The Allegorized Plague Becomes the Thing Itself
FRIAR
JULIET
if thou darest, I’ll give thee remedy.
O, bid me leap, rather than marry Paris,
From off the battlements of any tower,
Or walk in thievish ways, or bid me lurk
Where serpents are. Chain me with roaring bears,
Or hide me nightly in a charnel house,
O’ercovered quite with dead men’s rattling bones,
With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls.
Or bid me go into a new-made grave
And hide me with a dead man in his shroud
(Things that to hear them told have made me
tremble),
And I will do it without fear or doubt,
To live an unstained wife to my sweet love.
(4.1.77-90)
1
18th century Dance
of Death by
Matthaus Merian
in the style of
Holbein.
2
Sicilian Crypt, photograph ca. 1900. Notice the bodies hanging
from the ceiling and the skulls 3lining the walls.
Romeo in the Capulets’ Monument, Zefirelli Romeo
and Juliet, 1968
4
FRIAR
tomb!
Poor living corse, closed in a dead man’s
(5.2.30)
5.3. ENTER COUNTY PARIS AND HIS PAGE WITH
FLOWERS AND SWEET WATER [Q1, Q2, F]
PARIS:
Sweet flower, with flowers thy bridal bed I
strew
(O woe, thy canopy is dust and stones!)
Which with sweet water nightly I willScent
dew,case,
England, 1620.
Or, wanting that, with tears distilled
by moans.
Victoria
and Albert
(5.3.12-15)
Museum.
ROMEO Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death,
Gorged with the dearest morsel of the earth,
Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open,
And in despite I’ll cram5 thee with more food. (5.3.45-
The Miasmatic Corpse
KING HENRY I pray thee bear my former answer back.
Bid them achieve me and then sell my bones.
[…]
A many of our bodies shall no doubt
Find native graves, upon the which, I trust,
Shall witness live in brass of this day’s work.
And those that leave their valiant bones in France,
Dying like men, though buried in your dunghills,
They shall be famed; for there the sun shall greet
them
And draw their honors reeking up to heaven,
Leaving their earthly parts to choke your clime,
The smell whereof shall breed a plague in France.
Mark, then, abounding valor in our English,
That being dead, like to the bullet’s crazing,
Break out into a second course of mischief,
Killing in relapse of mortality. (KING HENRY V, 4.3.94109)
6
FRIAR LAWRENCE:
Lady, come from that nest
Of death, contagion, and unnatural
sleep.
(5.3.156-7)
7
James
Northcote.
Romeo and
Juliet, act V,
scene III,
Monument
belonging to
the Capulets:
ca. 1790.
Courtesy of
Carved beams
on the exterior
of a 16th century
Charnel House,
(repository for
the bodies of the
infected),
Rouen, France.
8
The Departed
CAPULET
Earth hath swallowed all my hopes but she;
She’s the hopeful lady of my earth. (1.2.13-4)
NURSE
NURSE
Well, Susan is with God (1.3.21)
And then my husband (God be with his soul,
He was a merry man) took up the child. (1.3.43-44)
16th c. toddler’s
shoe, pulled from
a London plague
pit, Victoria and
Albert Museum.
9
The Allusive / Elusive Pestilential Context of
Twelfth Night?
We might wonder whether the closed-up house of Olivia,
which “will admit no kind of suit” (1.2.47), is a house once
haunted by this infection, given the deaths in quick
succession of father and brother:
VIOLA
What’s she?
CAPTAIN
A virtuous
maid,
thethat
daughter
of a count
Is it this pestilential
train of
thought
leads to Viola’s
odd
That diedsubsequent
some twelvemonth
since, then leaving
simile, immediately
to this exchange?
her
VIOLA There
a fair behavior
in thee,
In theisprotection
of his
son,captain,
her brother,
And though that nature with a beauteous wall
Who shortly also died, for whose dear love,
Doth oft close in pollution, yet of thee
say, she
IThey
will believe
thou hath
hast aabjured
mind thatthe
suitssight
Andthis
company
of men.
(1.2.36-42)
With
thy fair and
outward
character. (1.2.50-4)
10
Leiden pest-house, 17th c. Wellcome Collection
11
ORSINO O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,
Methought she purged the air of pestilence. (1.1.201)
Perhaps Viola is the figure who administers this
purgation for Olivia.
