, fellow. / No man that has been near him come near me” (ll. 20–21) When others arrive on stage, summoned no doubt by Pedro, Maria’s fi rst words again are to urge fl ight: “Get you gone/ If you mean to save your lives, the sickness” (ll. 25–26). Maria assumes here that all will recognize that “the sickness” is plague, the great mortality. In fact, she seems almost teasingly to drive home her claim that Petruccio has plague by only gradually becoming specific. First she comments to Jaques that if he visits Petruccio he must not come near her; next she mentions “the sickness” and then she says outright “The plague is i’th’house, sir, / My husband has it now, and raves extremely” (ll.27–28) and only later does she deliver the clinching detail: “I saw the tokens.”(l. 59+1).19 Mounting such specific evidence in this carefully unfolding plan, she positions herself as a reliable, well-informed witness. After all, as Petruccio’s wife, she is best situated to testify to the condition of his body (although the theater audience understands that her marriage to Petruccio is still unconsummated). Before she enters the scene with all Petruccio’s household goods, Maria has taken steps to strengthen her claim that Petruccio suffers from plague. I have bespoke two women, and the city Has sent a watch, I thank ‘em. Meat nor money He shall not want, nor prayers (3.5.31–33) These are appropriate plague precautions. The women were probably the “nurse-keepers” described briefly by F.P. Wilson: “They were fi rst appointed in 1578—two in every parish—to wait on the inhabitants of infected houses and to nurse the sick. They were for the most part single or childless” (67). As Richelle Munkhoff explains, these searchers had a “responsibility to read living bodies for signs of plague, a responsibility which effectively put them in charge of quarantine. Based on the searchers’ fi ndings, parish officials were obligated to shut up houses suspected of harbouring infection” (10). Although Maria claims to have summoned them, these women never appear on stage to “search” Petruccio. No one but Maria herself therefore verifies her diagnosis of plague.

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The Watch does arrive, however. Unlike ordinary watchmen, such as Dogberry and Verges whom Shakespeare portrayed so comically in Much Ado, these men are the special watch or warders appointed to guard houses in time of plague: as Wilson explains, in the General Orders of 1592 directions were given for the appointment of two or three warders to watch by turns outside the houses of infected people who did not duly observe the necessary regulations, and to arrest any persons coming out of these houses contrary to the orders. (68) These men appear on stage and Maria urges them to perform their duty: “The watch! / Pray, do your office. Lock the doors up, fast. / And patience be his angel” (ll. 35–37). The Watch lock the house doors, while Petruccio cries from within that he is not infected, even thrusting out an arm to show those who have not yet fled that the arm has no plague tokens on it. The Doctor and the apothecaries arrive, and the Doctor seizes Petruccio’s outthrust arm and takes his pulse, proclaiming that it beats wi’th’ busiest And shows a general inflammation, Which is the symptom of a pestilent fever. Take twenty ounces from him. (ll. 53+4) Petruccio refuses to submit to blood-letting, uttering threats from behind the locked door. It is at this moment that Maria plays her trump card and announces that she has seen the plague tokens. The Doctor and everyone but the Watch hastily exit, and Petruccio is divested of every supporter, of the community of relatives, friends and servants whom he had hope to rally by his sickness (not plague but a “handsome” illness) to support him against Maria. 20 The idea of plague tokens is so terrible that only the Watch remain after Maria claims to have seen these physical markers. The two watchmen seem unafraid of Petruccio as they stand guard over his supposedly plague-infested house. They talk with him quite freely through the locked door, advising him to prepare himself for death and informing him that onions are being roasted to apply to his plague sores.21 Having no mind to remain locked up or to undergo torture by roasted onion, Petruccio, now anxious to rid himself of these unwanted professional observers, seizes a gun within the house and threatens to shoot the Watch through the door or window if they do not leave. Although they may not fear the plague, the Watch are afraid of guns and, most unprofessionally, turn tail and run rather than using force to keep him within, as directed by The Plague Act of 1604. Rid of his guard, Petruccio shoots off the door’s lock and emerges onto the deserted stage. He then delivers a monologue on

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the ten thousand ways wives have to kill husbands and exits in search of the friends and servants who abandoned him. When Petruccio returns in 4.2 to hear Pedro and Jaques’s account of how Maria stripped the house of all its valuables, no one is any longer worried about his being infected with plague. His men are convinced that he is not plague-stricken, and Maria— who invented the fictitious diagnosis of Petruccio’s fictitious illness—enters to reproach him for not allowing her near him in his sickness. This is yet another move to demonstrate publically that she is a good and dutiful wife trying to cope with a most difficult husband. Petruccio apparently forgives her, for he is soon plotting new ways to get her sympathy.22 All explicit talk of this fictional plague disappears from the play, and Petruccio, who has not yet learned his lesson, devises two more fake scenarios to try to persuade Maria to become a loving and concerned wife. First he claims that he is about to embark on a ship and travel far away, leaving Maria behind. When Maria seems completely unconcerned at his announced departure, he tries one last extreme scenario: he has himself brought out in a coffi n, staging his own death in an effort to one-up Maria in their battle for support from the community. Once again Maria defies his expectation by claiming that “He had a happy turn; he died” (5.4.27) and adding that she refused to consummate her marriage to Petruccio because she feared “his ruins might outlive him/ In some bad issue” (5.4.36–37). When Petruccio rises from his coffi n in great indignation, Maria abruptly announces that she has tested him enough, and the couple profess their love for each other, thus securing the mandatory happy ending. The play’s audience laughs through all these frantic activities dealing with plague and death, knowing that Maria’s claim that her husband has plague is completely false, a stratagem in her husband-taming scheme. In each of these plays where plague becomes an aspect of the plot, the primary emphasis is not on the individual victim or on suffering, but rather it is on a house that in the name of plague has undergone a radical transformation. In Romeo and Juliet, the audience never hears about the supposed plague sufferer, even whether it is a man, woman, or child. Only the house is mentioned, closed to protect the community from the infection it may harbor within. 23 In The Alchemist, the house is likewise the locus of plague-time activity, but in this case, the house is transformed in the opposite direction: its potential for visitation by plague is elided by its actual habitation by rogues. The house is transformed into a space for indulgence in epicurean pleasures: acquiring wealth, having sex, fi nding good marriage partners, and leaping forward immediately into prosperous futures. Most of these hopes are snatched away, of course, but by rogues not by plague. The same may be said for the fi nal comedy under consideration here. Petruccio may be “plagued,” but the threat to him certainly has more to do with the invasion of his home by a wife with a lesson to teach than with the actual plague. As a self-declared victim of supposed disease, he garners no sympathy from the characters who share the stage with him or

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from the audience; as a man whose place of comfort has become a place of confusion and unrest, he not only gains the support of his friends and the audience but fi nally of Maria herself. In these scattered references to plague there is no recorded concern for those who may be (but in fact never are) suffering and dying. Rather the concern is for preventative measures to protect those not infected. The victims (if there were any) have already been written out of the text. The vestiges of plague reference that remain are all prophylactic. Houses are boarded up, onlookers are encouraged to leave, but in each instance there is really no plague present, and the plague threat disperses as quickly as it came. What is more threatening in these plays is the loss of freedom brought about by enclosure and the long reach of plague, able to taint even the most basic of personal items, from letters and furniture to clothing and pots and pans. In plague time, the house and all things pertaining to it— the “household stuff” of which Natasha Korda has recently written 24 —are changed. The result is the sense that all is altered; all comfort and all certainty regarding who or what manages the home disappear. No longer is the husband or wife in charge, but instead the home is impacted by plague, by government officials, and those appointed by the government. Early modern citizens saw the plague push kings and queens off their thrones and onto the highway in flight, just as they themselves lost their sense of personal autonomy and comfort. Abuse in times of plague is wrought as much on the mind as on the body and the pocketbook, as Simon Forman makes clear in the passage I quoted at the beginning of this essay. Forman’s complaints of “injury” and “abuse” are echoed by Petruccio in Fletcher’s play, and they serve as the basis for Lovewit’s initial concern that his house has been ill used. In these cases, the fictitious and the real, the barricaded house results from a false alarm, a circumstance which makes the locked house, despite its prophylactic purpose, seem truly a kind of injury. If a closed house signifies anxiety about plague in these plays, however, there is little to fear from the plague itself. In the comedies, the injuries suffered during quarantine lead comically to a happy ending. Lovewit’s trangressively open house assures playgoers that the plague is not to be feared; by the end of the play, the house returns to its former condition, perhaps enhanced by the addition of a new wife for Lovewit. Similarly, Petruccio and Maria’s closed home eventually becomes an open site of marital concord. We are left to trouble over the appearance of the plague in Romeo and Juliet, where the injury of which Forman speaks is pronounced. The houses of Montague and Capulet might have been spared additional deaths had Friar John not been delayed within a house closed by officials for fear of plague; nevertheless the disease itself does not appear. It moves the plot but from a distance that renders it harmless in its immediate effects, even if not in its indirect ones. Perhaps plague is included both in Mercutio’s curse and in the closed house that traps Friar John to remind the audience

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that human hatred and ill will can be even more destructive than this lethal disease. When dramatists bring the literal disease of the plague into the plots of their plays, they do so consistently in terms that reassure audiences that the disease itself is not present. The theaters are open, like the houses at the end of the plays, and the audiences, at least, are better for the visit. Certainly, by the end of The Tamer Tamed, Maria is the better for the plague visitation she invents; she avoids the fate of her predecessor Kate, of whom Petruccio famously said in Taming of the Shrew: She is my goods, my chattels. She is my house, My household-stuff, my field, my barn, My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything. 25 By the end of this comedy, the wife runs the household, having used plague to help manage her husband, making them both serve her as she fully inhabits her new plague-free house.

Notes 1 See F.P. Wilson, The Plague in Shakespeare’s London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 110–13 and 124–28 for details on the theater closings between 1603 and 1625. 2 Plague is notable on the stage mostly for its absence from the plots of plays, though it is amply represented in dramatic metaphor, as other essays in this collection attest. Plague’s absence as part of plot lines on the stage has not stopped theater historians and literary critics from associating it with the London theater, however. A number of studies of the plague in early modern London either refer to the theater or to its synecdoche, Shakespeare, in their titles. Such studies recount the details associated with the closing of the theaters on account of plague and the consequent responses of the players, especially the formation of small touring companies to play in the countryside when plague closed the London theaters. F.P. Wilson’s The Plague in Shakespeare’s London and J. Leeds Barroll’s Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theater (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) are but two examples. The association of plague and theater is echoed in fictional treatments of the period as well. Two recent adolescent novels about young boys who associate with Shakespeare and his acting company both situate their action in time of plague, making the disease a major part of the plot as the early modern drama did not. See Gary Blackwood, Shakespeare’s Scribe (New York: Penguin, 2002) and Susan Cooper, King of Shadows (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999). 3 Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985; reprinted with corrections, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 210. This discussion is in reference to Elizabeth I, Orders thought meete by her Majestie, and her privie Councell, to be executed throughout the Counties of this Realme, in such Townes, Villages, and other places, as are, or may be hereafter infected with the plague, for the stay of further increase of the same. Also, an advise set downe upon her Majesties expresse commaundement, by the best learned in Physicke within this

180

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7 8

9

10

11 12

Barbara H. Traister Realme, contayning sundry good rules and easie medicines, without charge to the meaner sort of people, as well for the preservation of her good Subjects from the plague before infection, as for the curing and ordring of them after they shalbe infected (1578). Slack, Impact, 211. This is in reference to The Plague Act of 1604: An Act for the charitable relief and ordering of persons infected with the Plague (1 Jac. I. c. 31, Statutes of the Realm). City of London, Domestic State Papers of Elizabeth 98, no. 38, Public Records Office, quoted in Wilson, Plague in Shakespeare’s London, 63. John Davies of Hereford, The Triumph of Death: Or, The Picture of the Plague according to the Life; as it was in Anno Domini. 1603 in Humours Heav’n on Earth; With The Civile Warres of Death and Fortune. As also The Triumph of Death: Or, The Picture of the Plague according to the Life; as it was in Anno Domini. 1603 (London, 1609), sig. K3r. T[homas] B[rewer], The Weeping Lady: or London Like Ninivie in SackCloth (London, 1625), sig. A1r. William Austin, Epiloimia epē. Or, The anatomy of the pestilence. A poem, in three parts. Describing the deplorable condition of the city of London under its merciless dominion, 1665. What the plague is, together with the causes of it. As also, the prognosticks and most effectual means of safety, both preservative and curative (London, 1666), 41. For more on London’s pest houses, see Rebecca Totaro, Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton, Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies (Pittsburgh: Dusquesne University Press, 2005), 54–55, 80–82; and Slack, Impact, 204–5, 222–25. Forman plague treatise, Ashmole MS. 1435.65v (Oxford University: Bodleian Library). Slack also mentions Forman’s experience, though reading from another of Forman’s accounts he understands it somewhat differently. He quotes Forman as saying of the Lambeth neighbors who boarded up his house, “They could say to me that it was better that I and my household should starve and die than any of them should be put in danger” (Impact, 278). In this essay I quote from the following texts of these three plays: William Shakespeare, The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet in The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd ed., eds. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), 897–972; Ben Jonson, The Alchemist in Ben Jonson: Five Plays, ed. G.A. Wilkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 349–482; John Fletcher, The Tamer Tamed or, The Woman’s Prize, eds. Celia Daileader and Gary Taylor (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). For more on Shakespeare’s plays and their production in plague-time, see Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Wilson, Plague in Shakespeare’s London, but also Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Although the The Tamer Tamed was fi rst published in 1647, its fi rst performance date was much earlier, likely soon after Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew in the fi rst decade of the seventeenth century. It has been widely speculated that when Fletcher died in 1625 it was from the plague. Richelle Munkhoff, “Searchers of the Dead: Authority, Marginality, and the Interpretations of Plague in England, 1574–1665,” Gender & History 11, no.1 (1999): 10. For extended discussions of the plague in Jonson’s play see Totaro, Suffering in Paradise, 109–21; Patrick Phillips, “‘You Need Not Fear the House’: The

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14 15 16

17

18

19

20

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Absence of Plague in The Alchemist,” Ben Jonson Journal 13 (2006): 43–62; Cheryl Lynn Ross, “The Plague of The Alchemist,” Renaissance Quarterly 41 (1988): 439–50; and Ernest B. Gilman, “Plague Writing, 1603: Jonson’s ‘On My First Sonne,’” in Reading the Renaissance: Ideas and Idioms from Shakespeare to Milton, ed. Marc Berley (Pittsburgh: Dusquesne University Press, 2003), 153–75. See also the numerous plague pamphlets calling on Londoners to return to London and help the poor: among them, William Muggins, London’s Mourning Garment (London, 1603) and Henry Petowe’s, The countrie ague. Or, London her welcome home to her retired children Together (London, 1625). Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 24. Patrick Phillips, “‘You Need Not Fear the House’: The Absence of Plague in The Alchemist,” Ben Jonson Journal 13 (2006): 43. The title itself could not be more aptly named. The two most recent editions of the play disagree about the date of the fi rst performance. Daileader and Taylor place its fi rst staging between December 1609 and April 1610 whereas Gordon McMullan says, in the introduction of an edition prepared for the Royal Shakespeare Company, that the fi rst performance was in 1611 (John Fletcher, The Tamer Tamed, ed. Gordon McMullan [London: Nick Hern Books: 2003], xiv). Thomas Dekker, “A Medicine to Cure the Plague of a Woman’s Tongue, Experimented on a Cobbler’s Wife from The Raven’s Almanac” in Thomas Dekker: Selected Prose Writings, ed. E.D. Pendry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 149–52. Slack discusses the “divisive impact of plague on social ties,” noting that neighbors, servants, and even family members often deserted plague victims. Ironically, wives seem to have been the ones most likely to realize their social obligations and to remain to care for their husbands (Impact, 287–90). The Tamer Tamed has a complex printing history. It was fi rst printed in the 1647 edition of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, and most subsequent editions are based on that printing. However, an undated seventeenth century manuscript of the play also exists in the Lansdowne MSS at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Daileader and Taylor base their edition on that manuscript, arguing that it escaped censorship when the play was revived in 1633, censorship which is reflected in the 1647 edition. Their edition excludes several passages which they describe as Fletcher’s “overwriting” (177) including some lines about the plague in 3.5. These excised passages are printed in an appendix in Daileader and Taylor’s edition, and at times I quote from that appendix (noted with the line number from the text plus the number of additional lines from the appendix: [l. 58+3]). By contrast, a “handsome” illness actually appears in the play’s subplot. Undaunted by the failure of Petruccio’s trick of feigning illness, Livia also pretends to be ill to rid herself of the unwanted rich suitor favored by her father and to reengage the attentions of her lover Roland who has misunderstood her gamesmanship as she tries to steer a course toward marriage with him. Aided in her deception by other women in the play, Livia at one point has nearly the entire cast, except for Maria and Petruccio, gathered solicitously around her sickbed as she pretends to be close to death. Thus, Petruccio’s plan to sicken handsomely might have succeeded had Maria not been so quick to understand his deception and to offer a plague diagnosis. It is not sickness,

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but specifically the plague which results in Petruccio’s imprisonment alone in his own house. In this play, women’s schemes are consistently successful, and men’s are just as consistently foiled until the happy ending when both Maria and Livia (no longer pretending illness) accept Petruccio and Roland as their proper husbands. 21 Onions—whether boiled, roasted or raw—were, in fact, both a favorite preventative against the plague and, if the plague was already present, a common (if ineffective) ingredient thought able to draw it from the body. For discussions of the efficacy and application of onions in plague time, see F.P. Wilson, Plague in Shakespeare’s London, 12 and Rebecca Totaro, “Chicken Soup (and Orange Juice) for the Plague-Time Soul?: Francis Bacon’s Utopian Prescription,” English Language Notes 47, no. 2 [Winter / Fall 2009]: 25–33. 22 Daileader and Taylor comment: like the fear of AIDS in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, the fear of bubonic plague in Fletcher’s Tamer Tamed reminded audiences that a terminal contagious disease often provokes people to abandon those they claim to love—and that the survivors often forgive those who abandoned them. (Tamer Tamed, 9) 23 For an account of Shakespeare’s appropriation of his sources for Romeo and Juliet and the presence of the plague within them, see Paula Berggren’s essay in this collection. 24 Natasha Korda, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). See especially chapters 1 “Housekeeping and Household Stuff” and 2 “Household Kates: Domesticating Commodities in The Taming of the Shrew,” both of which offer significant contributions to what would be an engaging article on the relationship between Shakespeare’s play and Fletcher’s with respect to the plague, houses, and household stuff. 25 William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew in Greenblatt, Cohen, Howard, and Maus, 142–201.

Part IV

Contemporary Turns

9

Plague in A Midsummer Night’s Dream A Girardian Reading of Bottom and Hippolyta Matthew Thiele

In the 1970s, René Girard offered what is arguably the fi rst comprehensive effort to examine the plague in western literature. Girard opens “The Plague in Literature and Myth” by stating unequivocally that “The plague is found everywhere in literature.” He goes on to explain that it appears ubiquitously as a cluster of themes with plague at the center; in this way, plague “belongs to the epic with Homer, to tragedy with Oedipus Rex, to history with Thucydides, to the philosophical poem with Lucretius.”1 It is “universally presented as an undifferentiation, a destruction of specificity. This destruction is often preceded by reversal” (833). These two themes of undifferentiation and reversal are followed by the fi nal theme in the cluster, which “may be the most important of all, the sacrificial element” (841), whereby a society uses a scapegoat to bring about an end to the disruptive reversal and undifferentiation. Citing examples from Shakespeare to Bergman, Girard fi nds the anxiety originally associated with plague visitations and reproduced thematically in this cluster to be made manifest even in works not explicitly about the plague. For scholars examining the general relationship between plague and literature or the effects of violence and, specifically, scapegoating (“the sacrificial element”) in literature, Girard’s essay is often a starting point, because the thematic cluster reveals as much about the relationship between societies and violence and between civilization and chaos or death as between societies and epidemic disease. In a discussion of death and scapegoating in King Lear, for example, Derek Cohen uses Girard’s defi nition for scapegoating to conclude that Shakespeare offers an illusion of silence and stasis, if not peace, in the concluding spectacle. But it is a peace that is heavily burdened and eternally compromised by the presence of the Captain, the core remaining figure of violence, death, and discord. 2 The figure of violence is Girard’s “plague”—one like that which in Albert Camus’s words, “never dies or disappears for good . . . it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves”3 waiting to reemerge and turn

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everything upside down again. This is a plague and a form of violence that Girard, like Camus, sees as inherent in human society; it does not have to come in bubonic form but can appear as tyranny, as betrayal, and even as death itself. Writing on the changing perception of death in early modern English plague-time and its articulation in revenge tragedy, Michael Neill explains that the heightened anxieties related to death in this period were influenced by the fear of the plague pit, where all are buried together naked and anonymously, with no respect for rank of any kind: The threat of apolcalyptic breakdown to a society preoccupied with the maintenance of hierarchical order was precisely to emphasize the role of death as the arbiter of indifference, “the distinctiveness of the plague,” as Rene Girard puts it in a celebrated essay, “is that it ultimately destroys all forms of distinctiveness. . . . All life, fi nally is turned into death . . . the supreme undifferentiation.”4 In response to this pattern for plague and violence that begins with an unsettling “reversal” or upturning of accepted social relationships and leads to undifferentiation, western societies have offered a scapegoat—a sacrifice to appease the gods or God and end the undifferentiation. Cohen explains: the deaths of villains suggests the triumph of difference and distinction over undifferentiation and indistinction that such theorists of sacrifice as René Girard regard as the markers of culture . . . Something, someone, must die for something else to be born and peace to be restored. (387) As a structuralist pattern, Girard’s themes of reversal, undifferentiation, and scapegoating appear in literary texts that have been both directly and indirectly influenced by plague visitations. Perhaps in part for this reason, new historicist scholars examining the bubonic plague and early modern literature have been quick to dismiss Girard’s theoretical position, seeing in his thematic cluster a universalizing tendency that privileges plague-related themes over the realities of particular outbreaks in specific communities. For example, speaking of the applicability of Girard’s theory of mimesis to English Renaissance literature, Robert Weimann explains that Since Girard engages in increasingly complex and eventful patterns of historical narrative, he is almost forced to displace the temporal dimension of change, transition, and event . . . [and this] is made to serve as some universally valid code by which centuries of cultural development, from prehistoric ritual to twentieth-century fiction, can easily be accounted for.5

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Wiemann means that Girard too easily accounts for local variation, rolling particular changes into the larger pattern of plague and violence he has made monolithic. Jonathan Gil Harris agrees, comparing Girard’s work to other loosely unifying approaches to disease in early modern drama. Such approaches are potentially engaging but limiting; they tend to condense the plays’ many diseases into Disease, either by interpreting illness as a generic metaphor with one symbolic valence (be it autobiographical or sociopolitical) or by implicitly regarding one disease— usually syphilis or plague—as the model for all others.6 Indeed, Girard’s work deliberately does not attend to local phenomena but to trends across societies and times. His attention to the thematic cluster in the works of Dostoevsky differs little from his thinking about these themes in Shakespeare. By way of a more specific example of this homogenization, when Girard claims that in Romeo and Juliet, the death of the lovers is the entire plague, in the sense that it represents the climax of the scourge, the plague fi nally made visible and, as a consequence, exorcised by its very excess; the plague is both the disease and the cure (849) he is speaking not of the literal disease of the plague that is an important part of the plot but of the reciprocal violence related to anarchy that has doomed the young lovers.7 From a new historical perspective, this can be easy grounds for dismissing Girard’s claims. Girard’s theory of the relationship between plague and literature does not acknowledge the local traumas and particular terminology associated with plague-time realities; moreover, his distinctly pre-HIV/AIDS assertion that “the medical plague has become a metaphor for the social plague; it belongs to what we call literature” (835) dates his thinking, rooting it in an era in western culture when it was possible to imagine that humans might never again face threats from pandemics.8 Nevertheless, his themes of reversal, undifferentiation, and sacrifice can be used to open up early modern texts to more local plague-time readings, particularly when those texts do not explicitly refer to the plague but to the general social effects of plague as they are represented in literature. In this essay, I employ Girard’s themes as tools for reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream in its plague-time context. * * * * The 1592–93 plague visitation in London was not as statistically significant with respect to mortality levels as those of 1563, 1603, or 1665–66. As the essays in this volume suggest, the early modern English epicenter for the plague as a physical threat, as a shaping force in government, and as a feature in literary texts was 1603. Paul Slack estimates that in that year alone over 25,000 people died of the plague, compared to the roughly

188 Matthew Thiele 11,000 that died in the 1592–93 epidemic.9 These numbers do not tell the only story, however, because it was the 1592–93 plague that closed theatres early in Shakespeare’s career, opening space for his foray into the writing of poetry and offering him creative distance from the pace of writing and staging dramatic productions. J. Leeds Barroll calls the 1592–93 plague epidemic, “the fi rst great plague visitation of Shakespeare’s writing career.”10 In Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his Life, Katherine Duncan-Jones provides a chapter entitled “1592–94: Plague and Poetry,” arguing as she does in her article “Playing Fields or Killing Fields: Shakespeare’s Poems and Sonnets” that “Plague was a defi ning context for all Shakespeare’s writing.”11 In 1596–97, there was another less severe epidemic in England during which the death rate was about 21 percent higher than the national trend (Slack 58), and the plague was a serious threat in the years prior to the fi rst performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As Barroll reports, officials closed the theatres for over 20 months during the course of the visitation (17).12 The play was likely fi rst performed between 1594 and 1596, “the probable period,” according to Stephen Greenblatt, “of the comparably lyrical Romeo and Juliet and Richard II”13 —each play also troubling over violence that breaks out in plague-like fashion, leading to death without concern for station. Moreover, plague visitations created peak mortality conditions in the summer months, and the play is set to take place on Midsummer’s night, the night before Midsummer, which was commonly observed on June 24 (OED, s.v. “midsummer”). Summer in England had been associated with the plague for generations by the time William Bullein created his character Medicus, a physician, who explains to his patient, saying, in response to a question from Antonius about the causes of plague, “muche Southe Winde or Easte winde in the Canicular daies, with stormes and cloudes, and verie colde nights and extreame hotte daies, and much change of weather in a little time.”14 The canicular days are the days of summer on or around the 11th of August that correspond with the rising of the dog-star (hence “dogdays”).15 In general, summer was a time of vacation when those with money left the city for country homes and when monarchs went on progress. In plague-time, the country was flooded with those fleeing from urban centers. Flight by those with means generated animosity in those who had no choice but to stay in the city during an epidemic, and writers participated in this criticism by enacting flight in their narratives and showing it to be fraught with complication. Some did so in overt fashion, but many more offered subtle examinations of the dangers to be found outside of the city, even during times of summer holiday.16 In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bottom experiences an identity crisis when he leaves the city to rehearse his play, and his participation in the Pyramus and Thisbe story, in which the two lovers meet their deaths after they flee, associates him once again with the theme of fl ight from the city to the country. Hermia and Lysander try to escape their problems by fleeing Athens, and they fi nd the forest rife with

