The Plague, Then and Now

By Dr Eleanor Rycroft

When the coronavirus outbreak hit I was halfway through reading Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet. As I continued to read this book about the loss of William Shakespeare’s son to plague, the pandemic developed throughout March, and a transformation occurred to the material. The book changed from being a historical, if heart-breaking, account of the death of a child, to a strangely prescient and very present tale about the sudden loss of anyone to an invisible illness. Ideas that had felt distant became suddenly close; fears that were one imagined were now being plucked from my own brain.

For the last year or so, I have been working on a research project which explores the staging and the meaning of walking in early modern drama. As a rule my research concerns bodies in performance, and I draw on a wide range of printed texts in circulation at the same time as drama to analyse how early modern bodies were understood and represented onstage. Like my experience of reading Hamnet, my response to my research has been transformed by the crisis we are living through.

Whereas, prior to March, I was writing blithely in my notes about “bad plague years” and the effect that these were having on movement and mobility in early modern literature, the material suddenly became more vital and, once again, prescient. The frequent closures of the playhouses during the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth centuries because of plague outbreaks, suddenly spoke to the theatres going dark in our present moment.

During 1603, the year that James VI of Scotland took to the throne as James I of England, a particularly bad outbreak of plague occurred, one that caused the death of 1 in 5 Londoners and continued on and off for the next 10 years. It was in this context that Ben Jonson created The Alchemist in 1610, a play which presents the machinations of servants in the absence of their master who has fled London due to an outbreak of the illness.

Outside of the theatres James VI and I issued a set of Orders in 1603 for the prevention of the plague – including a 6-week quarantine of the sick, and an injunction that if they leave their home then they should mark their clothes for identification. However, a large number of other medical treatises were written around this time. Prior to coronavirus, I had found one of these – James Manning’s A new booke, intitled, I am for you all, complexions castle as well in the time of the pestilence (1604) – particularly interesting, because of Manning’s advice that you should ‘command’ those that you suspect as sick to perform certain physical tasks for you:

“If you suspect any, as you may justly, where some have died out of a house, or where the next house have had the infection, then do as followeth; Command them to stand upright, and to reach themselves upright: if they faile to do it, then suspect a sore in the backe, bellie, brest, or flanks […] presently after this, command them to walke up and downe as fast as they can; if they halt, or steppe not largely, suspect a sore in the thighs, flanks, knees, backe, or hippes: presently after this, command them to bow down foreward to the ground, and reach up something, not removing any foote, if they cannot, then suspect the flanks, or backe: if they do performe all this, and be very short winded, having no other disease knowne; then suspect a soare to ensue, or the bodie very shortly to be in great danger by the pestilence.” (1604, E2r-v)

Colonel Tom Moore

As I read the same text now, it seems to imply a similar distrust of others that has led some people to spy on their neighbours during lockdown. Pandemics may bring out some of the best in us – Clap for Carers, Colonel Tom Moore – but they also appear to bring out some of our worst.

While Manning is from Wellingborough, the place bearing the brunt of the plague – as with coronavirus – is London. In 1603, the playwright and pamphleteer Thomas Dekker published The Wonderfull Yeare, a text which considers all of the strange (or ‘full of wonder’) events, from Elizabeth’s death, to James’ inauguration, to the plague itself. In it, he makes the point that once the ‘pestilence’ takes hold of the body, it has the potential to punish even the strongest and fittest of us, resonating with our disbelief when we hear of somebody who has died of COVID-19 ‘with no underlying health conditions’:

“How nimble is Sickness, and what skill hath he in all the weapons he playes withall? The greatest cutter that takes up the Mediterranean Ile in P[au]les for his Gallery to walke in, cannot ward off his blowes. Hes the best Fencer in the world […] he’ll make you give him ground […] and beat you out of breath, though Aeolus himselfe plaid upon your wind-pipe.” (1603, D4r)

For all of our understanding that certain structural, economic and physiological factors make some people more susceptible to COVID-19, Dekker’s comment upon the indiscriminate nature of illness brings his text right into our present moment, even while the references to the St. Paul’s and fencing locate it firmly in the past. By invoking St. Paul’s Cathedral, Dekker provides the reader with a glimpse of a London locale which was far more than simply a place of worship in the seventeenth-century, but rather one which bustled with cultural and commercial activity.

