Plague prevention in early modern drama and culture: safeguarding bodies, homes, and streets, 1593-1625

Criticism in early modern English drama continues to expose the social-spatial anxieties generated by plague within both the plays and the playhouse space. What has yet to be considered in any detail, however, are the numerous public health measures born out of these anxieties that altered, if not more profoundly, the lived experience of space during outbreaks of the disease. This thesis offers fresh readings of six early modern plays that each offer distinct and significant insights into the early modern plague prevention experience in England. These experiences will be traced across three early modern spaces: The Body, the Home, and the Street. The first space, the Body, is interested in plague time regimens and remains. The moderated body of the affluent male is the subject of Chapter One, which reads Love’s Labour’s Lost alongside health regimens and plague treatises. In Chapter Two, I turn to Titus Andronicus to examine the cultural and material spaces occupied by the plague time dead both on stage and beyond the playhouse. In the Home, I attend to plague time cleansing and incarceration where, in Chapter Three, I examine how infectious sources are both introduced and removed from the plague time home in A Woman Killed with Kindness. In Chapter Four, I consider the shut-up plague time home and the female plague workers who pass in and out of it in The Woman’s Prize. The final space, the Street, focuses on plague time politics and pests. Chapter Five reads Measure for Measure as a response to the plague time public health disaster of 1603-4, and finally, in chapter Six, I contextualise The Witch of Edmonton’s Dog within plague prevention frameworks that only serve to increase his fearsome presence. This thesis offers the first sustained study of early modern plague prevention policy and practice in early modern drama. It will not only reveal early modern plague prevention to be a distinct and significant cultural phenomenon that generated its own discourse and anxieties, but it will also demonstrate how early modern drama is well placed to offer more nuanced insights into this phenomenon and the material and conceptual spaces that it transformed.

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