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confusion and emotional trauma. This aspect of the play speaks to essential early modern English plague-time realities familiar to actors and audience members alike. Prose writers seem to have taken greater delight or found more liberty in describing the horrors of the plague,17 but such lack of overt reference was a common feature of early modern drama, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream is typical in that it contains few direct references to the plague. As Ian Munro explains, the plague was not put on stage “because of the sheer terror that representing plague-marked bodies in the crowded, contagious space of the theater would cause.”18 Dramatists chose an indirect approach to the plague when representing it under these conditions. The plague instead becomes its symptoms—miasmic air, quarantined homes, and the after-effects of attained or subverted desire.19 The plague also appeared in even less obvious forms on stage. As I will contend in this essay, it appears symptomatically and thematically embodied in the characters of Bottom and Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. * * * * A diagnosis of the plague in the composition of these characters begins with a review of Girard’s cluster of themes. The fi rst is the theme of reversal, because, as Girard explains: The plague will turn the honest man into a thief, the virtuous man into a lecher, the prostitute into a saint. Friends murder and enemies embrace. Wealthy men are made poor by the ruin of their business. Riches are showered upon paupers who inherit in a few days the fortunes of many distant relatives. (833) This is a social effect of plague revealed time and again in plague pamphlets, where the poor gain by the death of the wealthy and the everyman is turned beast by the same force. A variation on these transformations is compellingly displayed in the character of Bottom, his reversal perhaps the most striking feature of the play. Nick Bottom is, of course, a weaver, and he is unexceptional except perhaps in his inflated sense of self. As the play begins, his occupation and interactions with his peers mark him as ordinary, but he clearly aspires to be extraordinary. He describes as “lofty”20 his recitation of doggerel on the subject of none other than “Ercles” (Hercules; l.36), and generally his speech is peppered with the malapropisms characteristic of Shakespeare’s clowns; he will, for example, “rehearse most obscenely and courageously” (1.2.100–101) the part of Pyramus. Although there is certainly some truth to this statement (and, of course, some comedy), Bottom almost certainly fails to express himself accurately. His claims to loftiness and his desire to use words that are just slightly out of his grasp make him ridiculous. These two confl icting aspects of Bottom’s nature—the lofty aspirations and his inability to transcend his ordinariness—are magnified when he is

190 Matthew Thiele transformed. When he receives the ass’s head and Titania’s love, he is whipsawed in opposite directions. His ass’s head marks him as less than human, and his favor in Titania’s eyes elevates him to a status and a state of being that he could never hope to achieve. As he lies in Titania’s bower, ordering fairies about and craving hay, his diction points to his reversal: Mounsieur Cobweb, good mounsieur, get you your weapons in your hand, and kill me a red-hipped humble-bee on the top of a thistle; and good mounsieur, bring me the honey-bag. Do not fret yourself too much in the action, mounsieur; and good mounsieur, have a care the honey-bag break not; I would be loath to have you overflowen with a honey-bag, signior. (4.1.10–17) This is prose, as we might expect from Bottom, but his manner has changed dramatically since his transformation. His solicitousness toward Cobweb—“do not fret yourself,” he says, repeating “good mounsieur”—is remarkable in spite of its likely being as much affectation as an indication of concern. His speaking in the reflexive—“get you your weapons in your hand,” “kill me a red-hipped humble-bee”—is also new, creating an dissonant note when coming from his ass’s muzzle. As Hugh Grady confi rms, “The running gag in all this comes from the audience’s ability, seconded by Robin and Oberon, to see the ordinary, disenchanted, material Bottom in utter disjunction from Titania’s doting vision.”21 The joke climaxes when Bottom uses his new fancy manner of speaking to describe a base appetite: “Methinks I have a great desire to a bottle of hay” (4.1.32–33).22 Bottom’s reversal is followed by a radical mirroring or doubling effect Girard calls “undifferentiation,” which is characterized by the abolition of social hierarchies and categories and by “a destruction of specificities” (833) in which personal identity is leveled to represent figuratively society’s abjection before the apparently undiscriminating force of the plague: “The plague overcomes all obstacles, disregards all frontiers” (834), leveling all in its wake. This specific form of crisis produces a heightened and strained awareness of the artificiality or constructedness of social categories, ranks, values, etc., the very kind of awareness that Michael Neill says comes in contemplating the horrifying image of the plague pit (18–22). Bottom’s expression of his experience of undifferentiation is most telling. Upon his return to full human form, he has difficulty distinguishing between fantasy and reality and is inclined to dismiss his transformation into Titania’s ass-headed lover as a dream. Even as a dream, however, the experience is difficult to describe: “Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was—and methought I had—but man is but a

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patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had” (4.1.206–9). Repetition of “methought” points up Bottom’s lingering in a state of undifferentiation: What was he? What is he? Where is he? With whom was he? He is caught between the vision of himself as an ass and the vision of himself as a man. Patterson observes the same moment as indicative of a specific sort of undifferentiation related to naming: in addition to the common interpretation of “bottom” as indicating his status in Athenian society, it can be interpreted as “foundation”: “The name ‘Bottom’ refers not only to the bottom of the social hierarchy as the play represents it, but also to the ‘bottom’ of the body when seated, literally the social ass or arse” (173).23 The name itself speaks to his undifferentiated state. In a turn toward a social application of this and other observations, Patterson continues, the play’s inarticulate message remains: a reevaluation of those unpresentable members of society, normally mocked and burdened like asses, whose energies the social system relies on. And if laughter is necessary to mediate social tensions, Shakespeare’s festive theory seems to argue, then let it be laughter as far removed as possible from social condescension. (175) Even in his role as laughing stock, Bottom is indispensable, his character opening the way for good-natured festivity on the one hand and a contemplation of social hierarchies on the other.24 Bottom’s undifferentiation is also marked by his dual roles: as a substitute for Oberon in Titania’s bed and as Pyramus in the play within the play. Always he is also Nick Bottom, even as Titania offers to, “purge thy mortal grossness so, / That thou shall like an airy spirit go” (3.1.153–54) when she fi rst meets him. It is not clear exactly what this entails, but Titania here indicates another transformation Bottom must undergo in addition to what he has already been through. As a substitute for Oberon, it would make sense that he would need to become more like Oberon before becoming suitable company for the other members of her court who are not, as she is, drugged into believing Bottom is an ideal lover. As Pyramus, Bottom also speaks as if split in his identity. As part of his plan to prevent audience members from being disturbed over the death of Pyramus, he suggests, a device to make all well. Write me a prologue; and let the prologue seem to say, we will do no harm with our swords, and that Pyramus is not killed indeed; and, for the morebetter assurance, tell them that I, Pyramus, am not Pyramus, but Bottom the weaver: this will put them out of fear. (3.1.15–21)

192 Matthew Thiele Bottom does not say “I, Bottom,” but “I, Pyramus”—a fact not lost on Girard, who explains in A Theater of Envy that Bottom should say: “My name is Bottom and I am merely pretending to be a certain Pyramus whose suicide is feigned.” Instead, Bottom fi rst names Pyramus, speaking in the fi rst person, as if it were his real identity and wishing no doubt that it were. His real name comes second and he mentions it as if it belonged to someone else, or as it appears on the title page of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He suggests that his real self is false and his false self is real. The spectators are insidiously invited to join the mimetic confusion that our universal actor is spreading.25 This confusion for the spectators, which Girard attributes to Bottom’s own apparent confusion about who he is, is characteristic of Bottom for most of the play. He is and is not an actor, a fairy queen’s lover, an ass, Pyramus, and a weaver—the last, his most certain occupation, the only one we never see him practice. Girard defi nes the third element of the thematic cluster, sacrifice or scapegoating, as a resolution of the confusion caused by undifferentiation that has the power to restore social order: “Death itself appears as the purifying agent, the death of all plague victims or a few, sometimes of a single chosen victim who seems to assume the plague in its entirety and whose death or expulsion cures the society” (841). Of course, Bottom is alive at the end of this comedy, but his transformation into Titania’s lover is a transformation like to death—a little sleep decreed by Oberon to effect the reconciliation between Titania and himself, which is a necessary precondition for their blessing of the wedding couples at the end of the play. Oberon states after he restores Bottom and wakes Titania, Now thou and I are new in amity, And will to-morrow midnight, solemnly, Dance in Duke Theseus’ house triumphantly, And bless it to all fair prosperity. (4.1.84–89) With Oberon and Titania “new in amity,” Bottom is no longer needed. He has served to reestablish hierarchy and harmony in the world of the fairies and, consequently, in Athens. Oberon has also used Bottom indirectly to achieve what was for a time his greater desire: the possession of the changeling boy, another human character made to serve as the subject of fairy fantasy. As Pyramus, Bottom is sacrificed in a more literal performance of death that elicits pity from the audience. In this role, he also sacrifices his literal occupation and his time to help fulfill the desire of the mechanicals as it is expressed by Snug: they wish to be “made men” (4.2.8). Bottom’s par-

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ticipation is crucial to Peter Quince’s thinking about the upcoming performance: “You have not a man in all Athens able to discharge Pyramus but he” (4.2.7–8), the word “discharge” itself connoting the sacrifice Bottom is to undergo in the performance intended to make his company men in Athenian society (in addition to being a subtle if ill-humored joke related to Bottom’s name). In the mechanicals’ production of Pyramus and Thisbe Bottom’s identity is at stake again, much as it was when he had previously undergone transformation, and his critics are ruthless in their judgment of the production. He is again the bottom and the foundation. Even Hippolyta, who seems initially reluctant to make fun of the play, joins in the general lampooning of Pyramus and Thisbe, stating frankly, “This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard” (5.1.207). The absurdity of the play is appropriate to the festive occasion but does not quite completely mask the importance of Bottom’s sacrifice as Pyramus. As a successful sacrifice, eliciting laughter and a catharsis upon the death of Pyramus, Bottom is accepted and elevated among the players, who are “made men”; even if only temporarily, Athens appears to have freed itself from the plague and its traumatic effects as all characters join together in an elevated state of mirth. * * * * Less laughter follows Hippolyta, her sacrifice in the play a performance largely of silence, standing in stark contrast to that of Bottom: she is top whereas he is bottom, so to speak; she is silent, and he is all speech; she is an outsider made insider, and he is an insider who for a time dwells outside of human company. These are differences, but in Girardian terms, they also suggest a link between these characters that are forged in plaguetime. This reading hinges on her status as Amazon—an outsider whose disruptive female-male power must be sacrificed to ensure the stability of Athens. Girard says of reversal that we fi nd it where “Friends murder and enemies embrace,” and that is ostensibly the condition at the beginning of the play: in this murder-free comedy, Theseus and Hippolyta—once enemies—marry. The situation is complicated by the fact that Hippolyta does not speak for herself, but Theseus claims they fell in love on the battlefield: “Hippolyta, I woo’d thee with my sword, / And won thy love doing thee injuries” (1.1.16–17). Courtship is expressed in terms of combat, and love is expressed in terms of injury, and however much Theseus romanticizes their union, Hippolyta is essentially a spoil of war and a slave where she once had been a powerful, autonomous queen. By the time we fi rst see her in the play, she is the property of her husband and of Athens, as all women are. This is suggested by Theseus’s exchange with Egeus and Hermia. Theseus concludes his discussion with the father and daughter by saying, For you, fair Hermia, look you arm yourself To fit your fancies to your father’s will; Or else the law of Athens yields you up

194 Matthew Thiele (Which by no means we may extenuate) To death, or to a vow of single life. Come, my Hippolyta; what cheer, my love? (1.1.117–22) Theseus uses the same martial terminology he did when describing how he won Hippolyta; moreover, he does so in front of Hippolyta, who, as it would seem from his query “what cheer, my love?” has a negative reaction. It is unclear exactly what Hippolyta’s reaction is at this moment, and Theseus may only think he detects some gesture or look of discontent, but generally, editors of the play interpret any reaction she might have as negative. The note to this line in the Arden text is, “She is downcast at the ill omen, intruding upon the joyous preparations for her wedding, of love threatened with death or a compelled celibacy” (12). This makes sense, but there are alternative readings. Hippolyta might be downcast because she identifies with Hermia and is coming to understand that in Athens, the woman is property. The pronounced reversal Hippolyta experiences happens before the play begins, but her realization of it may occur here. Hippolyta’s condition of undifferentiation begins before the play proper as well. Kathryn Schwarz notes that Hippolyta is described even in the dramatis personae as an embodiment of two concurrent roles: “her entry in the dramatis personae—‘Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, betrothed to Theseus’—might summarize resolution out of conflict. But it might also identify a syntagmatic doubleness, asserting that ‘betrothed’ intersects without displacing the effects of ‘Amazon.’”26 Schwarz, perhaps optimistically, suggests that the play promotes an image of Hippolyta as capable of retaining the former even in submitting to the latter. But even solely as an Amazon, Hippolyta is a symbol of the kind of identity problems that Girard attributes to the social effects of a distant plague-time. As a figure who exhibits both masculine and feminine traits, Hippolyta challenges social norms simply by being on the stage, as Kathryn Schwarz explains: At once masculine and female, mistaken for men and looked at as women, Amazons generate desire between men, between women, between women and men. Their constant eroticism precludes hierarchical distinctions between substance and spirit, object and agent, other and self, revealing instead the extent to which identities and relationships overlap. (2) Schwarz sees the problems with desire that Amazons represent as breaking through into other areas of representation, and this is borne out in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when early in the play we learn that Hippolyta has a wide range of admirers. In attempting to account for Oberon’s presence in Athens, Titania conjectures,

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. . . Why art thou here, Come from the farthest step of India, But that, forsooth, the bouncing Amazon, Your buskin’d mistress and your warrior love, To Theseus must be wedded, and you come To give their bed joy and prosperity? (2.1.69–73) Titania’s mention of Hippolyta’s buskins, as well as her characterization of the Amazon as “bouncing,” which has various shades of meaning but generally means big or loud (OED), characterize Hippolyta as exhibiting masculine traits. The OED defi nition draws out the contrast implied by the use of the word “bouncing”: “big rather than elegant or graceful.” In Titania’s depiction at least, Hippolyta is not particularly feminine, and this is something Titania uses to taunt Oberon. Hippolyta is also a sacrifice by play’s end, particularly with respect to Louis Montrose’s assertion that the marriage ritual and the implied coitus that sanctifies the union are at once symbolic sacrifices. 27 Montrose extends this sacrifice to all women in the play, explaining The festive conclusion of A Midsummer Night’s Dream depends upon the success of a process by which the female pride and power manifested in misanthropic warriors, possessive mothers, unruly wives, and willful daughters are brought under the control of lords and husbands. (83) The state and the husbands and fathers within it strive to contain these energies. 28 The degree to which they succeed remains a question. Hippolyta is physically marked by her experience as an Amazon, which serves as a constant reminder of her prior rejection of patriarchal norms. If, as Schwarz asserts, “Everyone knows that the Amazon is missing a breast” (148), 29 Hippolyta, then, would have at some point removed one breast to prevent its interference in use of the bow during war. The word “amazon” itself is from the Greek ẚ and μαξ-ός (a and mazos), meaning, without a breast, the very fi rst usage of the English word in 1398 emphasizing the missing breast (OED). As a warrior, she had an advantage over other women and equality with male archers. As a wife and mother, however, the missing breast is a loss, a gap, an indelible marker of a former life and of either a choice she made or a battle she lost. At moments in the play, however, we glimpse the Amazon and her power in this restrained, plague-haunted city, 30 just as we perceive below the surface and in unusual configurations the anxieties brought about in plague-time. The new queen of Athens, once its enemy, is made to serve in a capacity not unlike Bottom’s: she is at once on top and on the bottom. Reading both characters as markers of plague-time anxiety brings this home in undeniable

196 Matthew Thiele ways. Due to his personality, Bottom runs the risk of misremembering his station, and by her body and former station, Hippolyta might do the same. By being called to serve Athens, however, their desires and their bodies are appropriated: in their roles, they represent Athenian success—mastery of language and of the past. This becomes more apparent during the staging of Pyramus and Thisbe at the end of the play when Bottom sacrifices himself on stage as Pyramus, proclaiming: Come tears, confound! Out sword, and wound The pap of Pyramus; Ay, that left pap Where heart doth hop:

[Stabs himself]. (5.1.284–88)

Of course, this is intended to be humorous, with the hopping heart and generally stiff death-speech, but the repetition of “pap” before an audience that includes an Amazon might remind A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s audiences of Hippolyta’s presence and even of the sacrifice of her breast in service of her own ideals. If so, Bottom and Hippolyta become sacrificial doubles, even if for only a moment. * * * * A more severe form of inquiry into the value of a Girardian examination of this plague-time play begs the question of whether it is possible to say the same of any other character in the play given the otherwise odd yoking of Bottom and Hippolyta. After all, one might say that the lovers begin in a state of reversal, as they change from the privileged youth of Athens to runaways. Once in the forest, they experience undifferentiation in a thorough, fairy-concocted alteration of desires. Helena’s much-cited “double cherry” speech is an expression of this: We, Hermia, like two artificial gods, Have with our needles created both one flower, Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion, Both warbling of one song, both in one key, As if our hands, our sides, voices and minds, Had been incorporate. So we grew together, Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, But yet an union in partition, Two lovely berries moulded on one stem. (3.2.203–11) In the forest, the quality that seemed to bind the two women, their likeness to one another, becomes a source of conflict. The moment that Helena stridently insists on their similarity is the moment that they become the bit-

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terest rivals and their double cherry is severed. Once like twins in affection, they become what Girard might call “mimetic rivals” who bring about complete confusion (837).31 The other important strand of undifferentiation concerning the pairs of lovers occurs after they are discovered by Theseus and Hippolyta’s hunting party. In general, the crisis of undifferentiation that Bottom undergoes is quite similar to that experienced by the mechanicals as a group and the lovers as well. In A Theater of Envy, Girard explains what he considers to be the identical influence of the fairies on these groups: The craftsmen have received less attention than the lovers, and even the most obvious resemblances of the two subplots remain undiscovered. Yet the antics of these people amount to a mimetic crisis quite similar to the one we just observed among the lovers, and it leads to the same transfiguration of reality. (57) The fairies cause the blending of fantasy and reality, acting as agents for the creation of undifferentiation. Moreover, just as Bottom does when he resumes his human form, the four Athenian youths have a hard time expressing what has happened to them overnight in the forest: Dem. Her. Hel.

These things seem small and undistinguishable, Like far-off mountains turned into clouds. Methinks I see these things with parted eye, When everything seems double. So methinks; And I have found Demetrius like a jewel, Mine own, and not mine own. (4.1.186–91)

The lovers have undergone an identity changing experience, and that experience causes them to struggle with the interpretation of reality at some of its most basic levels. For Demetrius, his sense of scale is disrupted; for Helena, her understanding of her relationship with Demetrius. Hermia’s statement is most telling; for her, everything seems double, but not naturally so, and her repeated “methinks” mirrors Bottom’s “methought” as a signal for a condition of undifferentiation. Her declaration describes a physiological condition, but she is describing a psychological phenomenon as well, and there is confusion as much between the two levels of perception as there is between the double images she perceives. Their undifferentiation, however, is far less complete than Bottom’s or Hippolyta’s, and there is no sacrifice for them in this comedy; it was never expected that they should do otherwise than marry desired equals— whether one was named Demetrius or Lysander, Helena or Hermia it hardly mattered to the audience. Nevertheless, given the proximity between the

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writing and performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the plague visitations of the 1590s, the appearance of so many proxies for plague anxiety makes sense; they speak to the repetitious reality of the effects of trauma. They also speak to the effects of the bubonic plague itself, a literal disease that seemed to take on many other shapes as it contributed to many other troubles, from the food shortages, halted commerce, and quarantining of families in their homes for weeks on end to the increase of paralyzing fear, melancholy, and despair that were not only thought to be worsened by the coming of plague but were also believed to have the potential to make the body more susceptible to it. The diversity of the disease in causing widespread and varied affliction is reflected in the equally diverse responses to it. A return to the more certain plague-time theme of flight mentioned in section two of this essay solidifies these claims. The increased frequency of plague outbreaks in summertime and the flight from the pestered city into the complicated country are themes present in nearly every piece of early modern plague writing, as they are in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The straining we see in plays such as this one to take a tragic pattern and turn it comic reflects the burdens placed on the city during plague-time. Summer should be a time for festivities, but in plague-time it was a time of death and suffering. A Midsummer Night’s Dream strains to recover summer from the connotations of suffering and death brought about by plague and to reassociate it with joy, ease, and health. By transforming the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, the desires of Bottom and the Athenian lovers, and the warrior passions of the Amazon into fuel for mirth, Shakespeare succeeded in this task. Reversal, undifferentiation, and scapegoating contribute to healing mirth, if not to marital harmony and Athenian stability, and Girardian theory proves a viable tool in the study of literature in its plague-time context.

Notes I owe many friends and colleagues more than I can repay for helping me prepare this essay. Thanks to the editors and fellow contributors of this volume and to Kellye Corcoran and Constance Relihan for helping me improve earlier versions of the essay. 1 René Girard, “The Plague in Literature and Myth,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 15, no. 5 (1974): 833. Subsequent citations of this essay will appear parenthetically in the text. 2 Derek Cohen, The Malignant Scapegoats of King Lear, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 49, no.2 (Spring 2009): 387. 3 Albert Camus, The Plague (New York: Random House, 1948), 278. 4 Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 15, 18. 5 Robert Weimann, “‘Appropriation’ and Modern History in Renaissance Prose Narrative,” New Literary History 14, no. 3 (Spring 1983): 463.

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6 Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 87. 7 For more on Romeo and Juliet, see essays by Paula S. Berggren and Barbara H. Traister in this volume. 8 At the time Girard writes his essay on plague, cancer is the scourge du jour, and while it takes on characteristics of other diseases in literature and theory, there are important differences between cancer and diseases such as plague and HIV/AIDS. For a full treatment of cancer and AIDS as metaphors, see Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988); and Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1978). 9 Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 151. 10 J. Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theater: The Stuart Years (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1991), 90. 11 Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his Life (London: Arden, 2001), 54. See also Katherine Duncan-Jones “Playing Fields or Killing Fields: Shakespeare’s Poems and Sonnets,” Shakespeare Quarterly 54, no.2 (2003): 127–41. 12 Early modern Londoners had more than just plague to worry about in these troubled years, and these additional threats to life and livelihood are discussed by Annabel Patterson in “Bottom’s Up: Festive Theory in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Critical Essays, ed. Dorothea Kehler (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998), 165–77; and Penny Williams, “Social Tensions Contained,” in The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre, and Politics in London, 1576–1649, eds. David L. Smith, Richard Strier, and David Bevington (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 55–66. A reading of the relationship between plague and famine in literature would be enlightening, particularly given Paul Slack’s discussion of their relationships (Impact, 28, 73, 76). 13 Stephen Greenblatt, Introduction to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997), 805. On plague and Richard II, please see Nick Cox, “‘Subjected Thus’: Plague and Panopticism in Richard II,” Early Modern Literary Studies 6, no.2 (September, 2000): 5.1–44, available online at http://purl.oclc.org/ emls/06–2/coxrich.htm (accessed November 10, 2009). 14 William Bullein, A Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence, eds. Mark W. Bullen and A.H. Bullen, Early English Text Society 52 (Millwood, New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1973), 38. Bullein’s dialogue was fi rst published in 1564; for more on Bullein’s satire, see William Kerwin’s essay in this volume. 15 OED, s.v. “canicular.” See also OED, s.v. “dog-days.” This association of plague and the dog star goes back at least as far as Homer’s The Iliad: “And old King Priam was fi rst to see him coming, / surging over the plain, blazing like the star / that rears at harvest, flaming up in its brilliance—/ far outshining the countless stars in the night sky, / that star they call Orion’s Dog—brightest of all / but a fatal sign emblazoned on the heavens, / it brings such killing fever down on wretched men” (trans. Robert Fagles [New York: Penguin Books, 1990], 542). 16 For more on the staging of plague-time fl ight, see Kelly J. Stage’s essay in this volume; by extension, we might consider banishment a form of fl ight that was related to depictions of its reverse, the self-administered quarantine—both themes popular in early modern drama.

