1 00:00:01,050 --> 00:00:04,560 Samuel already knew about the plague cases in Deptford. 2 00:00:04,560 --> 00:00:12,240 Even if he hadn't, the growing numbers of boarded up houses, giant red crosses daubed onto their doors would have given it away. 3 00:00:12,240 --> 00:00:17,340 He shouldn't be here. It was risky to be here, but he missed Elizabeth. 4 00:00:17,340 --> 00:00:23,500 It had been weeks since he'd seen her last and her husband would be away at the shipyard today. 5 00:00:23,500 --> 00:00:29,530 As he scampered down the street, he chewed his tobacco furtively, trying to keep away from the windows. 6 00:00:29,530 --> 00:00:40,210 They said it was spreading through the smells. Now. The sounds from the Deptford Tavern rang out past the houses, tempting him to take another risk. 7 00:00:40,210 --> 00:00:50,150 They seemed happy. Singing and laughing in the afternoon breeze. But he didn't think that that would last long. 8 00:00:50,150 --> 00:01:02,250 Welcome to the 17th century. And to the fourth episode of our History of Pandemics season, this is the last time that we'll focus on plague. 9 00:01:02,250 --> 00:01:07,340 And it's the last major outbreak of that horrific disease in England. 10 00:01:07,340 --> 00:01:13,970 We might dispel some myths along the way. For example, it wasn't the great fire of London that finally defeated the disease. 11 00:01:13,970 --> 00:01:23,900 Despite that oft repeated narrative and we'll drop in on one of the outbreaks, most famous commentators, Samuel Peeps. 12 00:01:23,900 --> 00:01:26,370 Stay tuned to the end as well. 13 00:01:26,370 --> 00:01:36,970 As we've also included a bonus conversation on Shakespeares experience during the earlier outbreaks, which led up to this final rate play. 14 00:01:36,970 --> 00:01:44,480 But test, I caught up with Paul Slack, emeritus professor at early 1960s Street, 15 00:01:44,480 --> 00:01:49,950 to ask him whether this was the same Plake strain that we saw in the Black Death. 16 00:01:49,950 --> 00:01:56,110 It is the same disease in a less fatal form. 17 00:01:56,110 --> 00:02:01,400 More tortures will much lower from the 16th century onwards. 18 00:02:01,400 --> 00:02:07,540 So we're not talking about anything killing a third of the population of your book. 19 00:02:07,540 --> 00:02:18,500 We're talking about regular academics, which might tell in that town 20 or 30 percent every five or 10 years. 20 00:02:18,500 --> 00:02:24,020 They go on and Mangrum from the black US to the period. 21 00:02:24,020 --> 00:02:28,070 I'm interested in, which often called the Great Plague of London. 22 00:02:28,070 --> 00:02:36,550 Sixteen sixty four. Sixteen sixty six, which was the last of the last epidemic. 23 00:02:36,550 --> 00:02:46,400 Or play in London where it might not offer Britain there were still plagues and other civil war, but they didn't affect England. 24 00:02:46,400 --> 00:02:50,720 I asked Paul what we know about how this all began. 25 00:02:50,720 --> 00:02:59,540 Most of it's in sixteen sixty five, but it starts from a of end of sixteen sixty four that there was disease, 26 00:02:59,540 --> 00:03:05,110 the plague in two parishes on the outskirts of London. 27 00:03:05,110 --> 00:03:14,870 And with the benefit of hindsight, later a physician said he thought of the same as a bird and brought him in a bale of cloth, 28 00:03:14,870 --> 00:03:19,890 probably from Holland, which should come originally from Turkish attack. 29 00:03:19,890 --> 00:03:30,170 It was thought to be the usual source of plague of this time shipping where it's Holland or to Britain, Quantou and Russians. 30 00:03:30,170 --> 00:03:36,080 There was a war on where the Dutch. This sort of precaution occurred, Madame. 31 00:03:36,080 --> 00:03:42,960 So that's December sixteen sixty four. Then there's no word of it. 32 00:03:42,960 --> 00:03:50,510 But in 60 to 65 in March, it flares up again all over the city. 33 00:03:50,510 --> 00:04:04,880 By the end of sixteen, 65 tons killed, about 80000 people getting on for 100000 people in a city of half a million. 34 00:04:04,880 --> 00:04:09,380 London by this tourist, the largest city in Norway. 35 00:04:09,380 --> 00:04:14,210 So this is a large dustbowl in a very large city. 36 00:04:14,210 --> 00:04:22,860 Were they in London? The distribution of deaths from close was, of course, skewed, partly social. 37 00:04:22,860 --> 00:04:34,490 They call it topographically the largest number for they Verster called Clode, were hidden in both the standard and the West Statens. 38 00:04:34,490 --> 00:04:44,620 They were in Stepney White Chapel in the East and in submarkets in the fields of Westminster in the West. 39 00:04:44,620 --> 00:04:54,380 But there were no trouble. A few deaths in the middle of the city, in the old walled city, which was the main business school. 40 00:04:54,380 --> 00:05:00,770 The reason for that was that the richest or so they were co-opted in the central city. 41 00:05:00,770 --> 00:05:06,900 It got out of town pretty quickly to travel friends from the countryside. 42 00:05:06,900 --> 00:05:11,030 Much of the inner city were soft deserts. 43 00:05:11,030 --> 00:05:22,100 So what happened was that the the main rounds of mortality was borne by the poorer sections of the population. 44 00:05:22,100 --> 00:05:29,780 Very large numbers of and supplies of the large section of the prosperous explains 45 00:05:29,780 --> 00:05:36,490 why there was such a concentration of mortality amongst the poor in London. 