As the dial hand tells o’er
The same hours it had before,
Still beginning in the ending,
Circular account still lending,
So, most mighty Queen we pray,
Like the dial day by day
You may lead the seasons on,
Making new when old are gone,
That the babe which now is young
And hath yet no use of tongue
Many a Shrovetide here may bow
To that empress I do now,
That the children of these lords,
Sitting at your council boards,
May be grave and aged seen
Of her that was their fathers’ queen.
Once I wish this wish again,
Heaven subscribe it with ‘Amen’.
The Dutch Church was housed in the former Austin Friars priory on Broad Street and is visible on the Agas map of London (c.1562) marked S. Augusti. It began to serve Dutch and Flemish immigrants from about 1550.
Elizabeth was lucky. She survived into old age. Many of her subjects did not, victims of that most terrifying of Elizabethan diseases, which we will be looking at in the next chapter – the plague.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Plague and the Playhouse
PLAGUE PROCLAMATIONS
In 1564, as we saw in Chapter two, a quarter of the population of Stratford-upon-Avon died of the plague. One of those who escaped was the infant William Shakespeare – though on the street where he was born, in April that year, one family lost all four of their children to the disease. Shakespeare’s life was marked by plague: his career was shaped by it, his audiences feared it, and many of them died of it. But there is no great play about it, by Shakespeare or any of his contemporaries. Its absence is one of the puzzles of Shakespearean scholarship.
Yet if plague never appears on stage, it can rarely have been far from the thoughts of the audience and the players. And never more so than in 1603, a year which the playwright Thomas Dekker commemorated in a pamphlet called quite simply The Wonderfull Yeare. What Dekker calls wonderful – by which he means full of wonders – was, for most Londoners, more appropriately described as terrifying.
On 24 March, Queen Elizabeth died.
To report of her death (like a thunder-clap) was able to kill thousands, it took away hearts from millions: for having brought up (even under her wing) a nation that was almost begotten and born under her; that never shouted any other Ave than for her name, never saw the face of any Prince but herself, never understood what that strange outlandish word Change signified: how was it possible, but that her sickness should throw abroad an universal fear and her death an astonishment?
Though Elizabeth’s death had been long anticipated, the long security of a forty-five-year reign suddenly evaporated. Nobody knew what her successor, her foreign cousin James of Scotland, was likely to do. But the fears surrounding James’s succession were overtaken a few months later by the most frightening of all the year’s events:
23 June 1603: Forasmuch as the infection of the plague is at this present greatly increased and dispersed as well in the Cities of London and Westminster, as also in the Suburbs thereof, the King’s Most Excellent Majesty considering that great peril and danger might ensue not only unto his Royal person, the Queen’s Majesty, the Prince, and Princess, the Honourable Ambassadors from sundry foreign Princes, the Lords and others of his Majesty’s Honourable Privy Counsel, the Nobles of this Realm, and other his Majesty’s loving Subjects, if the people of all sorts, and out of all parts of this Realm, should resort or continue together for their Suits and Causes.
James’s reign began in a cruelly testing way: not with processions of rejoicing citizens, but in pestilence. In the British Library there sits the evidence of how the new king tried to manage this totally unmanageable situation. It is a run of royal proclamations, each one issued separately on one or two large sheets roughly the size of a modern tabloid newspaper. Such proclamations were the equivalent of today’s rolling news:
LOVELL: I hear of none but the new proclamation
That’s clapped upon the court gate.
KING HENRY: These things indeed you have articulate,
Proclaimed at market crosses, read in churches.
These proclamations were intended for mass distribution across the country, to be read out and then pinned up in public view. The royal arms appear at the top, and they all begin with the words ‘By the king’. The first letter of the proclamation itself is a large decorated initial, and the proclamation is printed in a dense typeface used specifically for authoritative public documents.
Mass communication by print was one of the few instruments the authorities had to try to control the spread of disease. In 1574, following one particularly severe outbreak, a set of orders had been printed and fixed upon posts containing, probably for the first time, instructions on how people should conduct themselves in the face of an epidemic. In 1583 a more elaborate list of commands was set up in parish churches and on posts through London. This became the standard response to all future plague outbreaks, right up to the gradual waning of the disease following the Great Plague of 1665. After a particularly severe outbreak in 1592, the authorities also began to publish London Bills of Mortality: these listed deaths parish by parish and could be bought at the cost of a penny (the price of entrance to the Globe Theatre). When the pestilence was at its peak in 1603, Bills of Mortality were published every week in large print-runs, providing an ever-changing plague map of London, which you could check to find out where the infection was raging and where you might hope for relative safety.
6 July 1603: Forasmuch as we find that the Infection within our City of London doth daily increase, and is like (to our grief) rather to augment than diminish, as well by reason of the season of the year, as by the great Concourse of people to our said City against the time of our Coronation, some to do their duties in such necessary services, as to them belongeth at that Solemnity, and some for comfort they take in the sight of our Person, of the Queen our dear wife, and of our children.