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17 See for example Bullein’s description of the plague (Dialogue, 38). 18 Ian Munro, The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London: The City and Its Double (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 194. 19 Please see the essays on the plague and the theater in section three of this volume. 20 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks, Arden Shakespeare: Second Series (London: Methuen, 1979), 1.2.35. All references to this play will be to this edition, appearing in the text by act, scene, and line. 21 Hugh Grady, “Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics: The Case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare Quarterly 59, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 297. 22 For more on Bottom’s alternating or simultaneous high and low diction, see Brooks cvx–vi; David Laird, “‘If we offend, it is with our good will’: Staging Dissent in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Connotations 12, no.1 (2002/2003): 36, 38–39, 42–44; and Patterson 172–73. Laird in particular pays attention to the high and low impulses in Bottom’s speech, and sees Bottom as the focal point of anxieties about class and gender restrictions in Shakespeare’s fictional Athens. 23 For more on the foundation as the fundament (or bottom), see Jeffrey Masten, “Is the Fundament a Grave?” in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, eds. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), 128–45. 24 For more on the carnivalesque in plague literature and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, see, respectively as starting points Charles Whitney’s essay in this volume and Leah S. Marcus, “Shakespeare and Popular Festivity,” in Shakespeare And Elizabethan Popular Culture. Arden Critical Companion, eds. Neil Rhodes and Stuart Gillespie (London: Arden, 2006), 42–66. 25 René Girard, A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 60. 26 Kathryn Schwarz, Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 40. 27 Louis Montrose, “Shaping Fantasies: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” Representations 2 (Spring 1983): 82. 28 For more on Hippolyta’s ritual induction during the viewing of Pyramus and Thisbe, see Frank Nicholas Clary, “‘Imagine No Worse of Them’: Hippolyta on the Ritual Threshold in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in Ceremony and Text in the Renaissance, ed. Douglas F. Routledge (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 155–66. 29 Kathryn Schwarz, “Missing the Breast: Disease, Desire, and the Singular Effect of Amazons,” in Hillman and Mazzio, 148. 30 For more on Athens as a plague city and its relationship to London, see Ernest B. Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 42. 31 In A Theater of Envy, Girard provides his own gloss of Helena’s “doublecherry” speech, focusing loosely on its application to contemporary issues of self esteem “not only in our love affairs, but also in our professional lives, politics, literary and artistic fashions, and so on” (42).

10 Dekker’s and Middleton’s Plague Pamphlets as Environmental Literature Charles Whitney

London’s 1603 plague was unusually dire. Over one-sixth of the city’s inhabitants succumbed.1 Several treatises on the nature and treatment of the disease appeared, as did three pamphlet accounts of the epidemic’s rending events and experiences written by Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton. Both men were playwrights idled by the close of the theaters during the plague. Dekker wrote one pamphlet, The Wonderful Year: Wherein is Shewed the Picture of London, Lying Sick of the Plague. The other two were collaborations, with Dekker writing almost all of News from Gravesend: Sent to Nobody, and Middleton almost all of The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary; Or, the Walks in Paul’s. 2 All three pamphlets appeared within a few months of one another in late 1603 and early 1604. As has long been appreciated, these accounts, although modest in scope, offer remarkable records of this appalling visitation and reflections on its significance. They concern one of human history’s major environmental disasters, the plague’s recurrent devastation of urban habitats. Such writings are promising subjects of ecocritical study.3 This literary approach is growing in importance partly because, as an urban disaster like Katrina suggests, today we face ever-increasing possibilities of experiencing environmental devastation on even a greater scale.4 Like modern accounts of ecological crises, the Dekker and Middleton pamphlets survey destruction of an environmental habitat, explore causes, uphold the common good against greed and hypocrisy, describe and express a range of responsive feeling, emphasize the power and influence of natural systems, and affi rm that humans are part of an encompassing nature. They offer an illuminating context for considering our own proliferating, encyclopedic accounts of global climate crisis. There was no subject of ecology in the early seventeenth century, but there were, as at all times and places, particular beliefs and habits of thought concerning the relations between humans and the natural world—in other words, some kind of ecologically relevant awareness. These three plague accounts show such awareness in important ways. Their authors’ attitudes

202 Charles Whitney toward the natural world generally reflect what some scholars have called “organicism” or “vitalism” rather than what has become known as the mechanical model, which came into dominance later in the seventeenth century with the rise of science. Organicism resembles some leading aspects of contemporary environmentalism more than does the mechanical model, 5 And although early modern organicism offered no effective means of preventing plague epidemics, it shaped the experience of the plague and, especially in the festive atmosphere of The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary, provided solace for its horrors. Ecocritical study of that piece, which is written as a dialogue, can also show how Dekker and Middleton appropriated William Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV to apply its carnivalesque outlook. In that way, scholarly perspectives on festivity that were developed in the last two decades of the twentieth century can enrich the ecocriticism of the twenty-fi rst.

Plague Pamphlets as Accounts of Environmental Catastrophe Let us fi rst consider the ways in which the plague pamphlets comprise records of an environmental catastrophe. The two attributed primarily to Dekker, The Wonderful Year and News from Gravesend, do so directly and will be the focus in this section. Middleton’s The Meeting of Gallants concerns the plague’s aftermath. Dekker’s pamphlets are not exactly environmental exposés uncovering shocking conditions hidden from ordinary life such as Rachel Carson’s classic Silent Spring or even Charles Dickens’s Hard Times. Their primary audience consisted of those who already knew a great deal: fellow Londoners who had themselves been assaulted by the plague. Nor does their strength lie in denotative description but rather in emotionally and morally charged metaphor. Yet taken together, theirs is a distinctive kind of environmentally themed “toxic discourse,” as ecocritic Lawrence Buell calls it, that offers “totalizing images of a world without refuge from toxic penetration” and moments of lurid “gothicization” of bereft environments.6 The fi rst pamphlet includes wry anecdotes of the plague; the second is more discursive, although much of it is in verse. In The Wonderful Year a citizen with perhaps a one-day life expectancy faces the prospect of his corpse being buried under masses of other plague victims. He escapes the city and its infection with his goods and family, but he will soon see his son die and find himself shunned as contagious by everyone he meets outside of town. The plague destroys civility: opportunistic quacks peddle useless remedies; bribes free the quarantined; parish clerks, sextons, florists, and bakers extort; and many plague victims are left to die, indoors or out, alone and miserable (23–64). News from Gravesend also piles up instances of misery, especially in its section “The horror of the plague” (lines 731–1068). But here a new emphasis is given to the theme of justice: death levels social distinctions,

Plague Pamphlets as Environmental Literature 203 and those who flee the city are now judged negatively as feckless gentry who abandon their civic duty and rightly fi nd no succor outside of the city. Just as with hurricanes or tsunamis, here the environmental catastrophe is irrevocably linked to issues of social justice. A related, additional aspect of Buell’s toxic discourse is therefore emphasized: “the threat of hegemonic repression,”7 for this pamphlet comprises an assault on the irresponsibility of London’s rich elite. The long, tongue-in-cheek dedication thanks a lord named “Sir Nicholas Nemo, alias Nobody” (132) for his charitable acts during the plague: “discharging whole baskets full of victuals,” organizing “surgeons and apothecaries to lie close in every ward,” and providing funds for the purchase of burial plots to avoid mass burials (135–36). The point is that because of the elite’s irresponsibility not only was hunger widespread but medical treatment was lacking and mass graves were common, both in violation of city ordinances. Moreover, although the plague in News from Gravesend serves to punish everyone’s sinfulness (“Cease vexing heaven, and cease to die” [147]), a special emphasis is given to its role as God’s scourge for the sins of the elites in charge: Whether they be princes’ errors Or faults of peers, [that] pull down these terrors . . . The courtier’s pride, lust, and excess, The churchman’s painted holiness, The lawyer’s grinding of the poor . . . . (141) By identifying human activity as the source of the plague (that is, the immorality that brings down God’s correction), News from Gravesend becomes more relevant to contemporary issues of social ecology and of ecological justice. Of course today many of us consider only natural causes, not divine ones, in ecological terms. But as explained later, the organic view of nature that informs Dekker and Middleton’s thinking makes no fi rm distinction between natural and divine causes. The sociologist Ulrich Beck sees the developed world today comprising a “world risk society,” one threatened primarily not by sources external to it but by risks generated by society itself.8 Credit default swaps and anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere are examples of contemporary socially generated risks. These risks can be calculated and neutralized only with great difficulty, because, as Buell might say, it takes a lot of “toxic discourse” to confront “hegemonic oppression.” But in News from Gravesend, England in 1603 is another kind of risk society, for a different reason: because of the widespread belief voiced here that plagues and other disasters are the results of the sinful behavior of humans, risky behavior indeed in the sight of an avenging deity. And just as with Beck’s notion of a risk society, Gravesend views the situation as dire but not hopeless, because moral reform is possible.

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The Urban Habitat and Organic Ecology A second environmental aspect of the plague pamphlets—all three of them this time—is that they concern a particular environmental habitat: the city of London. Dekker and Middleton were both Londoners and composed pieces for civic celebrations. They had just collaborated on The Magnificent Entertainment, celebrating the new King James’s triumphal entrance into London. Dekker’s consciousness, visible also in The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599) and other plays, is governed by a sense of civic morality in the world of London, a world in which each walk of life is called to contribute to the common civic good.9 At the time, Middleton actually resided with his new wife a few miles south of town, but London remained the cynosure of his imagination. He is the single most important dramatist in the genre of city comedy, to which he contributed mainly in the years following the 1603 plague, fi rst in another collaboration with Dekker, The Patient Man and the Honest Whore (1604).10 A great deal of the subject matter of these London dramatists’ pamphlets relates to this sense of place and habitat. In The Wonderful Year all the anecdotes about fleeing city-dwellers despised and abused by country folk involve demeaning experiences that deflate civic pride. For during the plague “the very name of ‘Londoners’” became “worse than ten whetstones to sharpen the sword of Justice against them” (64), and in one story a tinker capitalizes on popular revulsion against the plague-carrying but sometimes cash-laden city dwellers, crying to squeamish villagers, “Hey down a derry! Have ye any more Londoners to bury?” (63). As indicated earlier, in the two pamphlets written all or mostly by Dekker, the breakdown of civility within London is a major theme. That breakdown leads to profiteering by merchants and church and city officials as well as the inhumane treatment of plague victims. The Wonderful Year describes the convulsive reaction to Queen Elizabeth’s death and the happiness of both King James’s accession and the brief period of plenty that followed: these are the quintessentially London events that along with the plague made 1603 a year full of wonders. The fi rst two events connect London with the rest of the nation, and confi rm its mercantile and political supremacy. The plague, however, emphasizes London’s separateness, isolating it as a “charnel house,” a “prison” (43), a citadel falling to Death the besieger (44) or a woman forsaken by her lover (48). Such rejection, loss of civility, and victimization becomes another dimension of Londoners’ tragic affect, and in The Wonderful Year Dekker’s role is more than that of a narrator, one who bears an inevitable detachment. Dekker speaks from a position of solidarity as a survivor and fellow Londoner who channels collective grief, outrage, and horror in a work of mourning. In a striking image he aspires to be the medium of the departed, invoking the ghostly revenants of “more by many than 40,000” dead to inspire his testimony, asking them

Plague Pamphlets as Environmental Literature 205 to join all your hands together and with your bodies cast a ring about me; let me behold your ghastly visages, that my paper may receive their true pictures; echo forth your groans through the hollow trunk of my pen and rain down your gummy tears into mine ink. (43) Toxic discourse’s stylized “gothicization” of environmental catastrophe is not far from this vision of undead muses, conjured in the devastated place of their former habitation. Middleton’s The Meeting of Gallants foregrounds the stricken urban habitat in a different way. In its prologue pestilence is denounced as a “most infectious city dame” (187) and one of the gallants later affi rms that “the infection [is] for the most part a Londoner” (189). But the pamphlet concerns the fi rst stirrings of urban civility in the aftermath of the plague, as gentlemen warily return, meet at Paul’s and at an ordinary (a lesser alehouse), and start putting their lives together. None of them indicates he is actually London born and bred, but their wry, cheerful speech contains many factualistic references to London life: they have nervously resolved no longer to “feare the dangerous Featherbeds of London” (where one could catch the plague). They speak of the “old worn brass” in the pavement at Paul’s walk, Birchen Lane, St. Tooles Parish, and of the city’s clothiers, inns, cooks, carpenters, sextons, its perennial bellman old John Clapper, and the vacancy of a city street on Sunday morning “three hours before service” (188–89). That habitat may be free of active infection, but it is still haunted by the plague’s devastation and its residual threat. Awareness of the plague remains center-stage during this liminal period, and the tales the pamphlet features take its gallants back to the other London, a place of terror, sudden death, and crushing irony. Moreover the teller of the tales, the host of the ordinary, has remained in London for the duration, deriving his stories and his wisdom from that witness. All three accounts show, as Robert Maslen says of News from Gravesend, a “sensitivity to [the plague’s] redefi nition of the urban community” (128). But it is in Gravesend that the sensitivity to habitat goes farthest in an ecological direction as the authors lament the utter collapse of “Europe’s jewel, England’s gem” (143) and ponder the causes of the London plague. To understand the ecological dimensions of their deliberation, let us briefly review the organic ecology that largely underlay both authors’ habits of thought, keeping in mind that it was never actually stated to be a kind of “ecology,” that it existed in many variations, that it generally involved habits of thought rather than actual beliefs, and that in the skeptical and relatively free-thinking ferment of early modern attitudes its dominance was being eroded at the same time that its resources were being creatively probed and developed. In the organic or vitalist framework, natural cycles and processes are self-sustaining and normally exist in balance and harmony. Natural forces and creatures display anthropomorphic purposes, feelings, and

206 Charles Whitney faculties—nature itself is alive. The universe is ordered in a chain of being descending from God, who also may effect his special purposes through nature. As noted earlier, it is not possible, therefore, to understand this traditional ecology as purely natural. It is also spiritual (and both its spirituality and its notion of hierarchy parallel some ecological perspectives today11). The pagan heritage offered its own influential version of a presecular nature and facilitated continuing representations of nature as a divinity, an organism whose vital forces animate the universe (such as Edmund Spenser’s double-gendered representation of the goddess Nature in The Mutabilitie Cantos [1609]). As mortal creatures, humans have temperaments and health that are constantly affected by the interplay of the four natural elements of which they are composed, and they are susceptible to healthful or harmful natural influences from food, drink, and the air they breathe, as well as the natural materials in the clothes they wear. “Organic” nature in this sense may also be seen as God’s book, offering humans innumerable insights through analogy and emblem that depend on natural correspondences between the human microcosm and the universal macrocosm.12 Such insights are often matters of interpretation: for instance in church, the naturalness of social rank is coded in seating arrangements, but a sermon might represent it as unnatural (or might not). In the alehouse social rank might be more likely to be considered unnatural, but not always. The city could be seen as a type of a heavenly Jerusalem or as an artificial environment disruptive to natural balance and encouraging immorality. News from Gravesend’s sensitivity to habitat fi rst sets in opposition and then reconciles two aspects of organic ecology. Its section “The cause of the plague” (lines 522–730) is actually an inquiry that poses a question, follows logical steps based on observation, and comes to a definite conclusion. One aspect is the miasma theory of the plague (as caused by “contagious fumes,” 140), which stems from Galenic notions about bad air corrupting bodily humors. This theory is presented and rejected, as are a number of other alleged natural causes of the plague. The authors are not denying that human health is affected by natural causes, but in this section they reason that this particular manifestation of the disease is not. The plague actually comes from the other, divine aspect of the organic universe, God, and specifically “God in anger” (141). This anger is directed at “the city sin” (141), which flourishes because of the materialistic opportunities the city in particular provides through trade, money-lending, and prostitution. Along the same lines, the section of the pamphlet most likely to be Middleton’s focuses on the usurer, the glutton, and the lustful one, all of whom meet divine retribution through the plague (145–46).13 Sustained then within a moral, organic universe and enduring the punitive consequences thereof lies a sinful urban habitat, a profl igate risk society. But this conclusion is complemented in the last section of Gravesend, “The necessity of a plague,” by a different and yet more explicitly eco-

Plague Pamphlets as Environmental Literature 207 logical explanation for the urban plague: overpopulation, one that seems to reconcile natural and divine causes. “A plague’s the purge to cleanse a city” (147) of too many people, a city “Having too too many living, And wanting living”—that is, unemployed (148). “When fruits of wombs pass [i.e. exceed] fruits of earth,” then “The med’cine for a riotous land Is such a plague” (148). The plague works to preserve the balance of human population relative to available natural resources. As a cause of the plague, overpopulation here implies the existence of a natural balancing and correcting force. Yet at the same time, in the context of the earlier remarks on divine correction, the implication is that through the plague a divine gardener preserves the balance of fruits and fruits (the fertility of humans and of the rest of nature). The appeal to overpopulation as a catalyst of the plague combines the natural and divine aspects of organic ecology where the earlier discussion of causation had opposed them. It also fits one of Buell’s criteria for ecocritical writing, that “human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation.”14

Festivity and Ecology Whereas News from Gravesend offers the possibility of a moral solution to the threat of the plague—more godly, restrained, and civic-minded living—the other two pamphlets are somewhat less proactive. They confi ne themselves primarily to psychology, not potentially transformative morality. For them, when it comes to dealing with the reality of the plague, the issue can be defi ned as that of a sustainable ecology, that is, an emphasis on the empowering possibilities of human creatureliness. If plague epidemics cannot be ended, humanity can raise itself beyond the level of mere survival through festive organicism and the practice of convivial fellowship, prandial pleasures, and laughter. Organic views of nature are crucial here. In early modern agrarian societies, seasonal cycles link humans and the sustaining forces of nature. Human life is regulated by the seasons and other natural rhythms like dearth and plenty, fortune’s wheel, day and night, health and sickness, and life and death. Humans commemorate these cycles in rituals that sometimes also emphasize orthodox religious faith or corporate allegiances and other times center on leveling popular-festive beliefs and practices. The Wonderful Year and The Meeting of Gallants draw from festive traditions, from holidays that paradoxically both celebrate the natural cycles and conjure a sense of an eternal present outside of time.15 They demonstrate how Mikhail Bakhtin’s notions of the “carnivalesque” and the “grotesque” can have important ecological implications.16 Both pamphlets exhibit the style of the Elizabethan grotesque,17 which draws from a popular-festive consciousness expressed in ambivalent laughter and views calamity and death as potential social levelers, as sources of affi rmative new beginnings, and as reminders of our common mortality as creaturely beings among others. In

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both pamphlets these figurations actually offer a means of understanding and dealing with the horror of the plague. The Wonderful Year stages an uneven conflict between this buoyant popular-festive consciousness and the cruel and tragic reality of the plague. It presents both the death of Elizabeth and the plague as disruptions of natural cycles, and during its course keeps trying with its good humor to, as it were, jump-start the cycles again through mirth. On the other hand, in The Meeting of Gallants, with its grotesquely humorous Prologue, lively dialogue, and wry tales recounted in a post-plague ordinary, the horrors of the plague can be reviewed and processed at leisure with the aid of food, drink, fellowship, and mirth. In both pamphlets, mirth offers an ecological and philosophical perspective on our being-toward-death. The Wonderful Year begins with a climatic narrative that joins human and meteorological worlds. It seems to have skipped winter, recounting that Autumn’s departure was perfumed with spring flowers and the sun appeared “richly appareled in cloth of gold like a bridegroom” “to be married to the Spring” of 1603 (32). Birds, kids, shepherds and “country wenches” joined in the celebration, people were happy, “every house seemed to have a Lord of Misrule in it” (32) and “the earth [was] like a paradise” (33). Then the Destinies stirred up a “hideous tempest” and gave birth to Sickness, who summoned the Queen to her death (33). After that, the whole kingdom got the ague but was cured by the proclamation of the new king, whereupon the sun reappeared and the economy thrived. Finally, the arrival of the plague arrests the climatic narrative, although that arrival is itself associated with seasonal festivity in a striking initial personification: “corn is no sooner ripe but, for all the pricking up of his ears, he is pared off by the shins and made to go upon stumps” (42). The dread of the plague’s violent assault on the human body that is figured here almost becomes neutralized by the festive reminder that one is nourished by plants whose harvesting means death for them, a fate their consumers will eventually share. So be it. That is the ambivalent laughter of carnival. But the plague overwhelms both ecological rhythms and festive ambivalence, not unlike the quarrel between the fairies Oberon and Titania in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that disrupts the moon, causing floods that threaten the harvest—just as England’s harvest had been damaged in the play’s year of debut.18 After an initial night of horror, hope is dashed: “It is now day. Let us look forth and try what consolation rises with the sun. Not any, not any” (44). Instead, the plague comes to place a “deadly burden” on the author, the task of “ruthful and passionate condolement” (42), a task requiring toxic discourse that indeed prevents him from ever establishing a fi rm rule of mirth. The pamphlet’s dedication notes this problem from the beginning: “If you read, you may haply laugh. ’Tis my desire you should, because mirth is both physical and wholesome against the plague; with which sickness, to tell the truth, this book is—though not sorely—yet somewhat infected” (27). The notion that mirth has medicinal

Plague Pamphlets as Environmental Literature 209 value in ameliorating the plague comes from the humoral physiology that connects human temperaments and natural forces in an organic relationship; the implication is that here Dekker by no means believes that the plague remains entirely separate from nature and natural forces, although he identified its cause as divine vengeance in his later co-authored pamphlet. The best that can be achieved is to go ahead and figure Death as a grotesque, festive being—a Tamburlaine besieging the city with his forces in tents, with his officers “burning fever, boils, blains and carbuncles” (46)—a figure not just anthropomorphized but “anthropophagized” (42), that is, personified also as an ever-devouring cannibal. Such contexts could potentially give the plague a meaning in a larger pattern of life’s continuity and ability to rejuvenate, because in the natural round such horrors always pass. Yet the power that this figure has to turn all things topsy-turvy overcomes the ambivalent affi rmation of the whirligig of time, the continuity of life and its rhythms beyond the passing of each individual and even the falls of great ones. It is more a revelation of the plague’s inexorable ability to sow horror, tragedy, and chaos, and to destroy the meaningfulness of life. The plague can bring out the worst in people, and the experience of the plague is too fresh in The Wonderful Year for festivity to prevail; yet at least this ruthful pamphlet positions its horror in relation to festive highlights pointing to an organic ecological frame offering a possible way beyond. A mark of the plague’s occlusion of therapeutic festivity in The Wonderful Year is the pamphlet’s distant allusion to Shakespeare’s Falstaff, that huge and grotesque figure of mirth from the Elizabethan age. One of Dekker’s stories includes the remarkably fat host of a country alehouse, one whose bright nose, like Falstaff’s companion Bardolph’s, could “save the charges of candles” at night (60; cf. 1 Henry IV, “Thou hast saved me a thousand marks in links and torches”).19 This host is hospitable and merry at fi rst but responds cravenly when he suspects his London customer to have died of the plague. As we shall see, the yet more Falstaffian host in A Meeting of Gallants retains his good humor and his convivial acceptance of difference. The ecologically significant feature of A Meeting of Gallants is its strong focus on representing death and the threat thereof as laughing matters by adapting traditional contexts of festivity grounded in an organic view of nature. This is, again, a positive, therapeutic dimension that copes with the psychological consequences of a plague epidemic by providing, in effect, an ecological framework. With the potential acceptance of diversity that its laughter provides, the carnivalesque orientation here frames the experience of plague as part of an ecology recognizing that natural bounds on human aspiration can become sources of vitality and fellowship. The prologue comprises a match of boasting and invective among personifications of the biblical representations of mass death: War, Famine, and Pestilence. Each of these grotesque and yet comic beings claims to bring the greatest woes to mankind. They set a tone of festive ambivalence recalling

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the verbal sparring among personified seasons in folklore, as reflected in the droll sixteenth-century paintings The Battle of Carnival and Lent executed by both Pieter Brueghels, Elder and Younger, and in Thomas Nashe’s wistful masque Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1595) for instance. Pestilence is not a lady. She proudly describes the painful sores and pits she visits on human bodies. For her part, Famine emphasizes that she kills with agonizing slowness, and disdainful Warre that he or she selects the brave and respectable. But Pestilence has the last word, introducing the matter at hand, matter that testifies to her power. Here and elsewhere, rather than emphasizing the shock effect of the plague through toxic discourse, A Meeting of Gallants offers a primarily festive world in which death is a laughing matter because it can be made part of sustaining social practices of festive ritual and consciousness. The boasting match is a Hallowe’en touch. Something in us that connects to the rhythms of the natural world helps us to bear the horrors of existence and to recognize our radical equality. 20 In The Meeting of Gallants the plague is clearly a material, environmental presence, although exactly what it is remains unknown. Whether or not infection was originally set in motion by God’s hand, avoiding it seems to be primarily a matter of luck and prudence. The danger of contaminated bed linens, clothing, and cloth is emphasized from the beginning. The four gallants have just returned from six months of country retreat from the London plague and all wear worn-out clothes that they know have not been exposed. Those are in special danger who are connected with “dangerous and perilous Trades that has any woolen about them,” or who wear wool, “for the infection . . . loved to be lapped warm” (189). It is better to swallow your pride and wear old clothes out at elbows than to risk the plague. In the tales, precautions against infection include staying upwind, using long instruments to move plaguey corpses, burning those corpses, and of course avoiding visited houses. But elaborate precautions such as shrouding a coach to protect its leather and nails from infection are laughable. At the same time there are one or two hints that divine vengeance is also operating to plague sinfulness: “I think it one of Hercules’s labours,” observes a gallant, “to fi nd two whole tailors about London that hath not been plagued for their stealing” (189). But fi nding a proper tailor here is a parochial concern of fashion-conscious youth, and the question is not addressed whether there is a general guilt for which God is putting everyone in harm’s way. Humor pervades the dialogue, which is filled with puns juxtaposing life and death, like a marriage—“bane” (that is, banns) and “ratsbane” (191). Typical carnivalesque references to and metaphors of eating and drinking are common. The visit to the ordinary is undertaken to hear its jolly host tell stories about the recent plague, and the gallant who leads his fellows there, Signor Shuttlecock, assures his companions that “there is no doubt but his tales will make us laugh ere we be out of our porridge” (190). Sure enough, the host says he has preserved his tales “like anchovies to relish