The ‘Mediterranean Aisle’ was the name given to the central walkway of the Cathedral and Dekker draws our attention not only to the parading around which took place in the church but also, implicitly, the connection between social proximity and disease. A later pamphlet written by Dekker provides us with a vivid sense of what it meant to walk in St. Paul’s at that time, and of how easy it must have been for disease to spread in such a crowded setting at the very heart of the city:

“What layinge of heads is there together […] What shuffling, what shouldering, what Justling, what Jeering, what biting of Thumbs to beget quarrels, what holding up of fingers to remember drunken meetings, what braving with Feathers, what bearding with Mustachoes, what casting open of cloakes to publish new clothes […] I heare such trampling up and downe, such spitting, such [ha]lking, and such humming, (euery mans lippes making a noise, yet not a word to be understoode) […]

For at one time, in one and the same ranke, yea, foote by foote, and elbow by elbow, shall you see walking, the Knight, the Gull, the Gallant, the upstart, the Gentleman, the Clowne, the Captaine, the Appel-squire, the Lawyer, the Usurer, the Cittizen, the Banker, the Scholler, the Begger, the Doctor, the Ideot, the Ruffian, the Cheater, the Puritan, the Cut-throat, the Hye-men, the Low men, the True-man, and the Thiefe: of all trades & professions some, of all Countryes some; And thus dooth my middle Isle shew like the Mediterranean Sea […] Thus am I like a common Mart where all Commodities (both the good and the bad) are to be bought and solde.” (1608, D4v-Er)

Sadly one of the commodities being brought to this roiling sea of London society is the plague itself. There is still widespread disagreement among historians and epidemiologists about whether the plague was spread by animals and insects or through human-human contact, but there was clearly a sense among early moderns themselves that proximity was a factor in catching the disease. In Dekker’s depiction of bodies spitting, touching, and rubbing against each other, the potential for transmission is clear: there is saliva on people’s fingers, there is face-touching, and there is the flourishing of potentially infected clothes.

With such an emphasis on faces and mouths and fabrics, you can almost see infectious droplets pass through the air. With such a social mix and volume of people, you can almost sense the viral load. While these terms may not have been available to early modern people – or to me, a couple of months ago – they inhere in texts from the 1600s that are themselves contaminated by an ever-present plague. They underscore these texts’ responses to the body and reveal our inability as social creatures, really, to remain socially distanced for long.

Cited works

https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/blogs/sovereign-and-sick-city-1603/

Dekker, Thomas, The dead tearme (London,1608)

Dekker, Thomas, 1603. The vvonderfull yeare (London, 1603)

Jonson, Ben, The Alchemist (London, 1612)

Manning, James, A new booke, intitled, I am for you all, complexions castle as well in the time of the pestilence (London, 1604)

O’Farrell, Maggie, Hamnet (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2020).

Endgame for End Times

By Dr Isabel Stowell-Kaplan

A: So … What is the likelihood that we will get to see Endgame? 😢

B: Yeah […]
[Edited to omit various conversations about tension headaches, cancelled plans and working from home]

C: Yes, sadly I think Endgame’s gonna be a no go …😔 I actually think the Old Vic will be closed from next week as it seats over 500.

This conversation is from mid-March and already it feels quaint and impossibly distant.

Having made a return to the U.K. to take up my Marie Curie Research Fellowship at Bristol after ten years abroad, I was looking forward to returning to friends and to the theatre – ideally in combination. I’d made plans to see Endgame (dir. Richard Jones) at the Old Vic, quickly reviving a tried, if not quite trusted, practice for theatrical selection: one of us would pick a show and the others had to see it.

Though it does sound simple enough, the fact that the five of us have wildly different theatrical tastes has made for a kind of dramatic Russian Roulette over the years. We all saw things we wouldn’t otherwise – good and bad – and we had dinner and drinks to talk about it. You know, everything we all did before lockdown. This time it was Endgame, chosen likely as much for Alan Cumming as for Samuel Beckett. I have vague memories of seeing him on a different outing, that time upside down in a skirt at the Lyric, Hammersmith.

In any case, I don’t need to tell you that Endgame was of course cancelled, the Old Vic was closed, everything was closed.

