1

FRIAR if thou darest, I’ll give thee remedy.

JULIET O, bid me leap, rather than marry Paris,From off the battlements of any tower,Or walk in thievish ways, or bid me lurkWhere serpents are. Chain me with roaring bears,Or hide me nightly in a charnel house,O’ercovered quite with dead men’s rattling bones,With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls.Or bid me go into a new-made graveAnd hide me with a dead man in his shroud(Things that to hear them told have made metremble),And I will do it without fear or doubt,To live an unstained wife to my sweet love.

(4.1.77-90)

The Allegorized Plague Becomes the Thing Itself

2

18th century Dance of Death by

Matthaus Merian in the style of

Holbein.

3Sicilian Crypt, photograph ca. 1900. Notice the bodies hanging from the ceiling and the skulls lining the walls.

4

Romeo in the Capulets’ Monument, Zefirelli Romeo and Juliet, 1968

5

FRIAR Poor living corse, closed in a dead man’s tomb!

(5.2.30)

5.3. ENTER COUNTY PARIS AND HIS PAGE WITH FLOWERS AND SWEET WATER [Q1, Q2, F]

PARIS: Sweet flower, with flowers thy bridal bed I strew

(O woe, thy canopy is dust and stones!)Which with sweet water nightly I will dew,Or, wanting that, with tears distilled by moans.

(5.3.12-15)

ROMEO Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death,Gorged with the dearest morsel of the earth,Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open,And in despite I’ll cram thee with more food.

(5.3.45-8)

Scent case, England, 1620.

Victoria and Albert Museum.

6

KING HENRY I pray thee bear my former answer back.Bid them achieve me and then sell my bones.[…]A many of our bodies shall no doubtFind native graves, upon the which, I trust,Shall witness live in brass of this day’s work.And those that leave their valiant bones in France,Dying like men, though buried in your dunghills,They shall be famed; for there the sun shall greetthemAnd draw their honors reeking up to heaven,Leaving their earthly parts to choke your clime,The smell whereof shall breed a plague in France.Mark, then, abounding valor in our English,That being dead, like to the bullet’s crazing,Break out into a second course of mischief,Killing in relapse of mortality. (KING HENRY V, 4.3.94-109)

The Miasmatic Corpse

7

FRIAR LAWRENCE: Lady, come from that nestOf death,

contagion, and unnatural sleep.

(5.3.156-7)

James Northcote. Romeo and Juliet, act V, scene III, Monument belonging to the Capulets: ca. 1790. Courtesy of LUNA

8

Carved beams on the exterior of a 16th century Charnel House, (repository for the bodies of the infected), Rouen, France.

9

NURSE Well, Susan is with God (1.3.21)

NURSE And then my husband (God be with his soul,He was a merry man) took up the child.

(1.3.43-44)

CAPULET Earth hath swallowed all my hopes but she; She’s the hopeful lady of my earth.

(1.2.13-4)

The Departed

16th c. toddler’s shoe, pulled from a London plague pit, Victoria and Albert Museum.

10

The Allusive / Elusive Pestilential Context of Twelfth Night?

We might wonder whether the closed-up house of Olivia, which “will admit no kind of suit” (1.2.47), is a house once haunted by this infection, given the deaths in quick succession of father and brother:

VIOLA What’s she?

CAPTAIN  A virtuous maid, the daughter of a countThat died some twelvemonth since,

then leaving herIn the protection of his son, her brother,Who shortly also died, for whose dear

love,They say, she hath abjured the sightAnd company of men. (1.2.36-42)

Is it this pestilential train of thought that leads to Viola’s odd simile, immediately subsequent to this exchange?

VIOLA There is a fair behavior in thee, captain,And though that nature with a beauteous wallDoth oft close in pollution, yet of theeI will believe thou hast a mind that suitsWith this thy fair and outward character. (1.2.50-

4)

11

Leiden pest-house, 17th c. Wellcome Collection

12

ORSINO O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,Methought she purged the air of

pestilence. (1.1.20-1)

Perhaps Viola is the figure who administers this purgation for Olivia.