A true bill of the whole number that hath died…, by Henry Chettle. The London Bills of Mortality were either frequent lists of deaths parish by parish, or, as here, summarizing the deaths in a longer period.
As you leaf through James’s 1603 proclamations, which attempted to contain the disaster, and which were issued at a steadily growing distance from the infectious capital, you get a strong impression of a king on the run: ‘Given at our Manor of Greenwich’, ‘Given at our Castle of Windsor’, ‘Given at our Honour of Hampton’, and then on to Southampton, Winchester and Wilton. It was a wretched beginning to a reign – but the wisest thing to do in the face of plague was indeed to run. Richard Barnett is a medical historian:
Governments and states in Shakespeare’s time are a little worried about people running away from the plague. On the one hand, if you are an aristocrat and you have a country estate, or if you are a priest or a physician and you have a college at Cambridge or Oxford that you can retreat to, of course that is what you want to do. But there are great fears in this period that people running away will spread disease much more quickly, so this is why governments and states start to jump in with new regulations about quarantine and confinement and restricting movement.
Those who were not in a position to run away – people like the groundlings who paid a penny to stand in the theatre – were the ones likely to suffer most, and suffer they did, as Richard Barnett describes:
The most common kind of plague and the kind most associated with historical plague is bubonic plague. The bacterium gets into the body, it goes to the lymph nodes, you generally find these in the neck and the shoulder, the armpit, the groin: they swell up, they go black, in some cases they sort of burst open, and you get really nasty abscesses. With bubonic plague you fall into a deep fever, you get multiple organ failure, your body just starts to shut down.
Bubonic plague – the Black Death – had be
en endemic in Britain since the fourteenth century. Spread by fleas from the black rat, it was one of the hazards of hot summers. When it arrived, plague was fast and fatal and so disrupted the ordinary life of the city that even the busiest of streets sprung weeds and grass. During the outbreak in London in 1592, when one Londoner in twelve died, Shakespeare was lucky once again. The authorities closed the theatres, and the promising young playwright turned to love poetry. He acquired a patron – the Earl of Southampton – and wrote his long poems The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis, which made him a star among the literati. But even Venus seems to be conscious of what is going on in the real world as she whispers this startling compliment about her lover’s lips:
Long may they kiss each other, for this cure!
O, never let their crimson liveries wear!
And as they last, their verdure still endure,
To drive infection from the dangerous year:
That the star-gazers having writ on death,
May say, the plague is banish’d by thy breath.
Whatever his prowess as a lover, and however accident-prone as a huntsman, Adonis is clearly a sound choice in an epidemic.
Shakespeare’s early career is largely a mystery: the details of his life in the theatre before the closure of the playhouses in 1592 are largely lost to us. But he emerged out of the disruption and reconfiguration of the theatres as a senior member and resident dramatist of the new Lord Chamberlain’s Men, one of London’s two authorized playing companies. For the rest of the 1590s bad weather – the cool, wet summers that made for riot-inducing bad harvests – kept the city more or less free of plague: crowds gathered, theatres boomed, and Shakespeare was able to return to writing plays and making his fortune.
All this changed once more with the plague of 1603. As the Queen lay dying in March, the first victims began to fall. Soon after Elizabeth’s funeral on 28 April, it was all too obvious that London was caught up in another major outbreak. King James arrived in the capital on 7 May, but on the 29th he ordered the gentlemen and nobles already assembling for his coronation in July to return home until closer to the time. Over that summer, as far as possible, the city was shut down:
11 July 1603: The care we have to prevent all occasions of dispersing the Infection amongst our people doeth sufficiently appear by our former Proclamations, and for that cause we are contented to forebear at our Coronation all such ceremonies of honour and pomp used by our progenitors, as may draw over great confluence of people to our City.
‘Triumphant Death chases Londoners from their city, but country folk right, fearful of disease, drive them back’, from Thomas Dekker, ‘A Rod for Runawayes’, pamphlet 1625.
The 1603 outbreak was first noted in the theatre district of Southwark, and the authorities began the standard measures to prevent it spreading. Infected houses would have been easy to spot, as Hazel Forsyth of the Museum of London explains:
Families who were affected by plague were quarantined, usually for a period of a month. There were also measures to identify properties that contained victims: a pole had to be suspended above the door or from the window with a bundle of straw attached to it. Then gradually printed or painted paper signs were fixed to posts and sometimes to door lintels and the door itself with the words ‘Lord have mercy on us’. Sometimes also a painted cross on paper was used, and then the symbol that we perhaps most identify with plague today became the current one: the red cross. One foot two inches high, its size was very particular; it was painted in oil, presumably because it was much more difficult for people to remove.
Quarantine and those frightening large red crosses painted on the doors were something everyone knew about, and many would have encountered.
OTHELLO: By heaven, I would most gladly have forgot it!
Thou said’st – O, it comes o’er my memory
As doth the raven o’er the infected house,
Boding to all! – he had my handkerchief.