Perhaps the play’s last song about the rain that
raineth every day is a Memento Mori in
reverse—a remembrance that amid death and
grief, life happens
12
A good Renaissance term
meaning “the action of invoking
evil, calamity, or divine2. The Imprecation
vengeance upon another, or
upon oneself, in an oath or
MERCUTIO
A plague
adjuration; cursing.”
[OED] o’er both your houses
(3.1.93, 103,
111)
an evocation, possibly, of Brooke’s description of the warring
houses as “this common plague” (thus: the strife between your
houses plagues us all, or plagues me to death)
A partial fulfillment, or a vengeful calling down of the fate that
Romeo anticipates before the Capulet party:
Some consequence yet hanging in the stars
Shall bitterly begin his fearful date
With this night’s revels, and expire the term
Of a despisèd life closed13 in my breast
By some vile forfeit of untimely death. (1.4.114-8)
Anon, Black Monday, or, A full
and exact description of that
‘The comet seengreat and terrible eclipse of the
“But
in truth as touching mine
sun
when the plague
in which will happen on the 29.
owne
opinion
which
is grounded
day
of March
1652
Also as
Florence killed
16,000
upon
the divine conjecture
determination
of
people’ (in 1340);
tract
astrologicall
of the
Plato
[…],effects
Aristotle
and
from 1557, Basle.
terrible
that
will probably
Wellcome Collection.
Auerrhois,
I finde thataccording
this
follow thereupon,
to
opinion,
isjudgment
both false
and
the
of
the best
ULYSSES:
but when the planets
erroneous;
as namely,
to thinke
astrologers:
it threatens
the fall
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
that any
contagion
or misfortune,
of some
famous
kings or
What plagues and what portents! what
incommoditie
or men
sicknesse
princes, and
in authority
mutiny!
whatsoever
may by
reason of
(TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, 1.3.98malice,
hatred,
theuncharitablenesse,
starres befall man.”cruell
Thomas
100)
wars
Lodge,
Treatise ofhouse-burnings,
the Plague,
and bloodshed,
1603. great robberies, thefts,
plundering and pillaging, rapes,
depopulation, violent and
unexpected deaths, famine,
plague, &c. London, 1651
14
“This common plague”
15
George Wither,
Britain’s Remembrancer
Containing a Narration of
the Plague Lately Past,
London, 1628.
Some bitter force of
consequentiality hanging
over the characters’ heads
16
John Taylor, The fearefull summer: or, Londons
calamitie, the countries discourtesie, and both their
miserie. Oxford, 1625, reprinted and augmented, 1636.
17
Thomas Willis, A help for
the poor who are visited
with the plague, London,
1666.
18
Jean de Chassanion, John
Beard, The theatre of Gods
judgements wherein is
represented the admirable
justice of God against all
notorious sinners, London,
1597, 1618, 1631, 1642,
1648.
19
Claim 2:
The plague itself is a problem of categorical
uncertainty in early modern England-an effect without a discernable, material cause
The Bacterium
Yersinia Pestis.
Magnification:
10,500 X.
20
Robert Hooke’s
Micrographia
isn’t published
until 1665. The
transmission of
the bubonic
infection
through flea
bites isn’t fully
worked out until
the late 19th
century.
21
A Fault in Our Stars
Death Stalking the Land
A Punishment from God
A Miasma of Uncertain Origin
(exhalations of the earth;
various sources of
putrefaction, rats)
• A Refutation of Galenic
Medicine / the Humoral body
An Epistemological Crisis
22
The Plague is…
•
•
•
•
3. A Mystery of Transmission
OLIVIA
How now?
BEROWNE
Soft, let us see:
EvenWrite
so quickly
maymercy
one catch
“Lord have
on us”the
on plague?
those three.
Methinks
I feel
this youth’s
They are
infected;
in theirperfections
hearts it lies.
WithThey
an invisible
subtle
stealth
have theand
plague,
and
caught it of your
To creep
eyes.in at mine eyes. Well, let it be.
NIGHT
)
These(TWELFTH
lords are visited.
You1.5.300-4
are not free,
For the Lord’s tokens on you do I see.
LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST 5.2.456-61
23
BENVOLIO One desperate grief cures with another’s
languish.