Perhaps the play’s last song about the rain that raineth every day is a Memento Mori in reverse—a remembrance that amid death and grief, life happens

13

MERCUTIO A plague o’er both your houses (3.1.93, 103, 111)

an evocation, possibly, of Brooke’s description of the warring houses as “this common plague” (thus: the strife between your houses plagues us all, or plagues me to death)

A partial fulfillment, or a vengeful calling down of the fate that Romeo anticipates before the Capulet party:

Some consequence yet hanging in the starsShall bitterly begin his fearful dateWith this night’s revels, and expire the termOf a despisèd life closed in my breastBy some vile forfeit of untimely death. (1.4.114-8)

2. The ImprecationA good Renaissance term

meaning “the action of invoking evil, calamity, or divine

vengeance upon another, or upon oneself, in an oath or adjuration; cursing.” [OED]

14

Anon, Black Monday, or, A full and exact description of that

great and terrible eclipse of the sun which will happen on the

29. day of March 1652 Also as astrologicall conjecture of the

terrible effects that will probably follow thereupon, according to

the judgment of the best astrologers: it threatens the fall

of some famous kings or princes, and men in authority

malice, hatred, uncharitablenesse, cruell wars

and bloodshed, house-burnings, great robberies, thefts,

plundering and pillaging, rapes, depopulation, violent and

unexpected deaths, famine, plague, &c. London, 1651

“But in truth as touching mine owne opinion which is grounded upon the divine determination of Plato […], Aristotle and Auerrhois, I finde that this opinion, is both false and erroneous; as namely, to thinke that any contagion or misfortune, incommoditie or sicknesse whatsoever may by reason of the starres befall man.” Thomas Lodge, Treatise of the Plague, 1603.

ULYSSES: but when the planets

In evil mixture to disorder wander,What plagues and what portents!

what mutiny!(TROILUS AND

CRESSIDA, 1.3.98-100)

‘The comet seen when the plague in Florence killed 16,000 people’ (in 1340); tract from 1557, Basle. Wellcome Collection.

15

“This common plague”

16

George Wither,Britain’s Remembrancer

Containing a Narration of the Plague Lately Past,

London, 1628.

Some bitter force of consequentiality hanging over the characters’ heads

17

John Taylor, The fearefull summer: or, Londons calamitie, the countries discourtesie, and both their miserie. Oxford, 1625, reprinted and augmented, 1636.

18

Thomas Willis, A help for the poor who are visited with the plague, London, 1666.

19

Jean de Chassanion, John Beard, The theatre of Gods judgements wherein is represented the admirable justice of God against all notorious sinners, London, 1597, 1618, 1631, 1642, 1648.

20

Claim 2:The plague itself is a problem of categorical

uncertainty in early modern England-- an effect without a discernable, material cause

The Bacterium Yersinia Pestis.

Magnification: 10,500 X.

21

Robert Hooke’s Micrographia isn’t published until 1665. The transmission of the bubonic infection through flea bites isn’t fully worked out until the late 19th century.

22

The Plague is…

• A Fault in Our Stars• Death Stalking the Land• A Punishment from God• A Miasma of Uncertain Origin

(exhalations of the earth; various sources of

putrefaction, rats)• A Refutation of Galenic

Medicine / the Humoral body

An Epistemological Crisis

23

OLIVIA How now?Even so quickly may one catch the

plague?Methinks I feel this youth’s perfectionsWith an invisible and subtle stealthTo creep in at mine eyes. Well, let it be.

(TWELFTH NIGHT 1.5.300-4 )

3. A Mystery of Transmission

BEROWNESoft, let us see:

Write “Lord have mercy on us” on those three.

They are infected; in their hearts it lies.They have the plague, and caught it of your eyes.These lords are visited. You are not free,For the Lord’s tokens on you do I see.

LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST 5.2.456-61

24

BENVOLIO One desperate grief cures with another’s languish.

Take thou some new infection to thy eye,

And the rank poison of the old will die. (1.2.50-2)

The plague is an expression of untrackableaffective or somatic impact.

