The Plague in Print: Essential Elizabethan Sources, 1558–1603 by Rebecca Totaro (review)

A remarkable chapter of Maggie O'Farrell's recent novel Hamnet traces the progress of fleas transmitting the bubonic plague from Egypt to Warwickshire, with stops along the way in Alexandria, aboard ship outside Aleppo, then to Ragusa, Venice, Barcelona, Cadiz, Porto, La Rochelle, London, and finally Stratford-upon-Avon. O'Farrell also includes agonizing descriptions of Anne (she calls her Agnes) Shakespeare observing the effect of the flea bites, first staring down at the buboes swelling on the body of her daughter Judith, and then holding down her dying son Hamnet while realizing that "this pestilence is too great, too strong, too vicious […]. It has wreathed and tightened its tendrils about her son, and is refusing to surrender him" (O'Farrell 109).

Her experience, as Agnes knows, is common: "there are few in the town, or even in the country" who have not seen it before. The buboes "are what people most dread, what everyone hopes they will never find, on their own bodies or those of the people they love" (O'Farrell 105). Perhaps it is our current experience of pandemic that has made us so sensitive to such descriptions, able to understand how present—and how incurable and terrifying—plague and diseases like smallpox were in the early modern period. Young Hamnet was different only because he had a famous father, but that did not protect him, as Queen Elizabeth had not been protected from contracting smallpox in 1562, a few years after her accession. As we have lost millions worldwide who have contracted the plague of Covid.

Rebecca Totaro has become an expert on the early modern literature generated by the best-known plague, as seen in the analyses in her monograph Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literary Studies from More to Milton (2005), as well as in the essay collection Representing the Plague in Early Modern England, co-edited with Ernest B. Gilman (2010). In the book under review, The Plague in Print—first published in 2010 by Duquesne University Press and reissued in paperback in 2020 by Penn State—she transcribes, modernizes, and edits the primary sources on which scholars and novelists alike depend as they study legal, theological, medical, and literary reactions to the recurrent epidemics of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Although the book's subtitle uses the dates of Elizabeth I's reign (1558–1603), the sources actually begin earlier. As Totaro categorizes them, they include Plague Remedies (an example from 1531), Plague Prayers (the Church of England's A Form to be used in common prayer, 1563), government Plague Orders (Orders thought meet, 1578), Plague Bills (The Number of all those that hath died, c. 1583), and two outstanding examples of Plague Literature, William Bullein's A Dialogue both pleasant and pietyful (1564) and Thomas Dekker's The Wonderful Year (1603). Each piece is accompanied with editorial notes and, where they exist, notes from the original.

The best-known pieces, those by Bullein and Dekker, are also the most substantial. Usefully, Totaro places both in their context and contrasts them. The Bullein, she points out, unlike earlier works such as Boccaccio's, is entirely addressed to the threat of plague, and its author creates "a multilayered, lengthy dialogue to bring comfort to readers by offering them a sourcebook of medical and theological advice" (xii). Comfort is presumably supplied in this "literary entertainment" by its inclusion of "morality tales, travel accounts, humorous husband-wife banter, and satire" (xii). Although Bullein was a practicing physician who had published several plague remedies, nevertheless here he has a "decidedly Protestant, reforming agenda" (50). His conclusion is theological: the origin of plague was Adam's fall. In contrast, Dekker's plague pamphlet, written in the year of Queen Elizabeth's death and after many more outbreaks of plague, "never offers the reader a break from the grim...