Take thou some new infection to thy eye,
And the rank poison of the old will die. (1.2.50-2)
The plague is an expression of untrackable
affective or somatic impact.
24
The Theatre and the Plague:
not exactly causally linked,
but dangerously homologous
“to play in plagetime is to encrease the plage by infection:
to play out of plagetime is to draw the plage by
offendinges of God upon occasion of such playes.”
“Answer of the Corporation of London enclosing the
Act of Common Council of 6 Dec, 1587”
“Plaies are banished for a time out of London, lest the
resort unto them should ingender a plague, or rather
disperse it, being alredy begonne.”
William Harrison, Chronologia, 1576.
25
“Of the imagination springeth the Pestilence,”
Thomas Vicary, The English Man’s Treasure, London,
1613.
“The power of the imagination, making somewhat of
nothing, sowe[s] a pestilential Seed in the blood, which
fermenting and swelling up, doth forthwith entertain the
vital spirit that makes in it self a perfect Idea of that
Disease.”
George Thomson, The Pest Anatomized. London, 1666.
“this minute I was well, and am ill, this minute. I am
surpriz’d with a sodaine change and alteration to worse,
and can impute it to no cause, nor call it by any name. [. . .]
a Sicknes [. . .] summons us, seizes us, destroys us in an
instant.”
26
27
The Plague is…
An unseen conduit of
sensation or feeling.
28
“I went often to stage playes wherewith I was as it were
bewitched in affection,”
The Journal of Richard Norwood, 1639-40
“The abuses of plaies cannot bee showen, because
they passe the degrees of the instrument, reach of the
Plummet, sight of the minde, and for trial are never
brought to the touchstone. Therefore he that will
avoyde the open shame of privy sinne, the common
plague of private offences, the greate wracke of little
Rocks, the sure disease of uncertaine causes; must set
hand to the sterne, and eye to his steppes, to shunne
the occasion as neere as he can.”
Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse, 1579
29
Tragic Passages on the Transmission of
Affect:
OTHELLO Nature would not invest herself in such
shadowing
passion without some instruction. It is not
words that shakes me thus. Pish! Noses, ears, and
lips—is ’t possible? Confess—handkerchief—O,
devil! [He falls in a trance.]
IAGO
are
Work on, My medicine, work! Thus credulous fools
caught,
And many worthy and chaste dames even thus,
All guiltless, meet reproach. (OTHELLO 4.1.48-57)
30
LEONTES Affection! thy intention stabs the centre:
Thou dost make possible things not so held,
Communicatest with dreams;—how can this be?—
With what's unreal thou coactive art,
And fellow'st nothing: then 'tis very credent
Thou mayst co-join with something; and thou dost,
And that beyond commission, and I find it,
And that to the infection of my brains
And hardening of my brows.
(WINTERS TALE 1.2.175-183)
31
BENVOLIO Go, then, for ’tis in vain
To seek him here that means not to be found.
[They exit. End of 2.1]
Scene 2
[Romeo comes forward]
ROMEO
He jests at scars that never felt a wound. (2.2.1)
32
Why should we attend to the plaguey
atmosphere of Romeo and Juliet?
1. Process: Recovering historical context—the myriad
referents evoked and, to an extent we can never fully
know, deliberately conveyed by Shakespeare—is part
of what it means to read his work, and to seek
meaning from it. This was Gail Paster’s strong
introduction to her talk yesterday.
2. Argument: Since Oedipus, the plague marks a time
that is out of joint. (In other words, it nicely supports
the case I tried to make in my last lecture. Enough
said.)
3. Meta-critical payoff: Romeo and Juliet has been and
remains an exceptionally contagious play. It provokes
strong attachments. In other words, it is the plague
33
quickest caught in the Shakespeare
canon.
By bringing the plague onstage, Romeo and Juliet is a work
that takes on the force of its own uptake
George Cruikshank, Shakespeare, and honest King George, versus
Parson Irving and the Puritans; or, Taste and common sense, refuting cant
and hypocrisy. 1824. Courtesy of Lilly34Library, Indiana University.
It asks us to ask why we feel what we feel when
we read or watch these plays.
It asks us to notice our being human in the face of
them.
35
Set for the Capulet Party for Jean Cocteau’s 1924 production of Romeo and Juliet.
36
Goodnight, LUNA.