ABSTRACT
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.
