ABSTRACT
How does plague affect our power to speak? Can our choices in speech actually shape our experience of the plague? On the one hand, plague can overwhelm us: as trauma theory has been articulating, cataclysmic events such as a deadly pandemic can lead to silence.1 But as political reactions to the HIV epidemic demonstrate, disease can also lead to an end of silence, to a new articulation of cultural voices previously unheard. The subject of this essay is the meeting place of one set of plague experiences, the outbreaks of bubonic plague in Elizabethan England, with one tradition of writing, English prose satire. The disease and satire each had a long and separate history, with plague in the fourteenth century deeply changing English life and satire drawing upon both classical and native traditions to establish a place within literary culture. But when they met during the plague outbreaks in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, they both changed: satire took on a new role, and what it was like to endure the plague began to incorporate modern forms of expression.
