Representing the Plague in Early Modern England (review)

As its title makes evident, this collection treats plague visitation in early modern England as a represented event; what makes these essays so conceptually and intellectually engaging is precisely how. Against prominent readings of René Girard and Susan Sontag,¹ the contributors do not imagine plague as a metaphor of political and social disorder that has been evacuated of disordered bodies; they do not anatomize a cluster of metaphors that obscures the illness. Rather, representation and metaphor are part of the experience of plague: illness is metaphor. Ernest B. Gilman reminds us in his afterword that the term “plague” is a metaphor: a description of the expression of a pathogen and not the thing itself. So far as the encounter is with the symptom, one is automatically and immediately involved in interpretation. This displacement at the local level of the word is reproduced in numerous alienation effects: absent monarchs, quarantined houses, the red crosses on doors that indicated infection within. While many critical analyses of disease in the early modern period address the porous nature of the body—and the body politic—this fine collection reminds us of the enclosed, claustrophobic, and ultimately occluded experience of plague once a national strategy for plague control is imposed.

Certainly there was first-hand experience of plague visitations in early modern England: in 1603 alone, the year when monarchical power transferred from Elizabeth I to James I, London lost an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 people—20 percent of the population. No one could have been left untouched, yet as Barbara H. Traister observes (and other essays in the volume attest), “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” (169). Rather, plague is notable for its absence and displacement in the plots of early modern English plays. Instead, a “few plays” explore plague through the representation of the “material manifestations” of visitation in the structure of the house (169). The Plague Act of 1604 strengthened previous orders so that all persons attempting to break quarantine could be violently restrained within their homes—or executed for a felony offence if they roamed abroad (Statutes of the Realm, 1 Jac.c.31). John Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed, one of the “few plays” that fall within Traister’s scope, stages the rearrangement of social and domestic hierarchy that can occur in the absence of any outside society. The plague plot as a source of hilarity exposes the total isolation of a household under the force of plague.

Such isolation confines plague to the landscape of the imaginary. In Traister’s analysis, bodies are represented by the houses that contain them. Kelly J. Stage traverses different terrain: the fluid boundaries of city and suburb. The populations of London and its outlying wards fluctuated with plague; city and suburb were “stuck in a reciprocating relationship of disease and disorder” (57). Overcrowding in London forced relocation to the suburbs, aggravating the conditions under which plague thrived there. Plague also accelerated repopulation in areas where death rates were high. Wards outside London were morally coded as sources of pestilence. Urban instability ironically reinforced the demarcation of city and suburb in discursive space. Stage argues that plays such as Dekker and Middleton’s 1 The Honest Whore and Dekker and Webster’s Westward Ho “offer a geography defined by plague restriction and plague practices although neither play is explicitly about plague” (61). The comedies seek less restrictive space on both physical and moral grounds: “As the plays employ moral mappings of urban environments, they nonetheless muddle otherwise clean-cut distinctions of clean City, dangerous suburb, and saving countryside” (61). The migration of bodies was a particularly fraught enterprise during plague time, exciting social animosity and political upheaval. But flight to the “saving countryside” was the common reaction to plague visitation, when such flight was possible. Matthew Thiele perceives...