Plague Pamphlets as Environmental Literature 211 your drink well” (190), and offers the unpromising material “to make you laugh ere you be out of your capon” (193). Like the theater, the alehouse in its various forms was an important social institution in the early modern period that reinforced community in a relatively pluralistic setting that counter-balanced more explicitly ideological and hierarchical venues.21 As he enters the ordinary with the other gallants, Signor Shuttlecock says, Now, Signors, how like you mine host? Did I not tell you he was a mad, round knave, and a merry one, too? And if you chance to talk of fat Sir John Oldcastle, he will tell you he was his great grand-father, and not much unlike him in paunch, if you mark him well by all descriptions. (190) This Sir John Falstaff-Oldcastle pedigree (of which more later) makes the host a true figure of mirth. The tales this great-grandson of Sir John tells are not then simply stories of horror or exposé, although their common theme is death. They are also funny because they are likely to contain a “jest” (193) that turns on the ironies that transpire when pranks or mistakes confuse living people with those dead of the plague. A drunkard prankster orders the passing bell tolled for his death and cries out his window with loud laughter as it is tolled, but a few days later contracts the plague and dies. In another, harlots play the same joke on a man, who also soon after dies of the plague. A drunken man is knocked unconscious after falling from his horse, is taken for a plague victim, and wakes up screaming as his body is being burned (only a little). But the host does have his own fit of toxic discourse, railing against shopkeepers and tradesmen who cover up the deaths of their servants and family to preserve their businesses, bribing unscrupulous sextons and having their bodies buried in distant parishes. More serious yet to him are the people of Hertford who prayed for the plague to continue so the London law term might be held in Hertford: “for the greedy lucre of a few private and mean persons to suck up the life of thousands” (194). Even in a work designed to contextualize the horror, some of the frustration and outrage prominent in Dekker’s pamphlets breaks through. But if there is any doubt about the overall tone, the host dispels it. He is never sad, he assures, and bids his listeners remain merry. Where “a true heart” might “bleed outright” hearing his stories, he says, “not such a one as mine, gallants, for my heart bleeds nothing but alicant” (194). This festive metaphor confounding drink and bodily fluid refers to a well-loved Spanish wine that here takes on a symbolism embodying the total practice of festive conviviality and its philosophical, ecological, and democratic implications. The host, in effect, offers that consciousness to his listeners, promising to “put you all in one goblet, and wash all these tales in a cup of sack” (194). Being part of nature we accept its processes and their limitations, which are also the sources of our life and joy. Convivial, prandial

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fellowship in the carnival mode—“alicant”22 —helps makes these ecological affi rmations possible under difficult conditions. In the traditional ways it affi rms human becoming, popular festivity can provide a powerful means for survivors to come to terms with the horrors of the plague. Their comforting laughter envisions human life as part of the cycles of nature in which all that is high is brought low, and difference may not be exclusive. Cheer and good fellowship enable acceptance of universal mortality, the great leveller. The grotesque horrors of the plague epidemic become a vitalistic grotesque that affi rms the essential link of life and death. In these ways The Meeting of Gallants exhibits Buell’s criteria for the kind of writing amenable to environmental criticism (that is, ecocriticism): among them, recognizing a “nonhuman environment that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history,” and recognition that the “environment is a process.”23 One can go further however. The early modern, convivial awareness that our existence together is a beingtoward-death parallels recent developments in philosophy relevant to ecological issues. Sylvia Benso’s notion of “faciality” or “an ethics of things” addresses the vulnerability of nature to human exploitation, whereas plague pamphlets of course concern the vulnerability of humans to nature and/ or to divine punishment.24 But The Meeting of Gallants’s recognition of creatureliness chimes with Benso’s argument that humans bear an ethical relation to nature even though natural creatures lack the (human) “face” so prominent in ethical discussions of the Other since at least as early as Emmanuel Levinas’s work. Moreover, Benso finds that relation to be accomplished through festivity: “It is in the celebration of things as in a festive day that the ethics of things finds its ultimate accomplishment” (186). The festive aspect enables respectful, affi rmative recognition of the alterity of the nonhuman. It appears that early modern carnivalesque organicism has a postmodern counterpart. As I have shown elsewhere, one source of the festive consciousness in The Meeting of Gallants is indeed the Falstaff of Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, especially scene 4.2 where Falstaff describes the pitiful recruits he is leading to doom in battle. Middleton has his gallants who meet at Paul’s trade allusions to that scene as they conflate war and pestilence. At the scene’s conclusion, the sack-toting Sir John expresses his reluctance to fight: “to the latter end of a fray And the beginning of a feast, Fits a dull fighter and a keen guest” (1 Henry IV 4.2.71–73). In The Meeting of Gallants one plague survivor greets another by likening pestilence to war: “What, dare you venture, Signor, at the latter end of a fray now? I mean not at a fray with swords and bucklers, but with sores and carbuncles” (188). The pamphlet’s other references to this scene concern clothing and sheets. There’s not “a shirt and a half in all my company,” declares

Plague Pamphlets as Environmental Literature 213 Sir John (1 Henry IV 4.2.37–38), and here Signor Shuttlecock refers to “many an honest house in London well stocked before with large linen, where now remains not above two sheets and a half” (188). . . . Where the rags of Sir John’s soldiers in the Second Quarto are like “an old fazd ancient” (a ragged flag [1 Henry IV 4.2.28]), Signor Jinglespur remarks “Tis . . . as commendable to go ragged after a plague, as to have an ensign full of holes and tatters after a battle” (188). Where in the same text Sir John calls his troops “tottered prodigals” (1 Henry IV 4.2.31), Signor Kickshaw jokes that they will march to the ordinary like “tattered soldiers, after a fray.” (190)25 Here, in addition to identifying the ecological dimension of this consciousness, I want to point out that The Meeting of Gallants’s connection between Sir John Falstaff-Oldcastle and the plague actually stems from a relationship developed in 1 Henry IV itself. In the course of a few scenes, Falstaff manages to use the word “plague” more than any other character in Shakespeare (“A plague of all cowards, still say I,” and he says it four times).26 Falstaff wishes the plague upon others six times, and once in a conditional expression on his own bringing up. But he also uses the locution “what a plague” three times in questions, such as “what a plague have I to do with a buff jerkin” (1.2.through-line 152). Here the phrase operates as an intensive of elusive nuance (like “what the hell”). The cumulative effect characterizes Falstaff more intensively as a grotesque and celebratory carnival figure of ambivalence whose language emphasizes the immediate proximity of life and death, not in the way of hair shirt and death’s head but as an affi rmation of a creaturely, natural cycle of becoming—of birth and death, young and old, fat and thin—of which humans are a part and that has ecological implications in organicism that should now be clear to us. From this comic perspective, Mercutio’s dying curse, “a plague o’ both your houses” (Romeo and Juliet 3.1.86), penned within a year or so of Falstaff’s curses, might be read as another such pregnant plague quip. This is an aspect of Falstaff that particularly interested Middleton, a spirit expressed no more vividly than in the marching scene of 1 Henry IV 4.2 to which Middleton’s gallants allude. 27 These appropriations are homages to Shakespeare that both deepen the significance of the pamphlet and also, along with Middleton’s Falstaffian host, constitute a reading of Shakespeare’s play that foregrounds its grotesque, carnivalesque dimension. Here the allusions help convey the nervous relief among young men meeting at Paul’s in the plague aftermath and affi rm the profound ambivalence, in organicism, of laughter that embraces death. On the one hand the rich and allusive language of the meeting at Paul’s underscores the danger of the plague and the toll it takes on everyone, and on the other it invokes the carnivalesque vision of death and new life: in the Battle of Shrewsbury from act 5, Falstaff’s hapless recruits, drawn from the meanest of society,

214 Charles Whitney have been mowed down like corn at harvest, but here it is as if they have come back to life as young gentlemen. There are two qualifications to Middleton’s grotesque affi rmations. For all its potentially pluralist conviviality, The Meeting of Gallants addresses and privileges the male gentry, “gentlemen-gallants of five-and-twenty” as the host calls them (193). It was written for a moment when the privileged tenth were still returning to London in significant numbers, eager to buy accounts of the recent visitation. The gallants with whom readers are asked to sympathize are members of the so-called runaways with whom Dekker and perhaps Middleton were so impatient in News from Gravesend. One of the tales here notes the resentment toward this group felt by countrydwellers and city-bound Londoners alike. And the gallants’ fashion-consciousness and privilege (at least some of them are accompanied by pages) could not be shared by many of their fellow Londoners. To the host they are “my dainty liberal landlords” (190). The host himself better anchors the leveling affi rmations upon which this pamphlet draws. Another qualification is the pamphlet’s association of healing festivity itself with commerce. Here the magic of “alicant”—as the whole package, the creaturely experience of ale, food, stories, festivity, and fellowship centered on the host—is a commercial product. The host has a special deal on offer, which the gallants discuss before entering his ordinary, and they pay up before leaving. With other allusions to the stage besides 1 Henry IV, the pamphlet itself is not only a plague-time substitute for the stage but an advertisement for it as well, one written by a most interested party.

Past, Present, Future Today we are familiar with the notion that profound ecological problems can be solved through properly regulated commerce. That solution may be as fanciful as the early modern notion that mirth can stave off the plague. Contemporary baby steps along those lines, at least, have come under withering attack in crisis or doomsday books with titles like Earth Under Fire, The Bridge at the Edge of the World, The Last Generation, Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning and The Revenge of GAIA: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back and How We Can Still Save Humanity. 28 These books are like the plague pamphlets discussed here in that they concern general, many-faceted, far-reaching disasters: crises that have the potential to render an entire habitat indefi nitely unfit (a city, a planet) and that demand action and reflection both moral and existential, reflection on our creatureliness as part of nature. Many have identified as the most important cause of today’s mounting crises the seventeenth-century rise of the grand modern project of human advancement and mastery, which includes mechanistic science (eclipsing organicism), capitalism, and an exploitative attitude toward nature. Francis Bacon’s project of human dominion over the universe is anathema for an

Plague Pamphlets as Environmental Literature 215 ecology that posits a human creature embedded in nature, advances the disciplines of environmental ethics and economics limiting dominant models of capitalism, and emphasizes community and the common good of Earth and its life-forms. Early modern England is bound to play a significant role in our sense of our relationship to the natural world through history and into the future, but this is not simply because Earth-unfriendly ideologies were set in place then. The period also saw many environmental initiatives. 29 And here I have maintained that we should consider works like the 1603–4 plague pamphlets of Dekker and Middleton as environmental literature. The relevance of the plague material lies in its description of environmental disaster and its various emphases on habitat, the common good and social justice, human responsibility for maintaining natural balance, natural cycles, and human creatureliness and festive being-toward-death. Several prominent themes and perspectives in the books listed earlier, for instance, reprise those of the 1603–4 pamphlets. Take James Gustave Speth’s 2008 The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. Speth is a highly respected environmental scientist, Dean of the Yale School of Forestry, and his tone is suitably judicious. The book is replete with graphs, statistics, and exposés that plot our collision course with climate crisis and explain why current and proposed efforts to ameliorate the collision are hopelessly inadequate. It subsumes a range of interlinked ecological issues such as pollution, resource depletion, extermination of species, desertification, and ecological injustice. The inclusive frame of reference offers global climate catastrophe as the ultimate outcome of capitalist globalization. The unthinkable but inexorable consequences of the planet’s present trajectory under capitalism-as-we-know-it are surveyed in understated language, including the disproportionate suffering of the poor and of developing nations. The book also identifies a typical constellation of anxious affect— longing, fear, and guilt—attendant on the spiritual hunger generated by our fetish for growth, consumption, and waste, and on the uncertainties generated by our risk society. In surprisingly encouraging tones Speth also offers comprehensive and ethically laden prescriptions for sustainable and more fulfilling societies in harmony with nature. Multifarious grassroots actions and life-style changes are essential, as are sometimes simple but far-reaching legal measures like repealing the nineteenth-century law that gave corporations the legal status of persons. As with the plague pamphlets, here we fi nd several kinds of toxic discourse that describe and analyze environmental destruction. One or more of the pamphlets also feature moral and social critique of exploitation, and revelations of emotional suffering and moral malaise. They attack social inequality, defi ne the human as part of nature, and seek remedy in recognition of that relationship. Of course the plague pamphlets gained urgency and power because they appeared during or right after the huge catastrophe they chronicled and addressed anxious, dazed, and traumatized readers.

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But although the crisis Speth and so many others consider is mostly in the future rather than the present, the current world fi nancial crisis and recession have now stimulated, as of April 2009, a strand of crisis discourse that actually links our times to a possible global climate catastrophe. For instance, in as few as 12 years, a recent article in The Guardian claims, “food shortages, scarce water and high-cost energy” will lead to an “economic and political collapse that will make today’s economic recession seem very tame indeed.”30 That makes for racy copy, at least. But the clear implication of contemporary eco-crisis discourse is that if we are among the survivors, we may be writing crisis pieces ourselves and having to do it from positions more like Dekker’s or Middleton’s than like Speth’s, by invoking the testimony of the dead to overcome our own “stiff and freezing horror” (The Wonderful Year 42).

Notes 1 Paul Yachnin, Introduction to The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary; or, the Walks in Paul’s in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds. Gary Taylor and John Lavignano (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007), 183. On the severity of the 1603 plague see Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985; reprint Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 54. 2 Thomas Dekker, The Wonderful Year in The Wonderful Year . . . and Selected Writings, ed. E.D. Pendry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 23–64; Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, News from Gravesend: Sent to Nobody in Taylor and Lavignano, 128–48; and Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary; or, the Walks in Paul’s, in Taylor and Lavignano, 195–203. All references to these pamphlets are to the editions above. On the authorship of the two co-authored pamphlets see Gary Taylor, “Thomas Middleton,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eds. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 38: 81; Robert Maslen, Introduction to News from Gravesend: Sent to Nobody in Thomas Middleton, The Collected Works, 129. 3 For a concise introduction to this literary critical approach see Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2004). 4 Among many notable ecocritical studies on early modern English literature are Diane Kelsey McColley, Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2007); Gabriel Egan, Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism (London and New York: Routledge, 2006); Robert N. Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Sylvia Bowerbank, Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Bruce Boehrer, Shakespeare Among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave, 2002). 5 For “organicism” see Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980);

Plague Pamphlets as Environmental Literature 217

6

7 8 9 10 11

12

13 14 15

16 17

18 19

20

for this sense of “vitalism” see Gabriel Egan, Green Shakespeare, 22–30 and also R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1945). See also note 12 later. Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and the Environment in the U. S. and Beyond (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2001), 38, 43, 30–54. See also Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism 12. For an account of social criticism in these pamphlets see Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues, and Politics (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave, 2001), 102–12. Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, 41. Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1999). E.D. Pendry, “Introduction,” The Wonderful Year . . . and Selected Writings 12. See also Janette Dillon, Theatre, Court and City, 1595–1610 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000), 139–45. For more on Dekker’s plays in plague-time, see Kelly J. Stage’s essay in this volume. See the website of the Forum for Religion and Ecology, available online at http://www.religionandecology.org/ (accessed November 10, 2009); Edward T. Wimberley, Nested Ecology: The Place of Humans in the Ecological Hierarchy (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). See Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: An Essay in the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1970), 3–50; Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 30, passim. See also Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). Some versions of the organicist model, such as those influenced by Neoplatonism, can themselves reconcile this contradiction, of course, because nature is also part of a continuum, a chain of being that interfaces with divinity. Buell quoted in Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism, 53. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harcourt, 1959), 85–91; Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); François Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, tr. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT, 1984). See Neil Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque (New York and London: Routledge, 1980); see also Michael Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York and London: Routledge, 1985). For more on plague language in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, see Matthew Thiele’s essay in this collection. William Shakespeare, 1 Henry IV, in The Norton Shakespeare, eds Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997), 3.3.36–37. All references to Shakespeare’s plays are from this edition. Radical equality is an important theme of Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World.

218 Charles Whitney 21 Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200–1830 (London: Longman, 1983). 22 Editor Paul Yachnin’s fi rst emendation for the original 1604 word “Alegant” (The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinarie: or The Walkes in Powles [London, 1604], sig. D3r) was apparently “alegar,” a kind of vinegar made with ale. His introduction uses that word in quoting this passage, and the word sorts well with Yachnin’s interpretation of the host’s attitude, acceptance of the sour things of life. But it does not sort as well with the ebullience of the host’s own carnivalesque mirth. It is clear from plentiful external evidence that the subsequent choice, “alicant” (Alicante), a Spanish wine, is the more likely as well as richer reading. 23 Buell quoted in Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism, 53. 24 Silvia Benso, The Face of Things: A Different Side of Ethics (Buffalo and New York: SUNY Press, 2000). 25 Charles Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 106. Here the quotations from Middleton follow the modernized Collected Works. 26 Open Source Shakespeare Concordance (using The Globe Shakespeare), available online at http://www.opensourceshakespeare.com/concordance (accessed November 10, 2009), 1 Henry IV, 2.4, through-line 1144. I do not claim he uses the word more significantly than Timon of Athens, whose relation to the plague Rebecca Totaro has powerfully revealed; see Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton, Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005), 87–108. 27 See Charles Whitney, “Festivity and Topicality in the Coventry Scene of 1 Henry IV, English Literary Renaissance 24:2 (Spring 1994): 410–48. 28 Gary Braasch, Earth Under Fire : How Global Warming Is Changing The World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); James Gustave Speth, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Fred Pearce, The Last Generation: How Nature Will Take Her Revenge for Climate Change (Eden Project Books, 2007); George Monbiot, Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning (Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 2006); James Lovelock, The Revenge of GAIA: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back and How We Can Still Save Humanity (New York: Basic Books, 2006). 29 On the period’s environmental initiatives, see especially Diane Kelsey McColley, Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell. 30 Jonathon Porritt, “Perfect Storm of Environmental and Economic Collapse Closer Than You Think” The Guardian, March 24, 2009, available online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/23/jonathon-porrittrecession-climate-crisis (accessed November 7, 2009). See also Thomas Friedman, “Mother Nature’s Dow,” The New York Times, March 28, 2009, available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/opinion/29friedman. html (accessed November 7, 2009).

Afterword Plague and Metaphor Ernest B. Gilman

For René Girard, writing in 1974, the word “plague” functions mainly as a metaphor for social discord: a metaphor (and a metaphor only), he says, “endowed with an almost incredible vitality”—incredible because ours is “a world where the plague and epidemics in general have disappeared almost altogether.”1 For Susan Sontag, writing in 1978, “Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. First, the subjects of deepest dread (corruption, decay, pollution, anomie, weakness) are identified with the disease. The disease itself becomes a metaphor. Then, in the name of the disease (that is, using it as a metaphor) that horror is imposed on other things. The disease becomes adjectival. . . . From pestilence (bubonic plague) came “pestilent,” whose figurative meaning, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “injurious to religion, morals, or public peace—1513’”2 For Aristotle, a metaphor is “the application of an alien name by transference.”3 This essay develops two related themes, arguing fi rst that for English today the “vitality” of which Girard speaks has its roots in, and gains its impetus from, the plague discourse of the early modern period. Although the Black Death of the fourteenth century is rightly regarded as the epochal disaster of its age, during the later period stretching from the birth of Shakespeare to the death of Milton, England was pummeled repeatedly by pandemic outbreaks of the same disease. These visitations generated hundreds of plague texts in prose and verse, written by authors like Jonson, Dekker and Lodge but also by a host of divines, scribblers and quacks, and including sermons, satires, plays, medical advisories, official proclamations, broadsheets, and jeremiads—their numbers amplified by the industry of booksellers keen on satisfying an urgent demand for such literature, and the language in which they were written the early modern seedbed of our own. Driving this

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early modern process of dissemination was the need to explain the inexplicable horror of the plague by parsing its meaning, a project itself founded on the assumption that the plague must be meaningful. These texts strive to connect the plague with its causes—that is, with sins both large and small, with the stars and the air, with epochal changes in national events, with social discord and religious and political factions, with infestations of immigrants and the poor—in short, with the manifold corruptions of the natural, moral and civic order by which, and in just punishment for which, the English were “plagued.” The word itself thus proliferates, as does the density of its metaphoric surround. My second concern is to sketch in the broader perspective of plague metaphorics, opening a perspective that extends from Aristotle’s conception of metaphor itself to our own engagement with the figurative dimension of infectious disease. Thus I question the literal distinction between health and disease in light of our current understanding of infectious processes in the history of life. I explore the fragile boundary between the literal and the metaphoric realms of epidemic disease as it enters into the language of the digital age at a moment when a computer expert can warn that “Thousands of people whose antivirus software isn’t up to date may have been unknowingly infected” by new products.4 My coda brings together two examples of viral media: the early-modern newspaper and the online video game.

Plague and its Metaphors What is the relation between plague and its metaphors? Both Sontag and Girard acknowledge the peculiar power of plague metaphors, and both believe this power is all the greater when such metaphors become untethered from the diseases they describe. But just here, their arguments diverge. Girard was right on his fi rst point but unfortunately mistaken on the second. Unchallenged during a decade when it was still possible to predict that medical science would eradicate infectious disease altogether, Girard contends that plague metaphor has, as it were, taken on a life of its own: because plague has literally become a thing of the past, its metaphors survive the death of their host and attach themselves with even greater vitality to new realities such as social unrest. For Sontag, the reality of disease is itself so dreadful that the dreadful metaphors spawned in its name impose themselves “on other things”—especially on the individuals afflicted. The victim of the pestilence, contaminated by the overflow of dread, is metaphorically stigmatized as pestilent. These arguments lead, in turn, to opposing conclusions. In Girard’s view, because plague has “disappeared almost altogether,” only the metaphors remain—potent, free-floating signifiers in search of a signified. Sontag, in contrast, advocates stripping disease entirely of the “significance” invidiously imparted to it by metaphor. Where Girard sees residually powerful plague metaphors but no plague, Sontag would have us see only the plague, an object clearly visible for itself (that

Plague and Metaphor 221 is, as signifying nothing) but so visible only once the miasmal cloud of metaphor surrounding it has been dispelled. Both assume, however, that the literal and the metaphoric registers of the plague can be separated—an assumption I wish to contest in what follows. From Thucydides’s account of the plague at Athens to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, and Camus’s The Plague to Jonathan Larson’s Rent, the language of plague has not only been appropriated to characterize other infectious epidemic diseases (such as the “White Plague” of tuberculosis, or the “gay plague” of AIDS), but also metaphorically “imposed on other things,” chiefly things theological and political. One legacy of early modern plague writing is the renewed biblical conviction that something so awful must have significance in the fi rst place, and even an intention. Plague exegetes noted that in the biblical Hebrew, the three-letter word for “plague” ‫ =( רבד‬DBR) is orthographically identical to the word for the “word” itself, proving that the disease was not a mere thing of nature but the medium of God’s speech.5 What the signifier portends—what is signified by it—must be as pervasive and baneful as the devastation of the disease itself. In the search for meaning, the plague tends to become a symptom of its underlying causes, and its tokens the mark of its moral consequences. In early modern Europe, individual sinners, sinful nations, heretics, Lutherans, Catholics, intriguers and malcontents, invading armies, foreigners, vagrants, Jews, and the urban poor could all be spoken of, by transference, as “plagues” upon the body politic—and with enough of the literal remaining to imply that those so stigmatized might actually harbor the disease, or else deserve to contract it. Shakespeare’s “A plague o’ both your houses” could be either literal or figurative, depending on what Mercutio has in mind. The phrase itself, incompletely detached from any association with literal epidemics, nowadays reappears (inter alia) as the title of a website devoted to an “Independent commentary on politics and news.”6 Although the sponsors of A Plague On Both Your Houses (http://aplagueonbothyourhouses) wish to signal their scorn for conservatives and liberals alike, they would presumably stop short of calling down a fatal illness on their political opponents. We would probably classify this last example as an instance of a “dead” metaphor, its continuing vitality due to its having come unmoored from its literal grounding in the realm of infectious disease, but for that reason having become available for other uses, and containing enough residual dread to give its broader applications their Girardian potency.7 In early modern England plague was “in the air.”

The “air of pestilence” As I have noted, between 1563 and the “Great Plague” of 1665–66, England was beset by a number of major epidemics, each claiming tens of thousands of lives in London alone.8 Even in the intervals, hardly a year

222 Ernest B. Gilman passed without a worrisome number of plague deaths that did not rise to an epidemic threshold, or without the fear that spring weather would be the harbinger of a renewed outbreak. The outpouring of plague writing filling the book stalls arguably has two consequences for the metaphoric power of the disease. One arises from the sheer number of such texts, nearly all of them striving to connect the plague with its causes. The word itself proliferates, as does the density of its metaphoric surround. As an unscientific but suggestive index to its frequency, the concordance to Shakespeare’s plays lists 118 occurrences of “plague” in its several forms (“plagues,” “plagued” and even, once, “unplagued”), as well as 14 occurrences of “pestilence.”9 When these usages do not take the form of curses (like Mercutio’s) they refer for the most part metaphorically to Sontag’s “other things.” Thus in Antony and Cleopatra, Scarus reports that, with Cleopatra’s flight, the battle on Antony’s side is “like the token’d pestilence, / Where death is sure” (3.10.12–13)—to which Enobarbus replies that his eyes “did sicken at the sight” (3.10.20). In Twelfth Night, Orsino declares: “O, when mine eyes did see Olivia fi rst, / Methought she purged the air of pestilence!” (1.1.20– 21). In love and war, Shakespeare’s language conjures up the plague as its dramatic atmosphere, the imaginative simulacrum of the miasma in which the disease itself was thought to lurk.10 Alternatively, the arrow of metaphor can point in the opposite direction: not from plague writing to the figurative surround of other things labeled pestilential, but from the metaphor of plague back onto writing itself in the wake of the Gutenberg revolution. In The Wonderful Year Dekker encourages his reader to read as a form of prophylaxis: “If you read, you may happilie laugh . . . because mirth is both Physicall, and wholesome against the Plague”; but he also cautions that “this booke is . . . somewhat infected” with the same disease—playing on the fear that books themselves, like money and other objects that pass hand to hand, might be a source of contagion.11 Alarm at the sheer number of books spewing from the press is a familiar topos in the period, the early-modern forerunner of our own ambivalent response to the information (and disinformation) explosion fostered by the Internet. Robert Burton complains that “not only libraries and shops are full of our put[r]id papers, but every close-stool and jakes,” adding “What a catalogue of new books all this year, all this age (I say), have our Frankfort marts, our domestic marts, brought out!” “Amongst so many thousand authors,” the melancholic scholar concludes, “you shall scarce fi nd one, by reading of whom you shall be any whit better, but rather much worse, quibus inficitur potius, quam perficitur, by which he is rather infected than any way perfected.”12 The epidemic of books is also a breeding ground for error, the monster incarnate in Book 1 of The Faerie Queene: Therewith she spewd out of her filthy maw A floud of poyson horrible and blacke . . .