Some time later I received an e-mail from the Old Vic announcing that for those still with tickets for dates unplayable, they would be screening the archive recording. For me, the fact that the Beckett Estate – an estate with such an ‘iron grip’ on Beckett’s work that they had, in 1994, prevented a production of Footfalls from touring to Paris because Fiona Shaw had roamed further than the stage directions allowed or who, in 2006, issued an injunction against an Italian theatre to stop the ‘use of female actors in the two main roles’ of Waiting for Godot (‘Beckett Estate Fails to Stop Women Waiting for Godot’) – had granted permission for the theatre to screen the show, underlined the extraordinary nature of these times. These were the (dramatic) End(game) times indeed.

And so, despite some concerns that watching Endgame right now might be a little too ‘on the nose,’ we agreed to watch it online together and all settled down to do just that.

Jane Horrocks and Karl Johnson as Nell and Nagg. Endgame, Old Vic Theatre. London, 2020. Credit: The Old Vic Theatre.

Watching Endgame in lockdown was a revelation; and not simply because I was watching a play in a post-apocalyptic landscape peopled by characters who seemingly cannot leave each other and rarely leave the room, or, in the case of Nell and Nagg, their bins. ‘New Tory policy?…’ asked friend ‘B’ over text.

It was more that what had previously felt like a strange, though affecting, exercise in postmodern nihilism, suddenly felt … immediate. The striking darkness of Hamm’s demand, ‘Put me in my coffin,’ for instance, answered simply, ‘There are no more coffins,’ seemed suddenly to foreshadow a desperate COBRA meeting of 2021. What is more, Beckett’s careful attention to the minute and even mundane elements of life were no longer remote or abstract but tangible and proximate. It was as though someone had accidentally pulled the world’s focus and Beckett’s mirror (up to nature) no longer reflected obliquely but directly. Take this:

HAMM (irritably): What’s wrong with your feet?

CLOV: My feet?

HAMM: Tramp! Tramp!

CLOV: I must have put on my boots.

HAMM: Your slippers were hurting you? (Pause.)

This line has always seemed witty and wry but also strange and obscure. In lockdown 2020 it simply rang true. In a world where you can’t leave your home, you might just as well change into your boots (and forget having done so) because ‘your slippers were hurting you.’ Similarly, this:

HAMM: You haven’t put on his ribbon.

CLOV (angrily): But he isn’t finished, I tell you! First you finish your dog and then you put on his ribbon!

Hamm and Clov’s commitment to catastrophic-era crafting would make Kirstie Allsop proud. Moreover, Clov’s angry insistence that Hamm doesn’t understand the order of things – in big or small ways – reflects the frustrations of so many locked-down and locked-in relationships.

Similarly, watching Clov’s ritualistic navigation of his delimited space – up and down and up and down the ladder to the exceedingly high windows – made a new kind of sense. Clov’s methodical commitment to his repetitive tasks chimed with a newfound awareness of our own cyclical routines.

Alan Cumming as Hamm. Endgame, Old Vic Theatre. London, 2020.
Credit: The Old Vic Theatre.

As our recurring activities – opening *our* windows, making dinner, taking daily exercise – have gained an oversized importance, Clov’s weary but unvarying commitment to his own became relatable in a way I never expected. I feel echoes of Clov’s careful self-choreography every time I open the door. Indeed, taking my government-sanctioned daily exercise, feels increasingly like a high-stakes rehearsal for Beckett’s 1980s television play, Quad: a choreographed ‘dance’ in which actors cross the stage at regular intervals, walking carefully-defined paths and never touching.

Though my original plans to see Endgame at the Old Vic were frustrated – a part of that outside world we none of us can reach – the archival recording, played at home in these strange times, enabled me, to paraphrase Kent’s famous exhortation, to ‘see [it] better.’ For me, to view Endgame in these end times helped to make new sense of the Endgame and the (End) times.

#WTWatchParty: or, Bohemia’s Socially-Distanced Sea Coast

By Dr Nora Williams

It’s both an unusually stressful and unusually exciting time to be a scholar of early modern drama in performance: every day, it seems, a new production is made available online, free to stream to one’s own home. Noticing an abundance of productions of Shakespeare’s late play A Winter’s Tale becoming available, Peter Kirwan and I decided to set up a series of casual Twitter watch-alongs, timed to culminate with the premiere of the 2018 Shakespeare’s Globe production. Our first event was last week, on 21 April, with the Cheek by Jowl production.

