“Deep Ruts and Foul Sloughs”: Sexually Descriptive Language and the Narrative of Disease

One of the more interesting and distinctive social conditions of the English Renaissance was the prevalence of the pox, a grisly and very visible disease which ravaged England, especially London, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The pox was a matter of great concern for the people of the Renaissance, and this concern is reflected in the ubiquity of pox imagery and pox references in the literature of the period, particularly in the dramatic literature.