Plague and Metaphor 223 Her vomit full of bookes and papers was, With loathly frogs and toades, which eyes did lacke.13 Error’s “deadly stinke,” her spawn “as blacke as inke” (likened to the creatures thought to emerge spontaneously from the ooze of the overflowing Nile, and again to a “cloud of combrous gnattes”), as well as the frogs and toads mixed in her vomit with the detritus of the press, Burton’s “put[r]id papers”—all these associations do more than conjure up the fetid atmosphere of the plague (1.1.21, 23). They ask us to imagine that the epidemic of error is to be traced back to the print medium that engenders it. Error’s monstrous compatriot in Faerie, the slanderous Blatant Beast of Book 6, is “sent forth” into “this wicked world” to be “the plague and scourge of wretched men” (6.1.8). The Beast, like the press, can be neither muzzled nor chained. It will perhaps be objected that there is nothing exceptional about plague metaphors within the domain of figurative expression. Other sorts of baneful metaphor have an equally Girardian “vitality” and a like ability to attach their force to “other things.” Early modern divines preaching on the pestilence, for example, would conventionally invoke the two other members of the apocalyptic trio of afflictions, war and famine. If the age could speak metaphorically of the “paper warres in Paules Church-yard,” or of men who have “no famine of Natures gifts and blessings”14 what special claims, if any, can be made for metaphors spun off from the plague? It might be argued further that the web of language is so thoroughly suffused with metaphors dead, alive, and moribund (such as “web” and “suffused”) that the very distinction between the literal and metaphoric is an artifact of the rhetorical tradition rather than an analytic tool for untangling the strands by which words are interconnected. The close weave of language itself calls into question the assumption that plague metaphors could be, or in Girard’s argument, already have been, cut loose from their literal fabric. To return to the case in point, the same early modern divines would trace the lineage of the (literal) word “plague” not to the Greek “loimos” but to the Greek “plaga,” meaning a “blow” or “stripe.” This derivation might appear, to us, as a metaphor suggesting the sudden and violent onset of the disease, or, to put the word in its theological context, it might indicate that the afflicted are “struck down” for their sins. As most of us no longer regard epidemic disease as the instrument of divine vengeance, we would take this latter sense of “plague” as a metaphor, but our forbears understood it as terrifyingly literal. In the sections below, I wish to consider four features of plague language that ask us to probe the boundary between the literal and the metaphoric: metaphor as an Aristotelian “alien”; metaphor as a Baconian lens; “disease” as itself a metaphor; and the metaphor of a digital “plague.” These features are especially prominent if not unique to the metaphorics of epidemic disease; to the extent that they are not unique, they prove to be

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symptomatic of the operation of metaphor as such. I close with a coda on the toxic interplay among plague, politics, and geography today.

Metaphor as an Aristotelian “Alien” For Aristotle, metaphor (in Butcher’s translation) is “the application of an alien name by transference” (Poetics 21, 1457b9–16 and 20–22).15 Other translations render this defi nition as “the application to a thing of a name that belongs to something else,” or as “the application of a strange term.” Aristotle’s word for “alien” or “strange” is allotriou (from allotrios, different, of or belonging to another.) Earlier in the same passage Aristotle distinguishes “current” from “strange words” (glotta): By a current or proper word I mean one which is in general use among a people; by a strange word, one which is in use in another country. Plainly, therefore, the same word may be at once strange and current, but not in relation to the same people. Metaphor requires the carrying-over of a strange term—the term of the stranger, the word used properly (that is, literally) in another place or another linguistic domain but not here. Its juncture with our “proper” term creates a kind of conceptual polyglot of the familiar and the alien. What is “strange” or “current” (that is, metaphoric or literal) depends, therefore, on which side of the border we stand. Metaphor not only carries words across logical categories but across geographical frontiers as, in both senses, words migrate from one realm to another. Although Aristotle calls the proper use of metaphor a mark of genius, he also cautions that it can be abused in argument by an opponent (Topics 4:2). The figure thus carries the whiff of impropriety, importing another(s) language in a way that, in the hands of the unscrupulous, threatens to undermine logic. We might describe the plague in these terms, as a pathogenic foreign agent transferred into a realm where it “properly” does not belong; or, alternatively, improper metaphor as a plague of language. To do so would be to speak improperly from a place between the metaphorics of plague and the literality of metaphor; but metaphor itself literally allows us to make the transference. Indeed, as a way of breaching the divide between “a supposed primary, literal, use [of a word] and other deviant ones” in Aristotle’s writings on health and disease, the historian of ancient medicine G.E.R. Lloyd uses the term “semantic stretch” to describe the philosopher’s practice.16

Metaphor as a Baconian Lens Certain phenomena in our experience are “in themselves” invisible unless put (metaphorically) under the lens of metaphor. It was Francis Bacon’s

Plague and Metaphor 225 dream, pursued in earnest by Wilkins and ultimately parodied by Swift, to pare down the language of natural philosophy to a one-to-one correspondence between the things of the world and the working vocabulary of the investigator. The errors stemming from the use of imprecise figurative language to name the literal objects of the philosopher’s study—errors Bacon traces back to Aristotle—he terms the “diseases” and “peccant humors” of discourse.17 His cure would involve pruning back the excrescences of language to the literal root, in effect a campaign to extirpate metaphor. But Bacon also goes on to argue that if the fruits of the investigator’s discovery are to be “infused and pressed upon the mind of the learner,” we must “of necessity have recourse to simile and metaphor, the better to enter the human capacity” (174). Thanks to the invention of the lens, the Yersinia pestis bacterium can now be seen (albeit as an image projected on the microscope eyepiece or on the computer screen). As in this instance the work of representation has shifted from poesis to pictura, so there would appear to be less need for metaphor to transfer the literality of the organism into the form of language and so accommodate it to our capacity. But if the technology of magnification has in the case of many (but not all) disease organisms supplanted the technology of metaphor in carrying the object across the gap of visibility, many other things in the world remain invisible to the eye and the understanding alike, except insofar as they may be represented by the language of higher mathematics, and so grasped, or at least intuited, by only the trained and/or gifted few. A short list would, at the moment, include such phenomena as quarks and mesons, dark matter, five (or eleven) dimensions, saddle shaped or multiple universes, and black holes, all of which are apprehensible in ordinary language only through metaphor. The black hole is a strange metaphor—an antiphor so to speak, because the thing itself is neither black (it emits no light) nor a hole (but a massively dense object). Rather, the name indicates our own inability to name the thing otherwise than by transference to what it is not. The black hole, metaphorically, is the hole in our understanding. Macroscopically or microscopically, the greater the distance to be traversed between the knower and the unknown, the greater the need for metaphor to make the “strange” more “common.” I pause over the black hole not only because it represents the limits of the metaphoric lens in an extreme case in the realm of astrophysics, but also because trauma theory fi nds it an apt term for the inaccessible and unspeakable kernel that can persist for survivors in the wake of genocide, tsunami, war, and pandemic disease.18 Its content otherwise inaccessible to the one who harbors it, this black hole manifests itself in other terms, whether through the metaphorics of dreams, evasive speech (including the antiphoric refusal to speak, a metaphorical silence), or psychosomatic symptoms of dis-ease.

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“Disease” as a Metaphor I have mentioned earlier that the word “plague” itself is improper when taken back to its Greek root: the word already carries over the metaphorical sense of a “blow” and as such refers to the effect of the plague rather than to the thing itself. Arguably, the word “disease” itself is a metaphor of the same sort. Its earliest meaning recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary is the “Absence of ease; uneasiness, discomfort; inconvenience, annoyance; disquiet, disturbance.” It is in this broader sense, referring again not to the disease itself but metaphorically by transference to the victim’s experience of unease, that Ben Jonson uses the word in “To Heaven”: “Is it interpreted in me disease, / That, laden with my sinnes, I seeke for ease?”19 Jonson fears that the “disease” lies in the search for its alleviation and is itself the object of an “interpretation” put on it by the God whose presence the poet cannot bring himself to doubt (or believe). Insofar as, for Jonson, “disease” is the opposite of “ease” (but leaving open the possibility that ease can be found in disease), the thing we call disease seems broad enough to include our entire uneasy human condition. It is in this sense that Montaigne had approved the fi rst lesson Mexicans teach their children: “Child, you have come into the world to endure; endure, suffer, and keep quiet,” and observed that we do not die because we are ill but because we are alive. 20 For Donne there can be no disease in the strict sense because There is no health; Physitians say that wee, At best, enjoy but a neutralitie, And can there bee worse sicknesse, then to know That we are never well, nor can be so?21 Having survived the plague epidemic of 1603 at this writing (the “First Anniversarie,” about a girl who had died of some unknown disease), and himself seldom well in his later years, Donne fi nds the worst sickness in the knowledge of our parlous condition in the world and, correspondingly, the best therapy in our expectation of the grace that will remove us from it. What we may (want to) think of as strange or alien is in fact our common lot. Donne’s “neutralitie” collapses the distinction between sickness and health in a way that prompts us to rethink (the pejorative metaphor of) “disease” as, rather, our name for a natural process common to—indeed, essential for—the existence of life on this planet. As I have argued in like manner elsewhere, in the terms of an evolutionary biologist, the very origin of complex cellular life can be characterized as a process of adaptation to disease. 22 “Prokaryotic” bacteria (that is, those lacking a nucleus) evolved into “eukaryotic” bacteria (nucleated cells), and the building blocks of all

Plague and Metaphor 227 more advanced forms of life (like us) between 1.6 and 2.1 billion years ago, when these more primitive forms were invaded by viruses and other smaller particles that took up residence in the host organism. This same symbiotic ecology on a much larger scale facilitates the digestion of our food, which feeds a healthy supply of bacteria in our gut before we ourselves can take nourishment from the leavings of their repast. Resident bacteria also help produce certain vitamins such as vitamin K, riboflavin, and panthothenic acid. These bacteria become agents of peritoneal disease only if a breach in the digestive system unleashes a transmural plague—the intrasomatic version of a pathogen suddenly fi nding itself able to take advantage of a new ecological niche—allowing these formerly harmless residents to “invade” other parts of the body unacclimated to their presence. A similar, and remarkably benign, symbiosis exists between humans and a single-celled parasite called Toxoplasma gondii. This organism infects more than half the people on the globe, including more than fifty million Americans. Its remarkable success seems due to its having negotiated a modus vivendi with its host population. We harbor it, often in the brain and for the rest of our lives, without ever being aware of its presence. It generally does us no harm. Whether it does us any good has not yet been established. Except for individuals whose compromised immune systems disrupt the otherwise peaceful coexistence between our Toxoplasma and ourselves, their presence in the body is an “infection” only in the technical—or rather, the metaphorical—sense of the word, becoming a literal infection only when it causes havoc by crossing over the boundary into an improper space. At a higher order of magnitude, the endemic codependency between our bodies and their domesticated intestinal bacteria also defines our relationship as a species to the herds and flocks that supply our animal protein. Again, the proximity of man and animal, and the digestive processes that work to the mutual advantage of both (we feed them, they feed us), also facilitates the exchange of pathogens. Toxoplasma is transmitted to humans through undercooked meats as well as by way of the litter boxes of our pet cats. As Jared Diamond has written, and as the recent examples of “mad cow disease” and “bird flu” demonstrate, infectious disease in humans very likely originated (from our point of view, rather than that of the pathogens who thereby pioneer their own new vectors of communicability) as a toxic byproduct of the interspecial partnership between humans and animals formed millennia ago.23 To invoke the familiar anthropological distinction between the raw and the cooked: just as an uncultivated alien plant becomes known as a “weed” when it threatens (that is, moves in among) the “flowers” properly in our garden, so the semantic distinction between pathogenic and eugenic processes dissolves into a vast, interdependent ecosystem, one whose imbalances and readjustments, benefits and calamities alike, are the paradigm of life on every scale, and not a violation of its rules. There is no reason to believe it can ever be otherwise.

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Digital “Plagues,” “Digital” Plagues Of all the newly recognized agents of disease making headlines today, perhaps the most interesting as a test case for metaphor is the prion. Prions occur naturally in the mammalian brain and seem to have some beneficial function. “Rogue” prions, however, cause bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle and Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (CJD, or “mad cow” disease) in humans who ingest contaminated beef. The ritual practice, now ceased, of eating the brains of their deceased relatives made the Fore people of New Guinea susceptible to the prion disease kuru. Remarkably, these pathogens are nothing more than bits of protein, which is to say that unlike bacteria or viruses they lack nuclei, DNA, and RNA and are therefore incapable of genetic reproduction. Prions, in other words, are not alive. Rogue prions do their work by locking in to the structure of their normal counterparts and rearranging them physically into abnormal clusters by a process similar to that of crystalline replication. The result is a neurodegenerative disease that does its irreparable damage by forming plaques in the brain and turning healthy neural tissue into a spongy mass. Biological agents other than viruses or bacteria—parasites, for example—can cause contagious neurological disease in humans. Inorganic substances such as lead can produce the same symptoms, although of course without contagion. But the existence of an organic but nonliving infectious and contagious pathogen blurs these distinctions. Rogue prions are communicable through food; they increase and multiply (albeit nongenetically); and they cause devastating illness that, symptomatically, is difficult to distinguish from encephalitis. But can they therefore properly be called infectious? The question arises in the scientific literature itself when one fi nds research papers in the field putting “infectious” between quotation marks as if to signal that in the case of prions, using the word literally would be an example of Lloyd’s “semantic stretch.”24 Arguably, such is the tendency of language; the scare quotes will disappear and the domain of literal infections—now defi ned functionally, rather than by the nature of the agent—will expand to include prions. This kind of reliteralization has already happened in the case of computer viruses. The havoc wrought today by computer viruses (infiltrating the system through the vectors of spam, bots, and phish) perhaps reproduces the inky “floud of poison” spewed out by Spenser’s monster, albeit by means of an updated technology. The dark side of the Gutenberg revolution glimpsed by those who, during the era of early modern plagues, saw in it a monster of uncontrolled replication and an engine for the multiplication of error foreshadows a digital plague breeding, as it now reappears, in the machinery (and in the air) of the internet. Then as now, anxiety over the insidious spread of epidemic disease meets a technology capable of widespread dissemination at the border between the metaphoric and the literal. In a recent warning symptomatic of such a liaison, the wire services reported that an alarm-

Plague and Metaphor 229 ing number of high-tech gizmos manufactured in China—iPods, digital picture frames, and GPS navigation devices—were “infected, fresh out of the box.”25 We learn that this epidemic (coincidentally, imported from the country last reported to have a major outbreak of the plague, in 1905) is the “digital equivalent” of the spate of “tainted products traced to China, including toxic toothpaste, poisonous pet food, and toy trains coated in lead paint.” Yossi Sheffi, a professor at MIT, is quoted as saying that all these “tainted” products are “exactly the same thing, whether it happened in cyberspace or software or lead paint or toothpaste or dog food.” In the course of the article the human and the digital are further conflated into the “same thing” as pathogenic agents along an undifferentiated vector of infection: “If the testing computer is infected—say by a worker who used it to charge his own infected iPod—the digital germ can spread to anything else that gets plugged in.” The fi nal warning seems to contain a grammatical error of the sort we are cautioned to avoid in composition handbooks, but one that even now passes almost unnoticed: “Thousands of people whose antivirus software isn’t up to date may have been unknowingly infected by these new products, experts warn.” If a nonbiological substance like the prion can infect humans (without the aptly named “scare” quotes), the question posed for metaphor by this last example is whether a nonbiological virus can be properly said to infect “thousands of people” in addition to, and by means of, the digital products they use. Can we literally apply plague language to human and nonhuman systems alike? The question acknowledges that both theoretically and through a host of emerging technologies the gap between human (that is, “natural” or literal) and “artificial” (that is, metaphoric) forms of intelligence is narrowing.26 The same question is further complicated when we read that “Bacteria have been programmed to behave like computers, assembling themselves into complex shapes based on instructions stuffed into their genes.”27 Using E. coli bacteria, researchers have (by means of computers) genetically engineered biological products that can store data in a process that might eventually “be used to direct the construction of useful devices or the growth of new tissue, perhaps restoring function to a severed spinal cord.” Inserted into the body to carry out their programmed task by modifying cells according to their own imbedded instructions, these bacteria infect the recipient, although now for the benefit of the host. That such biological products are said to “behave like computers” is a form of the metaphoric scare quote, but in the near future that qualification, too, is likely to disappear. A computer virus, as conventionally described (in Wikipedia) is a computer program that can copy itself and infect a computer without permission or knowledge of the user. The original virus may modify the copies, or the copies may modify themselves, as occurs in a metamorphic virus. A virus can only spread from one computer to another when its host is taken to the uninfected computer, for instance by a user sending it over a network

230 Ernest B. Gilman or the Internet, or by carrying it on a removable medium such as a floppy disk, CD, or USB drive. Meanwhile viruses can spread to other computers by infecting files on a network file system or a file system that is accessed by another computer. I suggested earlier that we might try the thought experiment of defining infectious disease functionally rather than by the nature of the pathogenic agent. If viruses can replicate and even evolve or somehow modify themselves; if they can spread from a host to infect many unwitting victims without permission; and if, furthermore, a runaway viral epidemic can threaten whole nations with massive economic, political, and psychological damage—then why are we not justified in calling a “plague” a plague whether the agent is the Y. pestis bacterium, the E. coli bacterium, HIV, the prion, or the electron? None of the digital plagues on this list has as yet been responsible for great numbers of deaths. But it would be safe to say there is a nonzero chance that at some point in the future they might pose a very real threat, even as public health officials warn that new pandemics of flu or other scourges are almost inevitable. A batch of computerized E. coli gone rogue could spark an iatrogenic epidemic. The smallpox virus still cached in loosely regulated laboratories in Russia and elsewhere could fall into the hands of would-be bioterrorists, with devastating effect. And just as computer viruses have already breached the defenses of corporate and government databases by accident or nefarious design, a virus could infect the computer systems regulating a nuclear power plant, an electrical grid, or a municipal water supply. If, for Sontag, “the disease itself becomes a metaphor,” then the metaphor (the “virus”) can become a disease, on the principle that the Aristotelian transference works in both directions. The viral anxieties provoked by the second Gutenberg revolution recapitulate the pestilential anxieties provoked by the fi rst. Once all the quotation marks have disappeared, plague and cyberplague, viruses and “viruses” will be rhetorically indistinguishable and, if we are unlucky, epidemiologically indistinguishable as well.

Coda: From Metaphor to Litaphor My concluding meditation will circle back to an earlier example of the transference between the plague and its representations, and then more forward to a very contemporary instance of a viral medium in the “world” of online computer gaming. In the early fall of 1664, H.F., Daniel Defoe’s fictional chronicler in A Journal of the Plague Year, “heard in ordinary discourse” that the plague had broken out in Holland—carried there, “some say,” from Italy or the Levant, while “others said” it came from Candia, and still “others” from Cyprus.28 At a moment of heightened anxiety about the likely spread of the disease to England, these conflicting rumors, we are led momentarily to suppose, might have been quelled by a more reliable

Plague and Metaphor 231 source of information: “We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days” (23). But like the Internet today, the new technology of print journalism, whose advent H.F. lives to witness, serves only “to spread rumours and reports of things, and to improve upon them by the invention of men.” Although Defoe is himself an industrious journalist, the comment acknowledges the viral effect of the new technology. In an earlier day, as H.F. explains, “such things as these were gathered from the letters of merchants and others who corresponded abroad, and from them was handed about by word of mouth only,” but now such things “spread instantly over the whole nation” (23). Of course, all is grist for the Internet mill as for the print journalist’s, but Defoe’s language implies a closer alliance—a kind of metaphoric crosscontamination—between the spread of the word and the communication of infectious disease, starting at the base level of neighborhood gossip. For a time, H.F. reports, “this rumor died off again, and people began to forget it as a thing we were very little concerned in,” until later in the winter, word of the fi rst London plague deaths “had gotten some vent in the discourse of the neighborhood” (23). When for the moment no people “died off,” the rumor did; and the “thing” that died off hovers in Defoe’s uncertain grammar between denoting the rumor and the plague. Soon enough, “it” comes to life again as people began to die, with the attendant threat that its being “vent” in the discourse of the neighborhood would surely presage its appearance in fact if the contagion were to vent from one neighbor to the next (whether hand to hand, mouth to mouth, or by the air alone). Perhaps if there had been printed newspapers “in those days,” the word would have spread more rapidly beyond the neighborhood, infecting the whole nation with apprehension as the fi rst symptom of the disease following in its path. As it was, the breaking news of plague deaths parish by parish was posted in the weekly Bills of Mortality, and it was in these tabulations, as if more legibly than on the bodies of the afflicted, that “the thing began to show itself” (27). 29 Defoe’s own “account” of the Great Plague not only incorporates these documents and thus seeks to preserve a durable record of those who died; it also offers itself implicitly as a kind of prophylactic against the false or misleading words of rumor, communicated orally and disseminated in print. At the time of Defoe’s writing, in 1722, another outbreak in England seemed imminent, and Defoe positioned his narrator as one who had sifted through the documents and rumors of the past to offer his readers the “direction to . . . act by” (29) in the event of a future outbreak. With the H1N1 virus now ratcheting up the level of what has become our annual panic over the eruption—inevitable, as many experts believe— of a respiratory virus as devastating as the flu pandemic of 1918, it would be easy enough to fi nd examples of viral video and paranoid websites as the postmodern counterpart of the H.F’s early modern rumor mills. These range from harmless if tasteless parodies of medical advisories claiming to be from the CDC (the cartoon character “Burt Flu” teaches children never

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to lick a dead bird, “even though it’s fun!” for example)30 to alarmist squibs revealing lethal conspiracies behind public health policies. The website “Dangerous, Deadly H1N1Vaccine Scam”31 warns that “The World Health Organization (WHO) is spreading propaganda like the flu to convince people new, genetically engineered, live ‘mock’ influenza viruses in vaccines are safe,” and it likens the flu vaccine to “weapons of mass destruction like nerve gas” or “nuclear bombs.” When the website asks us to believe that “genocidal” vaccines cause “unnatural pandemics of cancer and flu” as well as “diseases like AIDS and Guillain-Barre,” it unwittingly reanimates a fantasy rampant during early modern Italian plague outbreaks, according to which unseen untori or “anointers” were suspected of daubing some noxious contagion on door handles and public benches. 32 Arguably, spreading such “viral” disinformation as a metaphorical adjunct to a literal virus could have very real, nondigital effects on human health if more than a few people were actually persuaded to refuse the H1N1 vaccine. Perhaps the more interesting recent example of a digital plague is provided by a project designed to use online video gaming as a means of studying people’s behavior during real epidemics. As reported on National Public Radio’s “On the Media,” Massively multiplayer online games are able to store reams of data about their avatars’ every transaction. It turns out this information can serve as a model for real-world concepts, such as economics. Dmitri Williams, assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, is part of a group of researchers who believe that they can get better information about our public predilections than polls can provide, through these massively multiplayer online games, even in a realm of elves, dwarves, ogres and trolls. He argues that recording every single action by the human-controlled characters in EverQuest II is better than any study conducted offline.33 In the broadcast, Williams reports on one such study that, from his point of view, turned out to be a failure: A couple years ago in the very popular online world, World of Warcraft, there was an incident called the Ironforge Plague. And so, what happened was you had an epidemiological event going on, where people were infecting each other from person-to-person around the city. And epidemiologists thought, wow, what a great way to study disease vectors. It would be, except that the behaviors in the virtual world are very different than the offline world, in this respect: The risks of death and the feeling of pain don’t map from A to B. So you wouldn’t want to look at people’s virtual behavior in that sense and say, oh, that tells us how people are going to behave in a disease outbreak. It wouldn’t,

Plague and Metaphor 233 because in a disease outbreak you don’t run around cackling with glee and trying to kill your friends. What, then, does “map” from A to B—from a plague in the virtual World of Warcraft to a plague in the offline world—or indeed from B to A? The possible connection between the two—their mutual capacity for a kind of metaphoric transference—is no less intriguing for all the researchers’ disappointment. Is virtual behavior in fact free of the feeling of pain? And if free of the risk or death, then it might be noted that even if a real epidemic today had a ten percent mortality rate in a given population (itself an estimate on the high side), the risk of any one person dying would only be one in ten. Nor is it clear from the example as reported whether the homicidal cackling is provoked by the game itself (one thinks of Bobby Fisher’s pleasure in “killing” his opponents in chess), or whether the urge to kill “your friends” becomes more irresistible when your “world” is affl icted with the Ironforge plague. The vector leading from nondigital epidemics to nondigital killing sprees is clearly charted in the historical record of the widespread massacres of Jews in Germany at the time of the Black Death.34 Would those exposed to the terrors of virtual survival during the Ironforge plague be more or less prone to violence if they were afterwards exposed to the real thing? They might be less prone if it could be shown that the Ironforge epidemic worked like an Aristotelian purgative, or in updated terms like a virtual inoculation, fortifying gamers against real-world violence, and thus functioning as the digital avatar of the nonlethal (and in this sense, virtual) pathogenic agent in a real vaccine. It would then serve a purpose like that which Defoe envisions for the Journal as a virtual replicant of the plague of 1665–66, intended as a set of directions (or gaming instructions) in the case of an actual recurrence. These and other questions about Ironforge arise from, and would need to be addressed within, a conceptual space that suspends the law of noncontradiction between A and B, regarding them as separately conjoined realms of human experience, and defi ning an encompassing game AB. The exercise must be left for the moment to the game theorists, but if we agree to defi ne A as the metaphorical and B as its literal referent, we will have returned to themes of this essay, and of this book. I have been interested in the liminal playing field that might be defi ned, for future reference in an increasingly AB age, as the space of the litaphorical.