25

The Theatre and the Plague:not exactly causally linked,

but dangerously homologous

“to play in plagetime is to encrease the plage by infection: to play out of plagetime is to draw the plage by offendinges of God upon occasion of such playes.”

“Answer of the Corporation of London enclosing the Act of Common Council of 6 Dec, 1587”

“Plaies are banished for a time out of London, lest the resort unto them should ingender a plague, or rather disperse it, being alredy begonne.”

William Harrison, Chronologia, 1576.

26

“Of the imagination springeth the Pestilence,”

Thomas Vicary, The English Man’s Treasure, London, 1613.

“The power of the imagination, making somewhat of nothing, sowe[s] a pestilential Seed in the blood, which fermenting and swelling up, doth forthwith entertain the vital spirit that makes in it self a perfect Idea of that Disease.”

George Thomson, The Pest Anatomized. London, 1666.

“this minute I was well, and am ill, this minute. I am surpriz’d with a sodaine change and alteration to worse, and can impute it to no cause, nor call it by any name. [. . .] a Sicknes [. . .] summons us, seizes us, destroys us in an instant.”

John Donne, “I. Meditation, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, 1624.

27

The Plague is…

An unseen conduit of sensation or feeling.

28

29

“I went often to stage playes wherewith I was as it were bewitched in affection,”

The Journal of Richard Norwood, 1639-40

“The abuses of plaies cannot bee showen, because they passe the degrees of the instrument, reach of the Plummet, sight of the minde, and for trial are never brought to the touchstone. Therefore he that will avoyde the open shame of privy sinne, the common plague of private offences, the greate wracke of little Rocks, the sure disease of uncertaine causes; must set hand to the sterne, and eye to his steppes, to shunne the occasion as neere as he can.”

Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse, 1579

30

OTHELLO Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing

passion without some instruction. It is notwords that shakes me thus. Pish! Noses,

ears, andlips—is ’t possible? Confess—

handkerchief—O,devil! [He falls in a trance.]

IAGO Work on, My medicine, work! Thus credulous fools are caught,

And many worthy and chaste dames even thus,

All guiltless, meet reproach. (OTHELLO 4.1.48-57)

Tragic Passages on the Transmission of Affect:

31

LEONTES Affection! thy intention stabs the centre:Thou dost make possible things not so

held,Communicatest with dreams;—how can this be?—With what's unreal thou coactive art,And fellow'st nothing: then 'tis very credentThou mayst co-join with something; and thou dost,And that beyond commission, and I find it,And that to the infection of my brainsAnd hardening of my brows.

(WINTERS TALE 1.2.175-183)

32

BENVOLIO  Go, then, for ’tis in vainTo seek him here that means not

to be found.

[They exit. End of 2.1]

[Romeo comes forward]ROMEO  He jests at scars that never felt a wound. (2.2.1)

Scene 2

33

Why should we attend to the plaguey atmosphere of Romeo and Juliet?

1. Process: Recovering historical context—the myriad referents evoked and, to an extent we can never fully know, deliberately conveyed by Shakespeare—is part of what it means to read his work, and to seek meaning from it. This was Gail Paster’s strong introduction to her talk yesterday.

2. Argument: Since Oedipus, the plague marks a time that is out of joint. (In other words, it nicely supports the case I tried to make in my last lecture. Enough said.)

3. Meta-critical payoff: Romeo and Juliet has been and remains an exceptionally contagious play. It provokes strong attachments. In other words, it is the plague quickest caught in the Shakespeare canon.

34

By bringing the plague onstage, Romeo and Juliet is a work that takes on the force of its own uptake

George Cruikshank, Shakespeare, and honest King George, versus Parson Irving and the Puritans; or, Taste and common sense, refuting cant and hypocrisy. 1824. Courtesy of Lilly Library, Indiana University.

35

It asks us to ask why we feel what we feel when we read or watch these plays.

It asks us to notice our being human in the face of them.

36Set for the Capulet Party for Jean Cocteau’s 1924 production of Romeo and Juliet.

Goodnight, LUNA.