To enforce the policy of quarantine, new lines of work opened up: two ‘honest and discreet matrons’, who lived apart and received a fee of fourpence or sixpence for each body, would stalk the parish in search of signs of infection; ‘searchers’ were appointed to enter the isolated houses and reclaim the bodies of those lost to the plague. At a critical turning point in Romeo and Juliet, Friar Laurence is told why his crucial letter could not be delivered to Romeo:
JOHN: the searchers of the town,
Suspecting that we both were in a house
Where the infectious pestilence did reign,
Sealed up the doors, and would not let us forth…
Everyone in Shakespeare’s audience would have shared the fear of being sealed up in a house in this way and not let forth. But this is the only time plague plays any significant part in the plot of a Shakespearean play, as near as it gets to coming on stage.
*
Over the summer of 1603, the number of plague deaths surged. The coronation went ahead on 25 July, but the new King’s procession into London was cancelled.
29 July 1603: The infection of the Plague spreadeth and scattereth itself into diverse places of the Realm, and is like further to increase, if by the presence and care of such as are in authority and credit amongst our people, they be not contained in some good course, for the preventing of that contagion…We have thought it good to publish to all other good subjects of this realm, that our pleasure is, and we command that all such as are not our servants in ordinary, or be not bound to attendance about our court by express commandment of Us, or our Council, shall immediately depart home to their countries.
The next day, 30 July, James issued national Plague Orders, effectively declaring a state of emergency. These Orders are a little like the civil defence pamphlets of the Cold War period, giving explicit instructions to every citizen on how to cope with an outbreak of plague. Organizing committees were to meet in safe places, people were to be appointed to count the infected and the dead and to conduct burials; local taxes were to be levied to cover the costs. The 1603 Plague Orders contain detailed advice, with recommendations for possible remedies and tonics that sound suspiciously like advertisements:
‘Orders thought meete’, James I, 30 July 1603. On 29 July James ordered everyone who had assembled for the coronation to go home immediately. The next day he issued the full Plague Orders, in effect declaring a national emergency.
For the Poore take Aloes the weight of sixepence, put in the pappe of an Apple: and for the richer Pilles of Rufus to be had in every good Apothecaries shop. After letting of blood and purging (as shall bee needfull) some of the forenamed Cordials are to be used.
You can’t help wondering how much the manufacturers of the Pilles of Rufus had paid the printer.
The Orders also included a kind of plague recipe book, instructing you how to brew up rosemary, juniper, figs, sorrel, cinnamon and saffron to make a variety of remedies. One of the most surprising antidotes advocated – though not in the orders – was a noxious new herb from Virginia recently popularized by Sir Walter Raleigh. Hazel Forsyth says:
Tobacconists made an absolute killing at the time. This was the period when tobacco really begins to become extremely popular. Realizing that people could create a sort of haze of smoke around them, the tobacconists profited by suggesting that people might have perfumed tobacco which they could buy expressly to protect them against plague. There were also extraordinary recipes for plague protection in the form of treacle and gunpowder, which was supposed to provoke a sweat.
One remedy that was not available was to cheer yourself up by going to the theatre. Playhouses were closed during plague outbreaks because controlling the assembly of crowds was one of the few effective ways of keeping the death toll down.
8 August 1603:…And we do charge and enjoin to all Citizens and inhabitants of our City of London, that none of them shall repair to any Fairs held within any part of this Realm, until it shall please God to cease the Infection now reigning amongst them.
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br /> By late summer, it was not just the King and his young family who were moving progressively further from the capital. The London acting companies also headed for provinces, the plague effectively forcing Shakespeare’s company to develop what we might now call a national outreach strategy. Unable to play in London, they visited Richmond, Bath, Coventry and Shrewsbury, where they would have performed well-tried favourites such as Romeo and Juliet. It is worth wondering how those audiences in that ‘wonderful’ year of 1603 reacted to Mercutio’s dying curse: ‘A plague a both your houses’.
Around one in five of London’s inhabitants died in 1603, at least 25,000 people. It was the worst single outbreak of plague that England suffered for sixty years. Although the epidemic waned in 1604, restrictions on the theatres remained sporadically in place until 1610 – between July 1606 and the beginning of 1610, for example, there was only one brief reopening in the spring of 1608. For much of this time – the period of Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus and Cymbeline – Shakespeare probably retired to Stratford. He had previously been writing two new plays a year, but now his creative output slowed; perhaps there was no point in producing new works when the theatres could not put them on. Profits – and Shakespeare’s income – must have been badly hit by this freezing of the theatres, in spite of the occasional royal payments to compensate the playing companies for their losses. As a leading member of a company, however, Shakespeare would have been far less vulnerable than the independent playwrights dependent on piecework. (Dekker’s account of 1603, The Wonderfull Yeare, was written in part to make up for earnings he would normally have hoped for as a playwright.) Shakespeare was, of course, lucky to have survived the plague, but he was also lucky to have made his name and his fortune as a playwright in the 1590s – a window of booming activity in London’s theatre-land when the audiences of the still-bustling playhouses craved new work.
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