Plagued subjects : political culture of crisis in early modern English literature

This dissertation explores the intersection of plague and political culture as theorized within the literary imagination surrounding the three major plague outbreaks of 1593, 1603, and 1625, this is a period that loosely coincides with Shakespeare’s professional career (taking the first folio publication as a posthumous collaboration and the end of that career). In the early modern period, the plague marked both a threat to English political and social order, a moment of freedom as authorities retreated from the city and otherwise kept their distance from sites of infection, but also a moment when the English regimes of the period ambitiously attempted to mobilize an invasive, robust, and draconian inspection and containment policy. Within the literary texts of the period actual bubonic plague appears infrequently and “plague” is generally used figuratively. To understand the figurative “plagues” found within the literature of the period it is important to remember that the plague was an invisible, unknown object, not a microbe called yersina pestis. The disease as understood in the period was many things and it was ultimately, in its greatest expression, one deadly many-headed conceptual object erupting from the y. pestis bacterium. This plague-assemblage might have been imagined to be a disordered condition, a disordered person, tyrannical sovereignty, a lesser disease, a threat or curse, or the parts of the plague orders meant to confront the disease. The polysemic “plague" could be the plague or some other potential symptom of impending plague.