The event’s setup is simple: Pete and I announce a production and a coordinated watch time via social media, and encourage people to watch along with us and tweet their thoughts in real-time using #WTWatchParty. On the day, we send out a five-minute warning and press play on the stream at the same, along with whoever is joining in. We take a ten-minute interval, at which point we pause the stream together, and then we resume at an agreed time. This way, although we’re each watching from our own homes and devices, we have a sense of experiencing the show together.

Alone, Together
Of course, the live theatre event is unique, and I’m eager to get back to the theatre once it’s safe to do so. But for all my appreciation and fierce defence of live theatre as something culturally valuable and important, the #WTWatchParty and similar initiatives allow for a kind of interaction and a form of ‘togetherness’ that isn’t typically possible in the live theatre. While I frequently see shows with one or two others—and while it’s common for me to debrief a show with others who have seen it at different times—it’s not often that I get to discuss a production, in real time, alongside a large and varied group of friends, colleagues, scholars, and theatre practitioners.

Recent research by scholars such as Rachael Nicholas explores how streaming theatre ‘harnesse[s] the possibilities of personal digital technologies to engage their remote audiences’ (2018: 77). In that vein, several of us in last week’s #WTWatchParty commented on the joys of being able to share thoughts on the production in real time through Twitter. Rather than waiting until the interval to download and process our thoughts with each other, we were trading tweets throughout the performance, creating a kind of running commentary.

These comments ranged from evaluative to analytical, from joking comments on Polixenes and Camillo’s poor disguises to emotional expressions of outrage at Leontes’ behaviour. More than once, I sent off a tweet only to see another member of the watch party saying something very similar, at virtually the same time. We expressed our rage together as Leontes rejected the Oracle in Act 3; we revelled in the appearance of Time wearing a romper at the top of Act 4; we gasped in (virtual) unison as Hermione’s statue was revealed in Act 5. Despite being geographically separated, we experienced the emotional journey of the show together.

At other times, we engaged in productive discussions about our readings of particular moments: one especially fruitful thread emerged on the production’s treatment of the tail end of Act 4, Scene 4. In the Cheek by Jowl production, this exchange between Autolycus, the Clown and the Old Shepherd was staged in an airport departures lounge, with Autolycus as a power-drunk security agent who insisted on searching their bags, viewing their extensive immigration papers and, finally, physically beating the Clown. Viewing this scene in the context of a pandemic that prevents us from travelling across international borders, as well as from post-Brexit Britain in a group that included a number of immigrants, raised several questions and observations around class, race, and civil rights among the #WTwatchparty members.

My co-host, Peter Kirwan, is also the author of an excellent book on Cheek by Jowl, and his insider knowledge of the company and their practices yielded some exciting details about the rehearsal process. Having his tweets running alongside the production created something like a DVD commentary feature, where we were given access to titbits of process that aren’t usually visible in the final ‘product’ of the performance.

For example, Pete was able to give us a great deal of detail about the choices made for the Act 4 sheep-shearing festival, which is typically staged as an almost psychedelic explosion of flowers and colours. Cheek by Jowl’s more sombre affair, Pete told us, hinged upon the team’s unique interpretation of a single line, which suggested that the Old Shepherd’s wife was only recently deceased and that this was their first year hosting the festival without her.  

Future Streams 

If you’d like to take part in future events, we’re planning on at least three more #WTWatchParty events between now and June. Join us on Tuesday 5 May at 19:00 BST to share the Royal Opera’s stream of Christopher Wheeldon’s ballet version.  Later in the month, we’ll be watching the Globe’s 2018 production and the 2012 Globe to Globe production by Nigerian company The Renegade Theatre.  

Works Cited 

Kirwan, Peter (2019) Shakespeare in the Theatre: Cheek by Jowl. London: Bloomsbury Arden.  

Nicholas, Rachael (2018) ‘Understanding “New” Encounters with Shakespeare: Hybrid Media and Emerging Audience Behaviours’ in Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Theatre Broadcast Experience, eds. Pascale Aebischer, Susanne Greenhalgh, and Laurie Osborne. London: Bloomsbury Arden.