Notes I am grateful to Drs. Michael Rampino and Jennie Votava for vetting the scientific and medical information in this essay. 1 Rene Girard, To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 138.

234 Ernest B. Gilman 2 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors (New York and London: Doubleday, 1990), 58. 3 Aristotle. Poetics, tr. S.H. Butcher (London and New York: Macmillan, 1898), 21: 1457b9–16. 4 Associated Press, “Some new electronic gadgets come loaded with viruses,” Dallas News, March 15, 2008, available online at http://www.dallasnews. com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/ptech/stories/031508dnbusvirus.39b0fee.html (accessed October 3, 2009). 5 Thus, the preacher Henoch Clapham: The word DEBER in proper English The Pestilence, they turne by the Greeke word Logos in English The Word; as if in the text it were not DEBER but DABAR, this indeed signifying a Word; and the very terme, that Saint John in his fi rst chapter doth giue vnto the Son of God, by whom as by a Word, the Creature had his beginning and being Henoch Clapham his demaundes and answeres (London, 1604), sig. B1r.

6 7 8

9

10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17

For more on this etymology and its significance, see Ernest B. Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), especially chapter 2. “A Plague on Borh Your Houses: Independent Commenary on Politics and News,” available online at http://aplagueonbothyourhouses.typepad.com/ (accessed October 13, 2009). For more on Girardian theory and early modern plague writing, see the essay by Matthew Thiele in this volume. For more on the dates of plague outbreaks, see the introduction to this collection. The last large-scale epidemic occurred in China in 1905. The locale is significant twice over: fi rst, as the putative origin of the Black Death in the west, and second, as the epidemic that provided Alexander Yersin with the material that allowed him to isolate the plague bacterium that still bears his name, Yersinia pestis. See Paul Slack for the authoritative account of this dismal chapter in epidemiological history: The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985; reprint Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). For more on Shakespeare’s use of plague-related terminology, see the essay by Paula Berggren in this collection. All references to the works of Shakespeare will cite The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. G Blakemore Evans (New York: Houghton Miffl in Harcourt, 1997). For more on the dramatic atmosphere and its miasmic quality, see Nichole DeWall’s essay in this volume. Dekker, The Wonderful Year, in The Plague Pamphlets of Thomas Dekker, ed. F.P. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 3. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (New York: Random House, 1932), 23–24. Cited from Edmund Spenser, The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Edmund Spenser, ed. Alesxander Grosart (London, 1882), available online at http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/fqintro.html (accessed November 7, 2009), 1.1.20. OED, s.v. “War,” 3b; OED, s.v. “Famine,” 2. Aristotle, Poetics, in Butcher, 21, 1457b9–16 and 20–22. G.E.R Lloyd, In the Grip of Disease: Studies in the Greek Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 8–10. Sir Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning, in Advancement of Learning and Novum Organum, ed. James Edward Creighton (1899), 20.

Plague and Metaphor 235 18 For more on trauma, black holes, and plague language see Gilman (55, 236–39). 19 Ben Jonson, eds. Charles H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 8:122. 20 “On Experience,” in Michel de Montaigne, Complete Essays, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 835. 21 The Poems of John Donne, ed. by Herbert J.C. Grierson. 2 vols. (1912. Reprint,Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), “The First Anniversary,” 1:234, lines 91–94. 22 On this discussion of prokaryotic bacteria and symbiosis, see Gilman, Plague Writing, 40–42. 23 Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1997), 195–214. 24 “Prions are ‘infectious’ isoforms of normal proteins that are capable of reproducing themselves by converting a normal protein, encoded by the same gene, into a prion”: Andrey S. Borchsenius, Renee D. Wegrzyn, Gary P. Newnam, Sergey G. Inge-Vechtomov, and Yury O. Chernoff, “Yeast prion protein derivative defective in aggregate shearing and production of new ‘seeds,’” in the journal of the European Molecular Biology Organization, EMBO J. 20 (2001), 6683, available online at http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid = 125771 (accesses April 13, 2008). 25 Jordan Robinson, “Secret Bonus: Virus,” The Associated Press, cited from The Dallas Morning News, March 15, 2008, D1-D2, available online at http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/ptech/stories/031508dn busvirus.39b0fee.html (accessed November 7, 2009). 26 On this growing field of techno-human study and its applications in early modern studies, please see, for example Eve Keller, Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves: The Rhetoric of Reproduction in Early Modern England (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2007); and Adam Max Cohen, Technology and the Early Modern Self (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 27 Robert Roy Britt, “Scientists Make Bacteria Behave Like Computers,” available at http://www.livescience.com/technology/050428_bacteria_computer. html (accessed April 13, 2008). 28 Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, eds. Anthony Burgess and Christopher Bristow (New York: Penguin, 1986). Subsequent page references to the Journal refer to this edition. 29 For more on the bills, see Erin Sullivan’s essay in this volume. 30 “Burt Flu,” on YouTube, available online at http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v = 5PfvbuV0UYo (accessed November 7, 2009). 31 “Dangerous, Deadly H1N1Vaccine Scam,” available online at http://www. rense.com/general87/scam.htm (accessed November 7, 2009). On the humorous side, see the following swine flu songs: “Swine Flu Song,” available online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = tbt_PuVAVTU (accessed November 11, 2009), and “Swine Flu Theme Song ‘Put my Mask On’ Spoof of Soulja Boy,” available online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = EM7OjpQVouo (accessed November 11, 2009). 32 Trials of persons thus suspected during the Italian plague epidemic of 1630 are published in Processo originale degli untori nella peste del M.D.C.XXX., (Milan: Triufi , 1839). 33 “Game Theory,” broadcast on October 10, 2009, transcript available online at http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/10/16/07 (accessed November 7, 2009).

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Ernest B. Gilman

34 The history of these systematic “legal” exterminations is to be found in Samuel K Cohn, Jr., Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200–1425 (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2006).

Notes on Contributors

Paula S. Berggren is Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY. A graduate of Barnard College with a Ph.D. from Yale University, she has written numerous articles and conference papers on Shakespeare and Renaissance drama, with an emphasis on heroines in disguise and spatial imagery in the early modern theater—among them, “The Woman’s Part: Female Sexuality as Power in Shakespeare’s Plays,” which appears in the oft-cited collection, The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (1984), edited by Lenz, Greene, and Neely. Berggren is also author of Teaching with The Norton Anthology of World Literature, now in its second edition (2002), and supervises two undergraduate programs: a multi-section required course in Great Works of World Literature and an endowed interdisciplinary seminar in the humanities. With the support of various grants, she has developed instructional software for the teaching of culturally diverse texts and participated in the Visible Knowledge Project, a multi-year inquiry into ways in which technology can enhance student learning and literacy, especially in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Nichole DeWall is Assistant Professor of English at McKendree University, where she teaches medieval and early modern literature, as well as Introduction to Drama and composition courses. With an M.A. from University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a Ph.D. from Northeastern University, DeWall has presented at several national and international conferences on topics ranging from medicine in Shakespeare’s plays to ritual and sexuality in Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II and feminism and Ophelia in Hamlet. She recently presented “The Jailer’s Daughter as Ariadne in Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen” at the International Society for Studies in Medievalism; participated in a seminar at the Shakespeare Society of America conference at Georgetown University; and is completing a monograph entitled Shakespeare and the Plague: Trauma, Medicine, and Theatrical Healing in Early Modern England. Ernest B. Gilman is Professor of English at New York University and Director of the NYU Summer in London Program. He received his Ph.D. in

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English and comparative literature from Columbia University and is the author of Plague Writing in Early Modern England (2009), in which he argues that plague writing of the seventeenth century attempted unsuccessfully to rationalize the catastrophic and that its failure to account for the plague as an instrument of divine justice fundamentally threatened the core of Christian belief. Gilman also trains his critical eye on the works of Jonson, Donne, Pepys, and Defoe, which, he posits, can be more fully understood when put into the context of this century-long project to “write out” the plague. He is also author of three books in the field of literary and visual culture: The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth Century (1978), Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (1986), and Recollecting the Arundel Circle: Discovering the Past, Recovering the Future (2002). William Kerwin is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he teaches English Renaissance and modern Irish literature. Having earned an M.A. from the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College and a Ph.D. from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he is the author of Beyond the Body: The Boundaries of Medicine and English Renaissance Drama (2005), part of the University of Massachusetts series Studies in Early Modern Culture. In this book, Kerwin considers the two related subjects of medical instability and Renaissance drama; medical stories are always also social stories, and Kerwin presents five case studies of how the fragile and dynamic relationship between the medical and the nonmedical played out in Renaissance England. Editor of Brian Friel: A Casebook (1997), a collection of 13 essays interpreting the work of Ireland’s famous playwright, Kerwin is currently working on a book project entitled Rough-Hewed Rimes: Poetic Forms and Historical Change in English Renaissance Satire, for which the Folger Shakespeare Library awarded him a 2006–7 short-term fellowship. James D. Mardock is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nevada, where he teaches early modern literature. With an M.A. in Shakespeare Studies from the Shakespeare Institute and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, he has published articles on John Taylor the water poet, Ben Jonson’s city comedy, and Dickens’s responses to Shakespeare. In his recent book, Our Scene is London: Ben Jonson’s City and the Space of the Author (2007), Mardock discusses Jonson’s employment of civic space as an authorial strategy, focusing in chapter four on Jonson’s “plague year plays.” Mardock is currently at work on critical editions of Henry V (forthcoming from Broadview Press) and of the works of Robert Armin (with Richard Preiss). He is an assistant textual editor for the Internet Shakespeare Editions and serves as the dramaturge for the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival.

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Richelle Munkhoff is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. With an M.A. and Ph.D. from University of Wisconsin-Madison, she is the author of the groundbreaking article “Searchers of the Dead: Authority, Marginality, and the Interpretation of Plague in England, 1574–1665” (1999). Munkhoff’s most recent article “Reckoning Death: Women Searchers and the Bills of Mortality in Early Modern London” (forthcoming in The Rhetoric of Bodily Disease and Health: Medieval and Early Modern Essays) and her current book-length projects extend this research: Parish Poetics: Reading, Space, and Women in Early Modern England examines the representation of women in parish archives, and Searchers of the Dead: Women, Public Health, and the Bills of Mortality in England, c.1550–1850 is a study of the role of older women in parish public health from sixteenth-century plague epidemics to early nineteenthcentury cholera outbreaks. A participant in the 2009 NEH Summer Seminar “Disease in the Middle Ages,” she also has an article on professional identity and hurricane Katrina in Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation (Spring 2009). Kelly J. Stage is Assistant Professor in the English Department at Ripon College, where she specializes in early modern English literature. A graduate of Harvard University with an M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University, her article, “The Roaring Girl’s London Spaces,” appears in Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 (Spring 2009), and she has presented on Jonson, Middleton, and Dekker at conferences of the Renaissance Society of America, Shakespeare Association of America, and the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies. Currently, Stage is completing an article on legal space and theatrical publics for Making Publics Volume 2: Publics and Space, edited by Angela Vanhaelen and Joseph P. Ward. She is also at work on a book project, Producing Early Modern London: City, Theater, Space, in which she examines early modern London theaters and urban dramas as remaking and manipulating the practices and processes of the city and its social spaces. Erin Sullivan is a Ph.D. candidate and recipient of the Roy Porter Memorial Studentship at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London. Her thesis, “Secret Contagions: Sadness and the Self in Early Modern England,” focuses on the understanding and experience of sadness in early modern England, as expressed in medical, religious, and moral philosophical discourses. She received her M.A. from the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, while studying on a Fulbright fellowship, and she now contributes to a module on medicine in literature as part of UCL’s M.A. in the history of medicine. She has published an essay on “Medicine, Melancholy, and the Arts” in The Lancet and an article on “Anti-Bardolotry through the Ages—Or, Why Voltaire,

240 Notes on Contributors Tolstoy, Shaw, and Wittgenstein Didn’t Like Shakespeare” for UCL’s interdisciplinary journal, Opticon1826. She is an author on medical entries for Blackwell’s forthcoming Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature and is a regular reviewer for Medical History, Cahiers Élisabéthains, and History of the Human Sciences. Matthew Thiele is a Ph.D. candidate at Auburn University, where he teaches Composition and World Literature, has served as Co-chair of the English Graduate Association, and is currently writing his dissertation, a project titled Invisible Tokens: Staging Cultural Anxieties about the Plague in Shakespeare and Jonson, which is an examination of the bubonic plague as a literal phenomenon in early modern England and as a figurative presence in early modern drama. In this research, Thiele offers new readings of the plays of Jonson and Shakespeare in their plague-time contexts by showing their preoccupation with period-specific plague themes such as urban fl ight, reproduction anxiety, and confi nement. With a B.A. from The College of William and Mary and an M.A. from the University of Virginia, Thiele won a 2005 Academy of American Poets Prize for his collection of poems, The Great Depression. As a member of the 2009 Shakespeare Association of America Seminar “Shakespeare at the Limits of the Human,” directed by Jean Feerick and Holly Tucker, he contributed “‘The dwarf, the fool, the eunuch are all his’: Reproduction and Plague in Volpone.” Rebecca Totaro is Professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast University; author of Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton (2005), an examination of the hope born out of plague-time and displayed in literature; and editor of The Plague in Print: Essential Elizabethan Sources, 1558–1603 (2010), a collection of interdisciplinary plague writings transcribed with critical commentary. With an M.A. in Religion from Yale University and a Ph.D. in English from University of Massachusetts, Amherst, she was a member of the Folger Institute Year-Long Colloquium “Vernacular Health and Healing” (2007–8) and held a short-term fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library for her project “Volatile Emissions: Meteorology and Physiology in Early Modern England” (2008–9). Totaro’s essay “Securing Sleep in Hamlet” has recently appeared in Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, and she will co-direct a seminar entitled “‘Must I Remember’?: Trauma and Memory in Early Modern England” for the 2011 World Shakespeare Congress in Prague. Barbara H. Traister is Professor of English and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies at Lehigh University, where she lectures and writes about the literature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, with a focus on drama. With a Ph.D. from Yale, Traister has authored numerous articles on early modern drama, medicine, and magic, and has served

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as scholar in residence at College of Physicians of Philadelphia and at the Medical College of Pennsylvania. Her published books include Heavenly Necromancers: The Magician in English Renaissance Drama (1984) and The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of Simon Forman (2001), the latter including discussion of Forman’s essays on the plague, largely the result of his remaining in London among his patients during the 1592–93 visitation. Traister has held fellowships from the NEH, the Rockefeller Foundation, ACLS, and the Folger Shakespeare Library, and she is author of Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure: An Annotated Bibliography of Shakespeare Studies 1662–2004 (2005). Charles Whitney is Professor of English at University of Las Vegas, where he has taught since 1988 and has served as Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department. With a B.A. in Anthropology from San Francisco State College and a Ph.D. in English from the City University of New York Graduate School, Whitney’s has published articles in Shakespeare Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, Journal of the History of Ideas, Clio, and elsewhere; among articles of note with respect to the current collection are “Appropriate This!” in Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation (Spring 2008) and “Ante-Aesthetics: Toward a Theory of Early Modern Audience Response” in Shakespeare and Modernity, edited by Hugh Grady (Routledge, 2000). Whitney has held NEH, Mellon, Huntington Library, and Folger Shakespeare Library fellowships and is the author of Francis Bacon and Modernity (1986; translated into German, 1989). His recent book, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (2006) won the 2008 Elizabeth Dietz Memorial Award from SEL and Rice University for the best book in Early Modern Studies, and he is the recipient of the 2008 UNLV Barrick Distinguished Scholar Award.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italic indicate an illustration. Fictional characters are indicated by (fict.) following the uninverted name. Abbess (fict.) 142 “Absence of Plague in the The Alchemist,” The (Phillips) 173 accounting, spiritual/economic 20, 56, 89, 94n43, 94n44 Act of 1606 to Restrain Abuses of Players 153 Adamovicz, Jeffrey J. 8, 27n23 Adams, Thomas 87, 93n32, 93n36, adaptive diseases 16, 31n46 Advancement of Learning, The (Bacon) 14 AIDS 15, 32n53, 50, 145, 148n 46, 154, 182n22; see also HIV Alchemist, The (Jonson): discussion of plague in 22, 61, 172; house as focus of plague-time activity 172–73, 177; 133; as prophylactic against plague 173; remedy for plague in 74n47; writing/publication of 172 “alicant” 211, 218n22 All’s Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare) 151 “amazon” 195 “A Medicine to Cure the Plague of a Woman’s Tongue, Experimented on a Cobbler’s Wife” (Dekker) 174, 181n17 anatomy 83–84, 86, 88, 163 Anatomy of Melancholy, The (Burton) 93n35, 140, 148n29, 234n12 Andrews, Gerald P. 8, 27n23 Angelo (fict.) 122–23, 126n10

Angels in America (Kushner) 182n22 anointers 232 antitheatricalists: appropriation of plague-time anxieties 133–36, 146n5, 147n7; closure of theaters and 57; description of self as physicians 136; effect on representations of plague 55, 61; Heywood’s view of 141–42; view of cause/spread of plague 21, 134–35 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare) 52n13, 159, 222 Apemantus (fict.) 152, 153 apocalyptic images and ideas 8, 46, 210, 223 Apology for Poetry, An (Sidney) 142 “Appropriate This” (Whitney) see Whitney appropriation 15-18, 32n49, 32n53, 33n54, 37, 71n4, 76-89, 125, 133, 145, 164-165, 182n23, 213 Archer, Ian W. 2, 25n5, 72n13, 73n23, Aristotle 219, 220, 224, 225, 234n3, 234n115 Art of English Poesie, The (Puttenham) 142 Austin, William 22, 138–39, 143, 171 Bacon, Francis 14, 136, 214–15, 224–25 bacteria: evolution and 226–27; human health and 227; programming of 229; Y. pestis 225, 234m8 Bakhtin, Mikhail 52n9, 207-208, 217n16 Baldung Grien, Hans 110n18 Bandello, Matteo 158 Barish, Jonas 133–34, 146n2

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Index

Barroll, J. Leeds: on 1592–93 plague visitation 188; on bills of mortality 77, 92n21; on plague’s effect on English administrative tradition 9, 10; reference to Ram Alley 91n14; on Shakespeare’s writing 27n26, 159; on theater closures 90n2, 167n21, 179n2, 180n10, 188, 199n10 Basilikon Doron 113 Bate, Jonathan 159, 164, 167n22, 168n31 Battle of Carnival and Lent, The (painting by Brueghels, Elder/ Younger) 210 beast fables 41 Beaumont, Francis 143, 148n38, 181n19, Beck, Ulrich 203, 271n8 Becon, Thomas 86, 93n33 Bedlam 52n8, 62, 64–66 Bell, John 90n5, 92n21 Bellafront (fict.) 62, 63–64, 65 Benedick (fict.) 167n14 Benso, Sylvia 212, 218n24 Bergeron, David 114, 125n3 Berggren, Paula S. 22, 74n39, 74n50, 128n42, 147n47,150–68, 182n23, 199n7, 234n9, 237 Berowne (fict.) 144, 146, 166n13 Bertram (fict.) 151 Biblical references: David’s calming of Saul with music 163; Exodus 12: 30 170; Jeremiah 9: 21 170; Job 151, 156; Nineveh 8; Proverbs 5: 15-18 164 bills of mortality: of 1596 visitation 90–91n9; for 1603 127n24; codification of urban area 58–59, 81, 83; collections of 90n6; content of 58, 76, 78, 79, 81, 108n3; cost of 79, 91m14; creation as literary genre 58, 81, 83, 89; determination of theater closings 76; development as literary genre 18, 77–79; examples of 80, 82; fear generated by plague deaths reported in 104–5; gathering of information for 109n12, 127n24; hindrances to study of 77; link of anatomy to 83–84; as means of managing plague visitations 19–20, 59, 76–77, 79–81, 83–84, 89, 91m10; preservation of 77, 92n22; production/readership of

78–79, 90n3, 92n19-20; reliability of 127n24; religious writer’s appropriation of 20, 76, 77, 83–86; as sign of plague visitations 231; for years following 1603 outbreak 92n21; see also vital records Birdlime (fict.) 69 births see vital records Black Death, fourteenth century 5, 26n16, 127n23, 219, 233, 234n8 see also plague black hole 225 Boccaccio 16 books, epidemic of 222–23, 228–29, 230 Boose, Lynda 156, 167n15 Bottom (fict.): expression of undifferentiation 190–92; flight from city 188; as focal point of anxieties about class/gender 195–96, 200n22; as marker of plague-time anxiety 23, 189, 195–96; reversal of status of 189–90; as scapegoat 192–93, 196 Boulton, Jeremy 72n17 Boyet (fict.) 146 Brabantio (fict.) 148n39, 156, 161 Brant, Sebastian 43, 52n16 Brentford 63, 67-69, 75n53, 75n54 Brewer, Thomas 22, 108n1, 170, 180n7 broadsides bills see bills of mortality Brooke, Arthur 24-25n2, 158, 167n18 Brueghel, Elder 210 Brueghel, Younger 210 buboes 4–5, 6 bubonic plague see plague Buell, Lawrence 23, 202, 203, 207, 211 building restrictions 28n32, 56, 123 Bullein, William: attacks on Catholicism 38, 39, 41–42, 43; attention to commoners’ protests 38; attitude of in Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence 50; on cause of plague 188; description of plague symptoms 5–6; on government of health book 148n30; incorporation of theology 39, 43–44, 49; medical advice of 39, 40, 52n10; personification of allegorical art 38, 43, 45, 46; on preventative powers of mirth 140; radical Protestantism of 38; response to plague 11; satire of 38, 39–44; use of plague writing to further complaint/protest 19; A Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence 5–6, 11, 14, 18, 19, 38, 39–44, 49–50, 51n7, 52n10

Index Burton, Robert 93n35, 140, 148n29, 222, 223, 234n12 calamity 9, 207–8 Calvin, John 86, 93n32 Camus, Albert 185-6, 198n3, 221 cancer 8, 199n8, 232 Candido (fict.) 61–62, 63, 64 canicular days 188, 199n15 Cantor, Norman 17, 32n53 capitalism 73n24, 214-215, 218n28 carbuncles 5–6, 75n55, 209, 212 Cardan, Gerolamo 139 Carleton, Dudley 119 carnivalesque 23, 200n24, 202, 207–12, 213, 217n17, 218n22, Catholicism 38, 39, 41–42, 43, 44 Cavendish, Margaret 145 Cecil, Sir Robert 29n33, 30n35, 103, 118, 121 Centers for Disease Control 5, 14, 26n14, 231 Chamberlain, John 117, 119–20 Charles I (king of England) 9, 97, 108n2 Charles II (king of England) 9, 108n2 Chaworth (Viscount) 81 China 234n28 Christopher Sly (fict.) 142, 144 city comedies 18-19, 42, 105, 204 see also Honest Whore, The (Dekker and Middleton); Westward Ho (Dekker and Webster) city space (urban space) 55–56, 58, 61, 66, 72n10, 74n51 city-suburb binary 19, 46, 55–57, 67–68 civil war 28n32, 83, 115, 117 Civis (fict.) 39, 41, 42, 44 Clapham, Henoch 7, 234m5 class 38, 40, 47, 48–49, 58, 200n22, Claudio (fict.) 122 Cohen, Derek 185, 186 Comedy of Errors, The (Shakespeare) 142 Coming Plague, The (Garrett) 18, 32n53 commerce 23, 45, 107, 112n34, 198, 214 Common Council 119 Company of Parish Clerks 77, 79, 81 complaint 19, 37, 40–41, 53n26 computer viruses 228–30 consumers/consumerism 2, 23, 59, 67, 145, 208

245

Coriolanus (Shakespeare) 154, 159 Corporation of London 116, 126n12 corrupt city-clean country binary 24, 41, 55, 57, 60–69, 72n22 Court of Aldermen 116, 117, 119, 126n12 Court of Common Council 116, 119 Cox, Catherine I. 17, 126n10 creatureliness of man 205-207, 212, 214, 215 Cregan, Kate 104, 111n28 Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (CJD) 228 criminal tales 42 crisis literature 9, 15, 23,201-218 crisis mortality 8, 26n22 see mortality Crispinus (fict.) 40, 43 Cromwell, Oliver 83 Cromwell, Thomas 78 Crosse, Henry 134 Culpepper, Nicholas 140 cultural changes: due to plague outbreaks 9, 15–16, 44, 202, 204, 211; healing 105–8; urban culture 37, 44 curses 151–54 Cymbeline (Shakespeare) 156, 159 Daileader, Celia R. 180n10, 181n16, 181n19, 182n22 Davies, John 10, 22, 83–84, 170 dbr (Hebrew for plague) 7, 221 Dead Term, The (Dekker) 45–46 De amina et vita (Vives) 140 death: Dekker’s description of arrival of 17, 46, 56, 61, 68, 120, 209; Dekker’s descriptions of London consumed by 47; as laughing matter 209–10; as a characteristic of early modern life 2–4; personification of 3–4, 43–44, 56, 61, 68, 110n18, 120, 209–10; Shakespeare’s personification of 3; as social leveler 207–8 Death and the Maiden (Baldung Grien) 110n18 Death in Venice (Mann) 221 Decameron, The (Boccaccio) 16 Defensative against the Plague, A (Kellwaye) 138 Defoe, Daniel: fear of quarantine 137; on Great Plague of 1665 92–93n28; on Plague Act of 1578 13; A Journal of the Plague Year 13, 137, 230–31, 233

