![]() Playwright Thomas Dekker’s pamphlet, The Wonderful Year, likened the outbreak to a battle against the adversary, Death: The Folger Shakespeare Library’s website contains illustrations of some of these documents.Ĭollecting bodies during the Great Plague of London, 1665 In the radio programme Shakespeare’s Restless World, Neil MacGregor talks about documents of the time, plague orders that gave people advice on how to cope: counting the infected, burying the dead, covering the costs. One in five citizens of London, about 25,000 people died. It was so serious that the King’s grand procession into London had to be postponed. The closing of the theatres because of plague could have damaged his career, but instead Shakespeare took the opportunity to find a patron and write his two long poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.Īn even more serious outbreak occurred in the summer of 1603, the year James 1 came from Scotland to succeed to the throne, and Shakespeare and his company became the King’s Men. Bills of Mortality were published giving details of who had died, parish by parish. ![]() In 1592, when Shakespeare’s career as a writer was just taking off, one in twelve Londoners died. During 1564 around 250 people died in the town compared with fewer than 60 the year before. William, just three months old, was lucky to survive: people often escaped to places of safety and it’s thought his mother may have taken him to her home village of Wilmcote. The words Hic incepit pestis (here begins the plague) were written in the church’s burial register on 11 July. One occurred in Stratford during the year Shakespeare was born, 1564. The Black Death took place during the 1340s and 1350s, centuries before Shakespeare lived, but with about a third of the population of Europe and Asia dying the effects were long-lasting.īetween The Black Death and the 1665 Great Plague of London there were recurrent outbreaks. No wonder that Plague Doctor costumes, rather than being reassuring, have become frightening symbols of death.įor Shakespeare and his contemporaries plague was a continuing threat. Modern uniforms are routinely cleaned and sterilised, but these costumes may themselves have spread infection. This was designed to be filled with herbs and even straw to help prevent infection. It’s similar to the costume worn by the plague doctors of the seventeenth century, an all-covering cloak of waxed leather, with boots, gloves and a distinctive head-dress with a beak-like covering for nose and mouth. Nowadays those responsible for caring for victims of Ebola wear a distinctive enveloping costume that completely hides the person’s identity.
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