William Shakespeare Wrote in the Shadow of the Plague

In an article at the New Yorker, Stephen Greenblatt reminds us that William Shakespeare was born mere months before the plague began to kill villagers in his hometown of Stratford-Upon-Avon. "It is all the more striking, then, that in his plays and poems Shakespeare almost never directly represents the plague," Greenblatt writes. More: 

…In Shakespeare, epidemic disease is present for the most part as a steady, low-level undertone, surfacing in his characters’ speeches most vividly in metaphorical expressions of rage and disgust. Mortally wounded in the feud between the Capulets and the Montagues, Mercutio calls down “A plague on both your houses.” “Thou art a boil,” Lear tells his daughter Goneril, “A plague-sore, or embossed carbuncle / In my corrupted blood.” “Here’s gold,” the misanthropic Timon of Athens offers his visitor. “Be as a planetary plague, when Jove / Will o’er some high-viced city hang his poison / In the sick air.” “All the contagion of the south light on you / You shames of Rome,” Coriolanus spits at the plebeians:

You herd of—Boils and plagues
Plaster you o’er, that you may be abhorred
Farther than seen, and one infect another
Against the wind a mile!

Plague constantly appears throughout Shakespeare’s works in the form of everyday exclamations: “a plague upon it when thieves cannot be true to one another”; “a plague of sighing and grief! It blows a man up like a bladder”; “a plague upon this howling”; “a plague of these pickle-herring!” But this is a sign less of existential horror than of deep familiarity, the acceptance of plague as an inescapable feature of ordinary life. 

Continue reading at the New Yorker.