246 Index Dekker, Thomas: on aftermath of plague 55; appropriation of 1 Henry IV’s carnivalesque outlook 23, 202, 209, 212–14; appropriation of plague language 17; association of plague with Elizabeth’s death 99– 100, 104; association of plague with theater 99; attention to commoners’ protests 38; on cause of plague 203, 205, 206–7, 209; commentary on urban chaos 50; concerns centering on urban life 44–48, 51n5, 61–62; condemnation of runaways 46, 47, 59–60, 202, 204; on curative powers of mirth 140; depictions of crisis as opening for festivity 23; description of James’s royal entry 115; description of plague 137, 138; description of plague’s arrival 6, 17, 46, 56, 61, 68, 120, 209; emphasis on lack of compassionate order 49, 60; on fear generated by deaths from plague 104–5; on fear of quarantine 150, 160; on flow of liquids of body politic 47–48; focus of works of 127n33; on heroism, cowardice, greed in plague-times 169, 202, 204; incorporation of theology 39; on lack of mirth-moving recreation during plague-times 141; personification of structures/cities 39, 44, 45–47, 56, 209; on plague/ pox policies 160; on potential for treason at death of Elizabeth 100–101; radical Protestantism of 51n5; on reading as prophylaxis 222; representation of Elizabeth’s death 20; reversal of plague writing’s elements 64–70; satire of 38, 44–49, 50; on seven deadly sins of London 148n32; on singularity of plague 110n16; on status of authors 48; stories of individual plague experiences 48–49, 55; use of metaphor 110n15; use of plague writing to further complaint/protest 19; work on festivities for James I 120, 204; “A Medicine to Cure the Plague of a Woman’s Tongue, Experimented on a Cobbler’s Wife” 174; The Dead Term 45–46; The Honest Whore, Part 1 19, 55, 61–66, 68; Lanthorne and Candle-Light 160; London Looke Backe, at that

Yeare of Yeares 1625. And Looke Forward, Upon this Yeare, 1630 104–5, 110n16; The Magnificent Entertainment 204; The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary 23, 59–60, 201, 202, 205, 207–8, 209–12; News from Gravesend 49, 51n7, 60–61, 65–66, 127n33, 201–6; The Patient Man and the Honest Whore 204; The Ravens Almanack 45–46; A Rod for Runaways 72n21, 127n33; The Seven Deadly Sins of London 45–46; The Shoemaker’s Holiday 204; Westward Ho 19, 55, 61–62, 66–70; The Wonderful Year 14, 19, 20, 23, 38, 44–50, 56, 59, 60, 74n48-49, 99, 120, 138, 140, 150, 169, 201, 202, 204–5, 207–8, 222; Work for Armourers 45–46 Demetrius (fict.) 197 desire see erotic longing Desdemona (fict.): Emilia’s defense of 162; hope for Othello’s belief in her honesty 157; movement between closed and open spaces 161, 163, 165; Othello’s view of 156, 164; view of the handkerchief 156 Dessen, Alan 163, 165 DeWall, Nichole 21, 71n8, 133–49, 167n13, 234n10, 237 Dialogue betwixt a Cittizen, and a poore Countreyman, A (Brewer) 108n1 Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence, A (Bullein): compared to The Wonderful Year 38; conclusion of 19, 49; content of 39; description of plague symptoms 5–6; medical advice in 39, 40, 52n10; publication of 14, 18, 39; satiristic features of 38, 39–44, 49–50; theology of 39, 49; writing of 11 Diamond, Jared 227, 235n23 digital plagues 228–33 Discipline and Punishment (Foucault) 14, 30n40, 57, 59, 72n19 disease: of adaptation 16; adaption to 226; fascination with infectious disease 23; as metaphor 226–27; of urban spaces 66–67; view of in Reformation 7–8 Disease and Representation (Sander Gilman) see Gilman, S. Diseases of the Soul (Adams) 87

Index Dobson, Mary J. 2, 8, 25n6, 26n21, 27n22, 27n23, 27n24 dog star 188, 199n15 Doll (fict.) 173 Donne, John 52n19, 170–71, 226 doomsday books, current 214-15 Double Immunity (PBS) 31n45 dragon water 68 drama see antitheatricalists; plays; theaters Dudley, Robert 10–11 Dugdale, Gilbert 124–25 Duke (in The Honest Whore, fict.) 63 Duke Vincentio (fict.) 21, 113–29 Duncan-Jones, Katherine 17, 32n52, 33n56, 90n1, 154–55, 166n11, 188, 199n11 Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (Whitney) see Whitney ecocritical studies 201–2, 207, 211 E. coli 229, 230 ecological awareness 201–2 ecology 15, 201, 203, 204–14, 216n4, 216n5, 217n11, 219n29, 227 economic concerns: closure of theaters as 169; H1N1 outbreak and 54; as result of flight/quaratine 59–60, 81, 105, 198, 204; financial crisis and 216 Edmonds, Sir Thomas 121 Eisaman Maus, Katharine 53n21, 75n53, 163, 168n28, 180n10, 182n25 Elizabethan plays 160, 163, 165 Elizabeth I (queen of England): burial of 117–18; connection between physical and sovereign selves 105; death associated with plague/treason 20, 97–101, 103–4, 106; death of 14, 19, 20, 44, 62, 104, 105, 208; debts of 116, 126n12; dedication into the Royal Exchange 107; Dekker on death of 99–100, 204; funeral of 105; naming of successor 103; opening/eruption of body of 103–4, 118; plague policies of 11–12, 29–30n35, 56–57; plague visitations under 9; reimagination and reinterpretation of body of 20, 97–98, 105–8; response to small pox experience 10–11, 28n31; restrictions on building 56; Southwell’s account of death of

247

101–4; views of virginity of 110n17; vision of death of 102–3 Emilia (fict.) 162, 163, 164, 165 emotions see passions England’s Caesar (Petowe) 120 environmental catastrophes 201, 202–3, 205 erotic longing 19, 21, 22, 67, 150, 154, 165 estates satire 38 Every Man in His Humor (Jonson) 149n18 evolution 15, 226–27 exploitation of nature 214 fabric, social significance of 47 Face (fict.) 173 faciality 212 Faerie Queene, The (Spenser) 14, 43, 222–23 fairies (fict. A Midsummer Night’s Dream) 197, 208 Falstaff (fict.) 23, 55-56, 151, 209, 212–14 fear 8, 44, 57, 59-60, 68, 74n47, 133, 138, 139, 140, 145 festivity: commerce as healer of 23, 214; depictions of crisis as opening for 23; as means of coping with the plague 207–12; as place of ethics of things finding accomplishment 212; scholarly perspectives on in 21st century 202 Finlay, Roger 126–27n20 “First Anniversary” (Donne) 226 Fletcher, John: appropriation of plague language 17; representation of plague 22, 71n7, 173–79; The Tamer Tamed 17, 22, 71n7, 172, 173–79, 180n10, 181n16, 181n19-20 flight: in The Alchemist 61, 172–73; association with seeking sin 61, 67– 68; banishment as form of 199n16; Dekker’s condemnation of 46, 47, 59–60, 69–70, 202–3; as dominant literary thread 16; effects on London 59; escape from confinement 66–68; of Gallants in Meeting of Gallants 214; as plague literary adaptation 16; as preventative measure against plague 58; as preventative measure against sin 62–64; representation of in literature 19, 172–73, 188, 198; reversal of in The Honest Whore 64;

248

Index

flight (continued) of royal court 10, 58, 59, 178; use of bills of mortality to determine timing of 79, 81 Foege, William H. 14 Forbes, Thomas Rogers 90n8 Forman, Simon 22, 171, 172, 178, 180n9 Foucault, Michel 13-14, 30n40, 57, 59, 72n19, 217n12 Freedman, Barbara 57, 72n20-21 Friar Anselmo (fict.) 65 Friar John (fict.) 1, 150, 158, 161, 172, 178 Frith, Mary 144 Furdell, Elizabeth Lane 136 Galenic theory 3, 11, 21, 25n7, 87, 138–40, 206 Garrett, Laurie 18, 32n54 Gaspar, Julia 51n5 gender 10, 53n23, 92n27, 100, 104, 108n4, 109n5, 109n6, 200n22 General Orders of 1592 176 geography 2–3, 67 Gianozza (fict.) 158 Gilman, Ernest B. 7, 24, 24n1, 50n1, 54, 71n5, 73n26, 92n25, 92-93n28, 94n44, 108n4,110n14, 110n18, 134, 135, 136, 147n8, 148n28, 149n48, 152, 166n13, 167n25, 170, 173, 181n12, 200n30, 219-236; 237–38 Gilman, Sander L. 145 Girard, Rene: on Bottom as focal point of anxieties about class/gender 200n31; definition of reversal 193; definition of scapegoating 192; definition of undifferentiation 190; on distinctiveness of plague 137, 186; figure of violence as plague of 185–86; on influence of fairies on mechanicals/lovers 197; on link between Bottom and Hippolyta in plague-time 193; on plague as metaphor only 219, 220, 221; reading of Romeo and Juliet 187; rejection of theory of 186–87; on reversals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 189, 197; usefulness of theory of 23; “The Plague in Literature and Myth” 185 Girarian theory 23, 137, 185–87, 186– 87, 190, 192–93, 219 Giulietta e Romeo (Bandello) 158

Gods three arrows plague, famine, sword, in three treatises (Gouge) 7–8 God’s tokens 5–6 Goldberg, Jonathan 115, 126n8 Gosson, Stephen 134, 136 Gouge, William 7–8 government: concern about population growth in London 56; danger of vacant throne 117–18; plague’s effect on English administrative tradition 9–13, 20; preparation for James I’s accession 117, 119; response to Elizabeth I’s battle with smallpox 10–11; response to H1N1 outbreak 54, 71n2; as source of support in plague times 2 government policy on plague: campaign against subdivision and new building 28n32; under Elizabeth I 11–12, 28n33-34, 29–30n35, 56–57, 176; enforcement of 128n39; under Henry VII 10; under James I 12–13, 30n36-38, 58, 122, 127n24, 128n39, 169–70, 172–78, 176; proliferation of plague representations due to 18; recording of plague deaths 28n33; repression of citizens 54, 122–23, 203; see also quarantine Grady, Hugh 190 Grant, Teresa 112n41 Graunt, John 77, 78, 94n43, 97, 108n2 Greenblatt, Stephen 3, 47, 58–59, 75n53, 78–79, 92n19, 188, 271n19 Gresham, Thomas 107 Griffith, Matthew 88 grotesque 207–12, 213 Guildhall Library 92n22 guilds 2, 57 Gurr, Andrew 33n56, 89n1, 91n14, 128n38, 129n44, 144 Gutenberg revolution 9–10, 18, 24, 219, 222–23, 228–29, 230 H1N1 flu outbreak 54, 71n2, 231 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 3, 147n5, 168n27 Harding, Vanessa 72n17 Harley, David 93n38 Harris, Jonathan Gil 27n26, 33n56, 109n8, 112n35, 112n40, 187, 199n6, vii Hartman, Geoffrey 135 Harvey, David 58 healing practices see medical practice; treatments for plague

Index Healy, Margaret vii, 51n8, 52n15, 83, 86, 93n40, 136, 217n6 Hecker, Justus Friedrich Karl 5 hegemonic repression 203 Helena (fict.) 196–97, 200n31 Helmont, Jean Baptiste van 139, 148n26 Henry VIII (king of England) 10, 27n29 Henry VIII (Shakespeare) 152 Hermia (fict.) 188–89, 196–97 Hermione (fict.) 165, 197 Herring, Francis 136–37 Heywood, Thomas: attempts to heal social and economic relations 107; reincorporation of Elizabeth as Virgin Queen 105–7, 108; view of antitheatricalists 141–42; If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody 20, 105–8, 112n41 H.F. (fict.) 230–31 Hippolito (fict.) 62, 63–65 Hippolyta (fict.): lampooning of Pyramus and Thisbe 193; as representation of plague-time anxieties 23, 189, 195–96; reversal of status of 193–94; sacrifice of 193, 195, 196; undifferentiated condition of 194, 197, 200n28 Histrio-mastix. The players scourge, or, actors tragædy, divided into two parts (Prynne) 134, 135 HIV 31n45, 37, 50, 187, 199n8, 230 see also AIDS Homer 199n15 homiletic satire 44 Honan, Park 167n22, 180n10 Honest Whore, The (Dekker and Middleton): depiction of urban life 61–64; opening scene of 62–63, 68; on reconstruction of English social space 19, 55; reversal of plague writing’s elements 64–65 Hosley, Richard C. 163 host-pathogen relationship 15 hot, use in plague pamphlets 73n35 Hotspur (fict.) 152 houses: in The Alchemist 172–73; focus on in plays 22, 169, 172–77; metamorphosis of during plague 170–72; in Romeo and Juliet 172; as symbol of plague anxiety 178; in The Tamer Tamed 172, 173–78 Hughes, Geoffrey 153, 154 human-animal relationship 227

249

Hunter, Lynette 153, 166n7 Hutcheon, Linda 16, 32n48, 32n49 Iago (fict.): assault on Othello’s ear 162; insinuations about Desdemona 157; instruction to Roderigo to rouse Brabantio 156; Othello’s assurance of his marital status 161; as personification of death 3, 4; urging of Roderigo to plague Brabanito 161 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody (Heywood) 20, 105–8, 112n41 Iliad (Homer) 199n15 Impact of the Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, The (Slack) see Slack infection 227, 228–30 Infelice (fict.) 62–63, 64 Internet 222, 223, 230, 231–32 inverse utopia 52n14 Ironforge Plague 232–33 Isabella (fict.) 122 Issues of Death (Neill) See Neill Jack Juggler (anonymous) 143 Jacobean plays 54-75, 113-125, 160, 163, 165 James I (king of England): accession of 14, 19, 44, 97, 98, 100, 110n19, 113, 204, 208; arrival in London linked to plague 119–20; attempt to visit Royal Exchange unnoticed 124–25; building restrictions 123; coronation and Triumphal Passage of 98–99, 119; Dekker on healing power of reign of 100; effect of plague on England’s perception of 21, 118–21, 124; Elizabeth’s debts and 116, 126n12; entrance into London 118, 127n21; flight from plague 58, 59, 98, 121; institution of Act of 1606 153; Measure for Measure version of 113–14, 118; plague policies of 12–13, 58; plague visitations during reign of 9, 98; progress to London 20–21, 116–18; reception of 21, 113, 116; Wilson’s portrayal of 114–16, 121, 124, 125n2 Jamestown 15 Jaques (fict.) 174, 175, 176, 177 Jeremiah 9: 21 170 Jesus Christ 86, 87, 93n32, 135 Johnson, Mark 88

250

Index

Jonson, Ben: remedy for plague 74n47; representation of plague 22, 61, 172; reversal of plague-house anxiety 173; The Alchemist 22, 61, 74n47, 133, 172–73; Every Man in His Humor 149n18; “To Heaven” 226 Journal of the Plague Year, A (Defoe) 13, 137, 230–31, 233 Juliet (fict.): bed of as representation of closed places 165; death due to quarantine of Friar John 1, 150–51, 158, 161, 172, 178; horror of quarantine 160; sequestered places sought by 161, 165, 168n29 Justiniano (fict.) 66, 67, 69–70 Juvenalian satire 38, 50 Kellwaye, Simon 138 Kemp, William 137 Kent (fict.) 152 Kerwin, William 18–19, 37–53, 199n14, 238 King, John N. 50–51n2, 53n26 kingdom of the sick 110n15 King James Bible 14 King Lear (fict.) 154 King Lear (Shakespeare) 152, 154, 159, 185 King’s Men 121, 122, 124, 129n44 Knight of the Burning Pestle, The (Beaumont) 143 Korda, Natasha 178, 182n24 Kushner, Tony 182n22 Laird, David 200n22 Lake Prescott, Anne 50–51n2 Lakoff, George 88 Lambarde, William 30n38 land exchanges 41, 42 Lanthorne and Candle-Light (Dekker) 160 Larson, Jonathan 221 laughter, as medicine see mirth Laxton, Paul 92n22 Leontes (fict.) 151, 156, 165 Levenson, Jill 159 Lever, J.W. 123 Levin, Richard 113 Levinas, Emmanuel 212 Life and Reign of King James the First (Wilson) 114–16 litaphorical 233 literary adaptations 15–18 literature: effects of events of 1603 on

14; effects of plague on production of 76; effects of plague on satire 18–19, 37; flight and quarantine as dominant narrative threads 15–16; influence on plague thinking in England 33n54; plague writing prior to 1603 14; response to plague in 10, 219; transformation of plague for safe consumption 37; see also plague pamphlets; plague writing; plays; specific work or writer Livia (fict.) 181n20 Lloyd, G.E.R. 24, 224, 228 Lodge, Thomas 68, 75n55, 141 Loimotomia; or the Pest Anatomised (Thomson) 139–40 London: codification of urban area 56–59, 81, 83; Dekker’s depiction of 46–47, 204–5; Dekker’s personification of 46–47; development of urban theater in 71n6; as epicenter of plague and printing 18, 33n55; fire of 1666 13; Middleton’s representation of following plague 205; official jurisdiction of 56, 71n10; population increases in 56, 72n17, 126–27n20; representations in plays following plague 55; royal death and accession in 204; separation from country by plague 204; stigmatization of suburbs of 56–58; as urban space 56, 71–72n10; visitors for James I’s arrival in 118 London Bills of Mortality see bills of mortality London College of Physicians 58 London fire (1666) 13 London Looke Backe, at that Yeare of Yeares 1625. And Looke Forward, Upon this Yeare, 1630 (Dekker) 104, 110n16 London’s Mourning Garment (Muggins) 138 London’s Remembrancer (Bell) 92n21 Loomis, Catherine 103, 111n24 lovesickness: as contagious/infectious disease 150, 155–58; in The Honest Whore 63–64; in Othello 156–58; in Venus and Adonis 155 Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare) 144, 146, 148–49n39, 166n13 Lovewit (fict.) 61, 172–73, 178 Luce (fict.) 66

Index Lucentio (fict.) 144 Lucian 52n14 Lysander (fict.) 188–89 mad cow disease 228 Magnificent Entertainment, The (Dekker/Middleton) 204 Malcontent, The (Marston) 122, 124 Manley, Lawrence 33n55, 46, 52n7, 52n19, 110n14 Mann, Thomas 221 Mardock, James D. 20, 21, 53n22, 74n39, 101, 108n4, 113–29, 148n37, 149n47, 238 Maria (fict.Tamer Tamed) 174–77, 178, 179, 181n20 Marston, John 49, 122, 124 Maslen, Robert W. 44, 51n7, 52n10, 60–61, 127n33, 205 materiality 46–47 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare): avoidance of “plague” 128n42; conditions in London reflected in 122; Cox’s view of 126n10; drafting of 21, 113, 122; influence of plague on 115, 118; Lucio’s protest of his sentence 53n22; on measures to control spread plague 122–23, 124; parallels to James I’s accession 113–14, 123–25 mechanical model 202 mechanicals (fict. A Midsummer Night’s Dream) 197 mechanistic science 214 medical plague treatise 19–20, 87, 138141 medical practice: antitheatricalists and 136; Bullein’s satirical revelations on 39–40; Dekker’s representation of 45; participants in 2; preventative and curative treatments for plague 2–3, 58, 75n56, 136–37, 140, 182n21; religious writer’s use of metaphors relating to 87–89; see also Galenic theory Medicus (fict.) 5, 39, 40, 188 Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary, The (Dekker and Middleton): address to/privileging of male gentry 214; appropriation of 1 Henry IV’s carnivalesque outlook 202, 209, 212–14; content of 201, 202; context of 205; depictions of crisis as opening for festivity 23;

251

ecological significant feature of 209–12; on festivity as means of understanding/dealing with plague 207–14; on healing of festivity with commerce 214; recognition of human creatureliness 212; reference to Falstaff 212–14; representation of urban habitat 205; ridicule of runaways 59–60; as solace for horrors of plague 202; source of festive consciousness in 209, 212– 13; as substitute for/advertisement of theater 214; writing of 201 melancholy: cure for 21, 133, 140–45, 173, 198, 208, 211, 222; negative effects of 133, 142, 143, 198; susceptibility to plague and 21, 138–40 Mendax (fict.) 43 Mendicus (fict.) 41 Mennipean satire 41 Mercutio (fict.): “a plague on both your houses” curse 1, 153, 169, 172, 178, 213, 221; rebuke of Romeo 159 merry tales 41–43, 49, 52n12 Merrythought (fict.) 143 Merry Wives of Windsor, The (Shakespeare) 75n53 metaphors: ability to attach their force to other things 219, 220–21, 223; appropriation of plague metaphors 220–21; as Aristotelian alien 224; associated with anatomy 84; as Baconian lens 224–25; of crowds to plague 56; definition of 219, 224; disease as 187, 226–27; of eating and drinking 210, 211; function of 24; Girardian vitality of 219, 220–21, 223; illness as 32n53, 136; as link between body and soul 87-89; of a medical nature 86, 150; plague as 84–88, 152, 219–25; of plague as erotic longing 150; of plague in The Alchemist 173; of plague of crime 173; of plague as overcrowding 56; of plague as spiritual sickness 50; of the body politic 84; Lakoff and Johson on role of experience in understanding of 88; of social plague 187; of the stage 99; trauma and 32n53; versus literal depictions of plague 9, 24, 152; of war 98, 120, Mexico City 54 miasma theory 17, 139, 145, 146n5, 206

252 Index Middleton, Thomas: on aftermath of plague 55; appropriation of 1 Henry IV’s carnivalesque outlook 23, 202, 209, 212–14; on cause of plague 203, 206–7; excoriation of runaways 60–61; involvement in James’s royal entry 128n42, 204; reversal of plague writing’s elements 64–66; sketches of responses to plague 55; The Honest Whore, Part 1 19, 55, 61–66, 68; The Magnificent Entertainment 204; The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary 59–60, 201, 202, 205, 207–8, 209–12; News from Gravesend 51n7, 65–66, 127n33, 201, 202–3, 204, 205, 206; The Patient Man and the Honest Whore 204 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare): attempt to recover summer from plague 198; Bottom as scapegoat 192–93, 196; Bottom’s experience of undifferentiation 190–92; Bottom’s reversal 189–90; Hippolyta’s reversal 193–94; Hippolyta’s undifferentiation 194–95; influence of fairies on mechanicals/lovers 197; plague proxies in 189, 197–98; plague threat prior to first performance of 188; quarrel between the fairies 208; representation of flight from plague in 188–89; representations of plague-time anxieties 23, 195–96; reversal of lovers in 196–97; sacrifice of all women in 195, 196; writing/ performance of 198 Millington, Thomas 117 Milton, John 14, 145 miracles 86, 93n32 mirror of monsters, A (Rankins) 146n5 mirth: as cure for melancholy 140–45, 198, 211; healing powers of 21, 133, 208, 222; as means of jump starting natural cycles 208–14; as prophylactic against plague 173 Mistress Honeysuckle (fict.) 66, 67 Mistress Justiniano (fict.) 66 Mistress Tenterhook (fict.) 66, 69 Mistress Wafer (fict.) 66, 68 Modest Defence of the Caveat Given to the Wearers of Impoisoned Amulets, as preservatives from the Plague, A (Herring) 136–37

Molino, Nicolo 79 Monopoly (fict.) 69 Montaigne, Michel de 226 Montrose, Louis 195 Monty Python and the Holy Grail (musical) 22 moral disease 62–70 morality 44, 64–65, 66–70, 207 More, Sir Thomas 27n29, 41, 52n14 Moyes, John 154 Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare) 148n39, 167n14, 176 Muggins, William 138, 181n13 Mullett, Charles F. 29n33, 119, 127n24, 128n39 Munday, Anthony 134 Munkhoff, Richelle: 20, 53n23, 58, 73n28, 74n48, 81, 91n9, 91n14, 92n20, 97-112, 126n19, 127n24, 147n37, 239, 175, 180n11, 239.. Munro, Ian 55–56, 189 Munro, J.J. 158 music, restorative effects of 140–41, 143, 144 Mutabilitie Cantos, The (Spenser) 206 naming 191 Nashe, Thomas 38, 42, 50, 90–91n9, 210 national security 10–11, 97, 109n8 natural disaster 15, 23, 120, 201 Natural and Political Observations... upon the Bills of Mortality (Graunt) 77 Neill, Michael: on “enclave” 168n26; on fear of plague pit 186; on humanization of death 3; on inwardness/morbidity/anatomy 162–63; on plague of crime in The Alchemist 173; on plague’s effect on crisis of death 4; on plagues social effects 190 Nemo, Sir Nichols 60, 203 News from Gravesend (Dekker and Middleton): as account of environmental catastrophe 202–3, 205; as alternative mapping of plague landscape 65–66, 127n33, 204–5; on causes of plague 205, 206; content of 201; dedicatory of 49; depictions of crisis as opening for festivity 23; excoriation of runaways 60–61, 202–3, 214; Maslen’s analysis of 51n7, 205;

Index moral solution for plague 207; on plagues social effects 202–3; representations of London in 204; writing of 201 newspapers 220, 230–31 Nick Bottom (fict.) see Bottom (fict.) Nineveh 8 Northbooke, John 134 nurse-keepers 175 Oberon (fict.) 192, 194–95, 208 O’Brien, Tim 31n45 official power 64–65 Olivia (fict.) 150, 155 1 Henry IV (Shakespeare) 151, 202, 209, 212–14 online video games 232–33 “On the Sight of a Plague bill” (Quarles) 85–86 Orders of 1578 11–12, 29n33 organic ecology 205–7 organicism 202, 203, 205–6, 207–14, 217n13 Orsino (fict.) 155, 222 Othello (fict.): desire for Emilia to accuse Desdemona 162; invocation of Ten Plagues of Egypt/view of self as plague ridden 151, 156–58; movement between closed and open spaces 161–62, 164, 165; personification of death following 3; reference locks and keys 163–64; reference to plague 167n14; treatment of Emilia 163, 164; view of Desdemona 156, 164 Othello (Shakespeare): on closed spaces 22, 150, 151, 162–65; compulsion to discover and conceal 168n26; discussion of inwardness/morbidity/ anatomy in 162–63; Iago as figure of death in 3, 4; meshing of verbal and spatial lexicons of plague in 162; Othello’s view of Desdemona 156, 164; production of following plague visitation 150, 161; references to plague in 151, 156, 167n14; writing of 159 overpopulation 56, 72n17, 126–27n20, 207 Overthrow of Stage-Plays, The (Rainold) 134 pandemics 9, 37, 187, 219, 225, 230232

