Of all the epidemic diseases, plague is by far the most literary—or perhaps I should say has inspired the most literature, from Boccaccio to Camus. The inspiration of literature was not the only beneficial effect of the disease, however: the Plague Orders of Elizabethan England forbade Sunday indulgence in tippling, gaming, and tobacco taking but, most important of all, prohibited “the outrageous play at the football.” Who, observing any modern English football crowd, could deny that this would be a most excellent thing?
Some scholars maintain that the plague reduced Shakespeare’s output and shortened his career. Elizabethan playwrights were like journalists: they wrote only when there was an immediate demand for their work. The playhouses were closed frequently during the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, once the bills of mortality showed that more than 30 or 40 people had died of the plague in the past week.
Other scholars have suggested that the quality of the drama fell with the decreasing frequency of the plague, for there is nothing like impending catastrophe to focus your thoughts on what is important in life. (“Depend upon it, Sir,” said Doctor Johnson, “it concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully when he knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight.”) Certainly, Shakespeare’s greatest plays were written at a time when plague was at its most frequent, if not quite its most severe.
It is hardly surprising that writers of the time alluded often to a disease that, at regular intervals, killed a tenth to a fifth of the capital’s population. If, in Romeo and Juliet, Friar John had not been confined in a house that was suspected of harbouring the plague, the all important letter would have reached Friar Laurence, and Romeo would have got his girl. And the most romantic love story would have ended with Juliet pregnant and Romeo deserting her, claiming to need his space because the relationship just wasn’t going anywhere.
It is difficult not to believe that Shakespeare’s description of the state of Scotland under Macbeth’s rule does not make use of the author’s experience of London during an epidemic:
Where sighs, and groans, and shrieks that rent the air
Are made, not mark’d: where violent sorrow seems
A modern extasy: the dead man’s knell
Is there scarce ask’d for who, and good men’s lives
Expire before the flowers in their caps,
Dying, or ere they sicken.
Oddly enough, the constant death knells got on people’s nerves. In Ben Jonson’s play The Silent Woman, the character Morose, a forerunner of Proust, was so exercised by the “perpetuitie of ringing” that he was led to “devise a roome, with double walls, and treble seelings; the windores close shut, and calk’d; and there he lives by candlelight.”
Of course, our ancestors considered that the plague was God’s punishment for their sins, provoked by the popular entertainment of the day, the drama. “The cause of plagues is sinne,” thundered one clergyman, “if you looke to it well: and the cause of sinne are playes: therefore the cause of plagues are playes.”
Luckily, he was wrong. For if television (the “playes” of our time) caused plagues, the bubonic and pneumonic would not be epidemic, they would be pandemically endemic, or endemically pandemic.
If, in Romeo and Juliet, Friar John had not been confined in a house that was suspected of harbouring the plague, the all important letter would have reached Friar Laurence, and Romeo would have got his girl