ABSTRACT
In his poem “The Flea,” John Donne’s speaker revels in his realization that the flea that has bitten him has also bitten his beloved, thereby establishing an intimate bond between them: “It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee,/And in this flea our two bloods mingled be” (3-4). As he tries to convince her not to leave, he romanticizes the insect:
O stay, three lives in one flea spare, Where we almost, yea, more than married are. This flea is you and I, and this Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is. (10-13)
Within the flea, the speaker’s blood has mixed with that of his beloved, thereby making them, in his mind, “more than married,” the flea itself hallowed ground. His interpretation of the events, at once sensual and grotesque, reeks with irony but has its serious side-and that is what appeals to Naomi Wallace, a political American play wright who named her best-known drama after Donne’s poem. One Flea Spare, a play about four characters quarantined together during the London plague, likewise combines beauty and horror, gravity and wit, to explore issues of power and chance. Perhaps the most shocking quality of the play is the physicality of its prison and the sexuality which necessarily ensues, with Wallace’s staged setting itself a manifestation of Donne’s flea. Confined to two rooms of William and Darcy Snelgrave’s mansion, the Snelgraves and their accidental guests, a sailor named Bunce and a twelve-year-old girl named Morse, embark on a metaphorical but life-altering journey. One critic summarizes the action with a question: “What happens […] when members of different economic groups are thrown together in a claustrophobic space? What power struggles occur when they are all prisoners in the same cell?” The answer: “Strange things happen in isolation” (Hartigan C9). And stranger things happen in the belly of the flea. These four characters may have been spared the bite that spreads the plague, but they have been stung by something more dangerous and
more symbolic-something that overturns their world in much the same way that Donne’s language overturns romance.