253

Paradise Lost (Milton) 14 “Paradox of Timon’s Self-Cursing, The” (Scott) 152 parasites 227, 228 Paré, Ambroise 4–5, 6–7 Parenthesis (fict.) 67 parish record keeping 77–78, 90n8 Parker (Bishop) 29n33 Parker, Patricia 109n5, 163, 168n27 Parolles (fict.) 151 Partlicius, Simeon 140 passions 21, 22, 25n2, 47, 48, 49, 93n32, 136–45, 148n25, 148n31, 149n41, 153, 198, Paster, Gail Kern 93n32, 94n41, 138, 139, 147n21, 148n25, 149n41, 217n12, paternalistic control 66–69 Patient Man and the Honest Whore, The (Dekker/Middleton) 204 Patterson, Annabel 191, 199n12, 200n22 Paulina (fict.) 165 Pedro (fict.) 174, 176, 177 Pelling, Margaret 25n3, 58, 73n27, 92n27 Pepys, Samuel 94n44 personification: Bullein’s personification of allegorical art 38, 43, 45, 46; Bullein’s personification of death 43–44; Davies personification of plague 10; Dekker’s personification of death/plague 56, 61, 68, 120, 209; Dekker’s personification of structures/cities 39, 44, 45–47; Middleton’s representation of mass death 209–10; Shakespeare’s personification of death 3; tradition of personification of death 110n18 “pester” 56, 72n16 pesthouse 170-71 Peter Qunice (fict.) 193 Petowe, Henry 120 Petruccio (fict. Tamer Tamed) 174–79, 181n20 Phillippy, Patricia 104, 111n27 Phillips, Patrick 74n47, 133, 146n1, 173, 180n12, 181n15 plague: absence of direct representation in plays 22, 55, 61, 68–69, 150–52, 169, 172–78, 189; aftermath of 55, 205; alteration in views of death due to 3; as antitheatricalists’ excuse to close theaters 133–36; appropriation of metaphors of 220–21;

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plague (continued) association of sexual sin with in Westward Ho 66–70; association with death of Elizabeth 98, 99–100; association with dog star 188, 199n15; association with entrance of kings 97, 120; association with urban environment 18; as catalyst for moral/ethical decisionmaking 40; change in household management due to 178; changing perceptions of 50; as cipher for all social violence 23, 185–86; codification of London’s spatial distinctions 56–59, 81, 83; cultural/ social response to 9, 15–16, 37, 159, 189, 202–3, 204, 211; deaths due to 98, 99, 108n2, 119, 187–88, 201; as defining context for Shakespeare’s writing 188; Dekker/Middleton’s personification of 209–10; Dekker’s/ Middleton’s exploration of causes of 203–4, 205, 206–7; Dekker’s representations of 44; as destroyer of all distinctness 137, 186, 190, 202–3; digital 228–33; as disruption of natural cycles 208–9; divisive impact of 181n18, 182n22; economic effects of 54, 59–60, 81, 105, 169, 198, 204; effect on disease control measures 14; effect on early modern city scapes 55–56; effect on festivities for James I’s accession 115, 119–21; effect on government 9–13, 54, 56– 57, 203; effect on lived experience 1, 4, 9; effect on perception of James I 118–21; effect on satire 37; effects on social topographies 15–16, 19, 23, 55, 105, 189, 190–91, 198, 202–3, 204, 211; emotions’ effect on susceptibility to 138–39; as erotic longing 150; etymology of 4, 7, 24, 134, 137, 221, 223, 226, 234n6; evolutionary adaptations to 15; festivity as means of coping during 207–14; forgetfulness of 54–55, 61, 70; frequency/severity of visitations 9, 119, 164, 187–88, 201, 219, 221–22 see also bills of mortality; healing of chaos of by reinvestment of Elizabeth as Virgin Queen 105–8; history of 37; immunity to 31n45; institution of citywide record keeping 77–79; as instrument of God’s wrath

7–8, 60, 83, 134–35, 153, 203, 206, 209, 210; interchangeability with pox 60, 128n42, 151, 154; isolation of bacterium causing 234m8; as language 7; last epidemic of 13, 229, 234m8; linked to James’s arrival in London 119–20; literary transformation for safe consumption 9, 16–17, 37, 146, 202; lovesickness as 150, 155–58; manipulation of contagion of 68–69; as metaphor 18, 152, 173, 219–24; metaphorical representation in plays 179n2; as opening of space for festivity 23, 207–14; other diseases vs. 8, 27n23, 142, 153, 199n8; other means of death vs. 4, 7–8; personification of 10, 56, 61, 68, 120, 209; plague pamphlets as solace for horrors of 23, 202; positive effects of 14–15; preventative and curative treatments for 2–3, 15–16, 58, 68, 75n56, 136–37, 140–43, 176, 207, 210, 222; progress of 4–7, 26n14, 137–38; psychic toll of 137; referred to as sickness 100, 110n16, 175; religious view of 7–8; representation of in recent adolescent novels 179n2; revelation of London’s problems 56–58; revision of London’s spatial distinctions 58; secularization of 84; as signifier of urban corruption/ contamination 61; symptoms of 4–7, 75n55; as toxic discourse 202; ubiquity of in literature 185, 198; variation in manifestations of 2–3, 15; see also government policy on plague; literary adaptations; quarantine Plague, The (Camus) 221 Plague Act of 1604 12–13, 30n36, 58, 127n24, 128n39, 169–70, 176 plague-city/health-country binary 19, 57, 60, 68, 204 Plague-Grave, The (Helmont) 139, 148n26 “Plague in Literature and Myth, The” (Girard) see Girard plague language: effects of use of 17; as metaphor 24; playwrights’ use of 16; Shakespeare’s appropriation of 22, 24n2, 128n43, 150–58, 221, 222 see metaphor plague meme 32n54

Index Plague in Print, The (Totaro) see Totaro plague pamphlets: as accounts of environmental catastrophe 202–3; on apprehension surrounding homes 170; descriptions of nature of plague 17; as solace for horrors of plague 202; as toxic discourse 23, 202–3, 205, 208, 211; transformation of plague for safe consumption 202; urban habitat and organic ecology of 204–7; see also specific pamphlet plague pits 4, 47, 186, 190 plague satire 18-19, 44, 37-53 plague space: definition of city scape 55–58; depicted in Westward Ho 66–70; effect of bills of mortality on 58–59; effect of flight from plague 59–70; reversal of in The Honest Whore 64–66 plague writing: appropriation of language of plague 16–17, 221; development of 14–15; errors introduced through 222–23; fixation on plague-grave 137; flight/ quarantine as dominant narrative threads 15–16, 22; on mirth as cure for plague 140; as model for current climate-crisis narratives 23; mutation of 24; proliferation of 18, 24, 219, 222; purpose of 220, 222; satire as ideal form for 49–50; transformation of plague for safe consumption 9, 16–17; types of 219; warnings against dangers of melancholy/fear 138–40; see also plague pamphlets; plays; specific play or plague pamphlet Plague Writing in Early Modern England (Gilman) see Gilman players 134, 136, 141, 143, 169 playgoing, healing power of 133 playhouse see theaters plays: absence of real plague/plague victims in 61, 68–69, 150–52, 169, 172–78, 179n2, 189; Act of 1606 and 153–54; application to life 145; death as element of 4; development of urban theater 71n6; displacement of plague fears 9, 146; effects of theater closings 21; effects of trauma in 145–46; equipment/fictional signals used in 163–65; focus on houses in 169–79; interpretation of plague references in 165; movement

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of characters in plague plays 19; performed by Kings Men 129n44; postvisitation discussions of plague 61, 128n39; on powers of mirth/ music 142–44; as prophylactic against plague 173, 178–79; references to locks, keys, and doors in 163–64; resilience following plague years 55; restorative aspects of 144–45; taking advantage of juxtaposition of inner/outer action 160; transformation of plague for safe consumption 9, 16–17, 146, 173; see also antitheatricalists; drama; theaters; specific play Plays Confuted in Five Acts (Gosson) 134 poetry 134, 142, 170 Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Stuart Years (Barroll) see Barroll Poole, Adrian 155 Poor Laws 30n35, 30n38 Posthumus (fict.) 156 posttraumatic stress disorder 16, 31n47, 32n53 pox: association with plague in Westward Ho 66–67; interchangeability with plague 128n42, 151, 153, 154; plague vs. 153; political policies toward 160; Shakespeare’s sexualization of plague as 123–24 prayer 11, 29n33, 58 Prescott, Anne Lake 49–50, 52n14 printing press 18, 24, 219, 222–23, 228–29, 230 prions 228, 235n24 Privy Council: accessibility to James I 121; burial of Elizabeth I 118; naming of Elizabeth’s successor 103; order to close theaters 98, 169; printing of plague measures 122; record keeping by 78; response to Elizabeth I’s battle with smallpox 11 Prosopopeia (Spenser) 41 Prospero (fict.) 144 Protestantism: appropriation of plague bills 20; attempts to explain plague 92n28; of Bullein 41; importance of iconography 52n15; perception of Catholicism 38, 39; reformation in England 14; view of Elizabeth 106 protest literature 19, 37, 38, 39, 40–41

256

Index

protheatrical apologists 141–42 Proverbs 5: 15-18 164 Prynne, William 134, 135 psychophysiology 139, 144–45 Puttenham, George 142 quarantine: claustrophobia of 137; closed spaces in Shakespeare’s writing representing 22, 150–51, 159–66, 168n29; correlation with policing bodies 66; death of Romeo and Juliet due to 1, 150–51, 158–59, 161, 172, 178; as dominant literary thread 16, 22, 169, 172–78; effect on Londoners 54, 150, 160; under Elizabeth I 11–12; Forman’s experience of 171; during H1N1 outbreak 54, 71n2; as injury 178; under James I 12–13, 30n36, 58; as preventative measure against spread of plague 58, 169–70; as representation of plague/effects of plague 16, 22; self-administered form of 199n16; spatial restructuring by 58; see also houses Quarles, Francis 85–86 Rainold, John 134 Ralph Roister Doister (Udall) 143 Ram Alley (Barry) 79, 91m14 Rankins, William 134, 146n5 Rape of Lucrece, The (Shakespeare) 17 Rappaport, Steve 2 Ravens Almanack, The (Dekker) 45–46 reading 222 recession 216 record keeping 77–79 see also bills of mortality Reformation 7–8, 14, 18 Reformation plague satire 50 religious community: appropriation of bills of mortality 20, 76, 83–86, 89; appropriation of medical metaphors 87–89; Bullein’s attacks on Catholicism 38, 39, 41–42, 43, 44; Donne’s sermon on plague/sin 170; invocation of apocalyptic afflictions 223; model for understanding plague 92n28; prayer and fasting for plague victims 11, 28n33; record keeping by 78; as source of comfort in plague times 2; use of metaphors

and analogies 93n38; view of plague 7–8, 153 Renaissance art 3 Rent (Larson) 221 Reply to Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse, A (Lodge) 141 Revenge of the GAIA, The 214 revenge plays 4 reversals: of Bottom’s status 189–90; contribution to healing mirth 198; Girard’s definition of 186, 193; of Hippolyta’s status 193–94; in The Honest Whore 64–65; of lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 196–97; of plague house anxiety in The Alchemist 173; as theme in literature of plague 185; in The Wonderful Year 45, 47, 49 Richard II (Shakespeare) 148–49n39, 188 risk society 203, 206, 215 Robertson, J.C. 59, 81 Rod for Runaways, A (Dekker) 73n32, 127n33 Roger (fict.) 41–42 Roland (fict.) 181n20 Romeo (fict.): death due to quarantine of Friar John 1, 150–51, 158, 161, 172, 178; melancholy of 143; sequestered places sought by 161, 165, 168n29 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare): anxiety over infected household goods 17; closed spaces in 1, 22, 150, 159, 161, 165, 168n29; on dangers of melancholy 143, 148n39; Girardian reading of 187; incidence of bubonic plague in 158–59; Mercutio’s curse 1, 153, 169, 172, 178, 213, 221; production of following plague visitation 150, 161; quarantine of Friar John 1, 150–51, 158, 161, 178; representation of plague in 22, 24n2, 172, 177; staging of 24n1; undifferentiated violence in 188; writing/publication of 172 Rosaline (fict.) 144 sacrificial element see scapegoating St. Olave’s Parish 74n38 St. Toole’s Parish 74n38 Salernitano, Masuccio 158 salus 86 salvaging 16

Index sanitation reforms 11, 29–30n35 SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) epidemic 55 satire: attitude of 50; of Bullein’s A Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence 39–44; changes in due to plague outbreaks 18–19; components of Buell’s/Dekker’s 38–39; continuities of 38; of Dekker’s The Wonderful Year 44–49; evolution of 37, 38, 44, 49–50, 50n2; as ideal literary form for plague writing 49–50; new role during plague outbreaks 37; spectrum of 53n26; use of merry tales in 41–43, 52n12 Savile, John 118, 127n21 scapegoating: of Bottom 192–93; contribution to healing mirth 198; Girard’s definition of 192; of Hippolyta 193, 195; as means to end plague 186; in plague writing 185 Scaramelli, Girolamo Carlo 78 School of Abuse, The (Gossen) 134 Schwartz, Kathryn 194, 195 scientific investigation 15 Scott, William O. 152 Scourge of Villainie (Marston) 49 Scrope, Lady 102, 111n24 searchers 58, 69, 109n12, 175 Second and Third Blast of Retreat, A (Munday) 134 Sennert, Daniel 139 Seven Deadly Sins of London, The (Dekker) 45–46 sexual activity 162, 177 sexual society 62–70, 122, sexuality 98, 100, 102, 104, 109n6, 110n18, 163 Shakespeare, William: absence of direct representation of plague in plays of 22; avoidance of “plague” 128n42; on benefits of mirth 148n39; closed spaces in plays of 1, 22, 150, 159, 161–65, 168n29; coalescence of plague and whore house 160–61; on danger of melancholy/power of theater to cure 142–43, 148n39; depictions of crisis as opening for festivity 23; dread of quarantine 150–51, 159, 160–63; effect of 1592-93 plague on career of 188; effect of theatre closing on writings of 14, 159–60; equating of love with infection 150, 155–58; on healing

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after great pain 164; homage to in Meeting of Gallants 213; on measures to control spread plague 122–23, 124; personification of death 3; plague as defining context for writings of 188; plague at birth of 167n22; plays of suited to alterations between public/private sphere 165; on political treatment of pox 160–61; preoccupation with the air 145; representation of plague 23, 158–59; on restorative effects of music 144; spatial lexicon of plague in plays of 159–66, 172; use of plague to denote effects of erotic desire 154–55; verbal lexicon of the plague 17, 22, 24n2, 128n43, 150– 58, 222; All’s Well That Ends Well 151; Antony and Cleopatra 159, 222; The Comedy of Errors 142; Coriolanus 154, 159; Cymbeline 156, 159; Hamlet 3; Henry VIII 152; King Lear 152, 154, 159, 185; Love’s Labours Lost 144, 146, 148– 49n39; Measure for Measure 21, 53n22, 113, 122, 126n10, 128n42; The Merry Wives of Windsor 75n53; A Midsummer Night’s Dream 23, 188–98, 208; Much Ado About Nothing 148n39, 167n14, 176; 1 Henry IV 151, 202, 209, 212–13; Othello 3, 4, 22, 150, 151, 156–58, 159, 161–66, 167n14, 168n26; The Rape of Lucrece 17; Richard II 148– 49n39; Romeo and Juliet 1, 17, 22, 24n1-2, 143, 148n39, 153, 158, 161, 165–66, 168n29, 172, 178, 187, 213; Sonnet 137 160–61; Sonnet 141 161; The Taming of the Shrew 142–43, 144; The Tempest 154; Timon of Athens 152–53; Troilus and Cressida 128n43, 154; Twelfth Night 22, 150, 154, 222; The Two Gentlemen of Verona 148n39; Venus and Adonis 17, 155; The Winter’s Tale 22, 150, 151, 156, 164, 166 Sheffi, Yossi 229 Shepherd’s Calendar, The (Spenser) 41 Shoemaker’s Holiday, The (Dekker) 204 Sidney, Philip 134, 142 Signor Jinglespur (fict.) 59, 213 Signor Kickshaw (fict.) 213 Signor Shuttecock (fict.) 59, 210–11, 213

258 Index silence 37, 50n1 Sir Andrew Aguecheek (fict.) 155 Sir John Falstaff-Oldcastle (fict.) 211, 213 Sir Toby Belch (fict.) 155 Slack, Paul: on divisive impact of plague 181n18; on frequency/ severity of plague visitations 164, 187–88; linking of population/ poverty/plague 28n32; naming of Plague Act of 1604 30n36; on Orders of 1578 12; on plague bills role in secularization of the plague 84; on quarantine 160, 169, 180n9; on relationship between church/ Elizabeth I 29n33; on reliability of bills of mortality 127n24; on sources of bubonic plague 57; on sources of plague practices 29–30n35; on surviving plague bills 90–91n9; on understanding of plague 89 smallpox 10–11, 27n23 Sodom and Gomorrah 8 Social Justice in the City (Harvey) 58 social topographies: effects of plague on 15–16, 19, 23, 105, 181n18, 190–91, 198, 202–3, 204, 211; of The Honest Whore 62–66; responses to plague 55, 189 Sonnet 137 (Shakespeare) 160–61 Sonnet 141 161 Sontag, Susan 32n53, 110n15, 219, 220–21, 230 Southwell, Elizabeth 20–21, 101–4, 111n24 spatial responses to plague 58–59 see also flight; quarantine Spencer, Robert 14, 43 Spenser, Edmund: representation of Nature 206; The Faerie Queene 14, 43, 222–23; The Mutabilitie Cantos 206; Prosopopeia 41; The Shepherd’s Calendar 41 Speth, James Gustave 214, 215 spiritual corruption 84–89 Stage, Kelly J. 19, 21, 52n18, 54–75, 149n47, 199n16, 217n10, 239 Stallybrass, Peter 74n50, 156, 167n15, Stow, John 56 Subtle (fict.) 173 suburbs 56–58 Suffering in Paradise (Totaro) see Totaro Sullivan, Erin 19–20, 73n30, 76–89, 94n44, 111n31, 235n29, 239–40

Summer’s Last Will and Testament (masque by Nashe) 210 Surrey (fict.) 152 Survey of London, A (Stow) 56 Sutherland, Ian 78 Swift, Jonathan 225 syphilis 60, 151, 153, 156 see also pox Tamburlaine (fict.): Dekker’s use of to describe arrival of plague 17, 46, 56, 209; as personification of death 4 Tamer Tamed, The (Fletcher): abandonment during plague 182n22; anxiety over infected household goods 17; first performance of 181n16; focus on invasion of home by wife 177–78; handsome illness in subplot of 181n20; Petruccio’s schemes 174–77; printing history of 181n19; as prophylactic against plague 173; publication/production of 180n10; representation of plague 22, 71n7, 174–76, 177; writing/ publication of 172 Taming of the Shrew, The (Shakespeare) 142–43, 144 Tawney-coat, John 112n39 Taylor, Gary 33n54, 51n7, 71n9, 128n42, 180n10, 182n22, 216n1, 216n2 technological threat 219, 222–23, 228–33 Tempest, The (Shakespeare) 144, 154 The Theater 71n6 Theater of Envy, A (Girard) see Girard theaters: Act of 1606 and 153–54; antitheatricalists 61; changes in following plague 55; closure due to Elizabeth’s illness/death 98; closures due to plague 55, 57, 72n21, 90n2, 121, 159–60, 164, 169, 173–74, 188; as cure for melancholy 21, 141–44; danger of miasma in 146n5; effects of closures 21–22, 76, 159, 160, 169, 188, 201; following 1603 plague 21; Meeting of Gallants as substitute for/advertisement of 214; salubrious role of in plague-times 133, 144–45, 173; use of juxtaposition of inner and outer action 160; see also antitheatricalists; plays The Guardian 216 Theologus (fict.) 39, 44

Index theology, incorporated in satire 39, 43–44, 49 Theseus (fict.) 192–97 The tragicall historye of Romeus and Iuliet written first in Italian by Bandell, and nowe in Englishe (Brookes) 24n2 Thiele, Matthew 23, 148n37, 185–200, 217n18, 240 Thomas Dekker’s Pamphlets, 16031609, and Jacobean Popular Literature (Waage) 110n20 Thomson, George 139–40 Thucydides 138, 221 Timon (fict.) 152 Timon of Athens (Shakespeare) 152–53 Titania (fict.) 190, 191, 192, 194–95, 208 “To Heaven” (Jonson) 226 Totaro, Rebecca 1–24, 26n17, 26n18, 27n27, 29n33, 29n34, 31n42, 51n3, 51n6,52n14, 73n26, 74n43, 74n47, 91n9, 92n28, 109n4, 110n14, 127n23, 145, 149n45, 180n8, 180n12, 182n21, 218n26, 240 toxic discourse: in The Meeting of Gallants 211; plague pamphlets as 23, 202–3; in Speth’s book 215; stylized gothicization of environmental catastrophe 205; in The Wonderful Year 208 Toxoplasma gondii 227 Traister, Barbara H. vii, 22, 53n20, 71n7, 169–182, 199n7, 240–41 trauma theory 32n53, 37, 50n1, 225 travelers tales 41–42, 43 treacle 68 treason 98, 100–101, 103, 104, 106 Treatise against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes, with Other Idle Pastimes (Northbrooke) 134 Treatise of the Pestilence, A (Partlicius) 140 Treatise of the Plague (Lodge) 68 treatments for plague: advice in Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence 39, 52n10; in The Alchemist 74n47; limitations of 58; mirth 21, 140, 208, 222; onions 176, 182n21; sources of 2–3 Triumph of Death (Davies) 10, 83–84, 170 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare) 128n43, 154

259

True History, A (Lucian) 52n14 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare) 22, 150, 155, 222 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The (Shakespeare) 148n39 Tyrwhitt, Thomas 115 Udall, Nicholas 143 undifferentiation: Bottom’s experience of 190–92; contribution to healing mirth 198; created by fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 197; Girard’s definition of 190; of Hippolyta 194; of lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 197; of mechanicals 197; plague presented as 185, 186 Unfortunate Traveller (Nashe) 42 Ungentle Shakespeare (Duncan-Jones) 188 urban culture: Dekker’s depiction of 44, 61–62; as depicted in The Honest Whore 61–66, 66–70; as depicted in Westward Ho 61; influence on felt experience of plague 37; plague’s redefinition of 55–56, 205–6 urban environment 18, 204–7 urbanization 56, 72n17 urban drama 19, 54-74, 71n6 urban plague satire 38, 50 use-oriented aesthetic 145 Utopia (More) 41, 52n14, 241 utopias 43, 45 Venus (fict.) 155 Venus and Adonis (Shakespeare) 17, 155 violence 23, 185–86, 187 viral media 220, 230–33 viral video 22, 231–32 Virtue’s Commonwealth (Crosse) 134 vitalism see organicism vital records 14, 77–79, 90n8 see also bills of mortality Vives, Juan Luis 140 Waage, Frederick O. 110n20 Walford 91m10 Ward, Joseph P. 57 Watch (fict.) 176 watchers 170, 176 Wear, Andrew 2, 25n4, 86 websites 231–32

260 Index Webster, John: on aftermath of plague 55; reversal of plague writing’s elements 66–69; Westward Ho 19, 55, 61–62, 66–70 Webster, Tom 94n44 Weeping Lady (Brewer) 170 Weimann, Robert 186–87 Westward Ho (Dekker and Webster) 19, 55, 61–62, 66–70 White, Francis 84–85, 87 White, Thomas 61 Whitney, Charles 16-17, 23–24, 28n32, 32n50, 52n9, 71n4, 71n9, 74n37, 145, 149n44, 165,168n32, 200n24, 201–18, 241 Williams, Dmitri 232 Wilson, Arthur 114–16, 121, 125n2 Wilson, F.P. 33n56, 172, 175, 176, 179n1, Windet, John 58–59 Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare): changing of sickness to cure in theaters 151; on closed spaces 22, 150; on healing after great pain 164; Hermione’s trial 165; suspicious husbands of 156 Wolsey, Thomas (Cardinal) 77–78 Wonderful Year, The (Dekker): as account of environmental catastrophe 202–3; accounts of heroism, cowardice, greed in 169; association of James I accession with healing 100; association of plague with Elizabeth’s death 99–100; association of plague with

theater 99; attitude of 50; compared to A Dialogue Against the Fever Pestilence 37; conclusion of 19, 49; condemnation of runaways 60, 202; content of 201, 204; context of 44–45, 204; on crisis as opening for festivity 23; on curative powers of mirth 140; Dekker’s role in 204–5; depiction of urban life 50, 61; description of plague corpses 62–63; description of plague’s arrival 6, 17, 46, 56, 61, 68, 120, 209; on fear of quarantine 150; on festivity as means of understanding/ dealing with plague 207–8; flow of fluids in 47–48; introduction of 48, 49, 74n48; materiality in 46–47; on potential for treason at death of Elizabeth 100–101; publication of 14; on reading as prophylaxis 222; remedies for plague in 75n56; representation of Elizabeth’s dead body 20; representations of London in 204; satire of 38, 44–49; stories of individual plague experiences 48–49, 74n49; on swiftness of death by plague 138; title of 101; underlying subject of 50; writing of 201 Work for Armourers (Dekker) 45–46 World of Warcraft 232–33 Wormald, Jenny 115 Wright, Thomas 140–41 Yersin, Alexander 234m8 Yersinia pestis see plague