ABSTRACT
Plague was of great concern to the men and boys involved in the early modern London theater. In addition to the anxiety which the constant threat of plague and its intermittent epidemics raised in every London citizen, theater people ran an additional risk in time of plague: if plague deaths mounted beyond a certain threshold, theaters closed, by order of the Privy Council, and did not reopen until after the wave of deaths subsided. Thus, plague threatened actors, producers and playwrights, not only as a deadly disease to which they and all Londoners were vulnerable, but also with loss of employment that could last for weeks, months or occasionally more than a year.1 Despite this material threat to all those who worked in the theater and the many dramatic narratives that London’s experience with plague made available-witness the stories of heroism, cowardice and greed recounted, for example, in Thomas Dekker’s The Wonderful Year (1603)—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.2 A few plays, however, fl irt with actual plague and its material manifestations, usually by focusing, not on plague victims or mourners for plague victims but instead on houses, those threatened by plague or quarantined to protect the uninfected on the outside from it. When we understand how prominent the house becomes in the plays that do deal with plague, Mercutio’s famous curse, “A plague o’ both your houses,” takes on a new resonance, for example. Usually and properly read as referring to family lineage, Mercutio’s curse seems directed at the families of both the Capulets and the Montagues, a curse that is realized in the destruction of the entire younger generation of both families by the play’s end. But perhaps early modern audiences would have also heard the curse more literally: as a wish that the physical houses of these families be visited by the actual plague.