46 00:05:36,490 --> 00:05:40,700 Did the local authorities take any action to try to slow the spread? 47 00:05:40,700 --> 00:05:51,590 The regular policy against plague in England was to isolate those who were fractured together with our relations in their own houses, 48 00:05:51,590 --> 00:05:57,900 with the doors locked up, marked with a cross so that no one could move in or out. 49 00:05:57,900 --> 00:06:04,420 How so? Were shot up together. If one of them called blooded. 50 00:06:04,420 --> 00:06:11,560 Now, this was known at the time to be a primitive practise when compared with police before. 51 00:06:11,560 --> 00:06:15,640 They're more civilised parts of your life. Really? 52 00:06:15,640 --> 00:06:28,010 Where it was common to try to separate infections, combat contact, some related shoes to isolate both groups in separate institutions, 53 00:06:28,010 --> 00:06:36,490 an enormously costly investment in hospitals, some loss of wretched in such a solid flaw. 54 00:06:36,490 --> 00:06:46,180 In London, however, there were certainly a hub for a special plague hospital suppressed such around the city of Nairobi to see capable of cope, 55 00:06:46,180 --> 00:06:53,380 coping with the numbers we're talking about. People have to be isolated to their home. 56 00:06:53,380 --> 00:07:06,430 Now, it's not surprising that the policy was enormously unpopular and was criticised at the time by some physicians as counterproductive. 57 00:07:06,430 --> 00:07:15,730 If you were shot out, those initially infected with contrast, we are going to increase mortality very quickly. 58 00:07:15,730 --> 00:07:21,580 In any case, it was impossible to enforce this policy rigorously. 59 00:07:21,580 --> 00:07:23,680 That will buy us some jobs. 60 00:07:23,680 --> 00:07:34,870 This protest was started when it was first and first shutting people out of a house sub to be abandoned altogether in September, 61 00:07:34,870 --> 00:07:39,800 the number of people infected and crushed was sick. 62 00:07:39,800 --> 00:07:49,070 Contractors were allowed out, much to the horror of people like groups all over stretchable citizens still. 63 00:07:49,070 --> 00:08:00,830 So were terrified of culture. Pro pigs should already have been appalled by the stories of sick people day out of nowhere. 64 00:08:00,830 --> 00:08:06,990 Those are just deliberately perea the faces of people who were prall certain bars. 65 00:08:06,990 --> 00:08:11,310 This seems like a good time to introduce one of our key contemporary sources for the 66 00:08:11,310 --> 00:08:19,200 period a a many of us associate with the great fire of sixteen sixty six Samuel peeps. 67 00:08:19,200 --> 00:08:28,470 I asked one of the experts on his life, oxfords, Dr. Kees Wendland, who exactly Heap's was right. 68 00:08:28,470 --> 00:08:38,070 Samuel keeps his diary, which cover the entire decade of the 16th sixties, have become really one of the most celebrated, 69 00:08:38,070 --> 00:08:45,060 justly celebrated sources for social historians of the restoration period. 70 00:08:45,060 --> 00:08:52,500 And that's that's largely due to the that the rich detail that he provides piece doesn't appear to have any filters. 71 00:08:52,500 --> 00:08:55,890 He just writes about everything that happens to him. 72 00:08:55,890 --> 00:09:04,120 And the plague itself almost disappears from from much of what he has to say about that year in sixteen, 73 00:09:04,120 --> 00:09:08,760 sixty five, because there's so much else going on in his life. 74 00:09:08,760 --> 00:09:15,360 He's a young man on the make. He's 32 years old. He came from very humble origins. 75 00:09:15,360 --> 00:09:23,340 He was the son of a tailor growing up just outside and not get so in what was technically the West End at that time. 76 00:09:23,340 --> 00:09:29,960 But his family was, fortunately for Samuel, a very well-connected in their home region of Huntington. 77 00:09:29,960 --> 00:09:37,140 Sure. And as a consequence, he was able to to, first of all, acquire a good grammar school education, 78 00:09:37,140 --> 00:09:41,350 even to send poems, which at that time was just next to the cathedral. 79 00:09:41,350 --> 00:09:50,460 And from there, he went to Cambridge and became the private secretary to Edward Montagu, who was made the Earl of Sandwich. 80 00:09:50,460 --> 00:09:58,140 At that point, Samuel Peeps became secretary to the Navy office with a house attached to the 81 00:09:58,140 --> 00:10:02,970 Navy office and seething lane just just a stone's throw from from Tower Hill. 82 00:10:02,970 --> 00:10:08,070 And sixteen sixty five was really the great turning point for him. 83 00:10:08,070 --> 00:10:14,940 He was making enormous amounts of money compared to most people at the time. 84 00:10:14,940 --> 00:10:24,120 The plague is raging and he's celebrated the fact that he just spent a day of fasting which had been decreed, you know, for her for the plague. 85 00:10:24,120 --> 00:10:35,520 He spent that totting up his savings and discovered that he was worth nineteen hundred pounds, which in today's money is about two hundred thousand. 86 00:10:35,520 --> 00:10:40,320 Or calculating how a skilled craftsman might turn. 87 00:10:40,320 --> 00:10:47,530 If he were lucky enough to spend 80 years working flat out, he might have made that kind of money. 88 00:10:47,530 --> 00:10:52,410 So for a young man of 32. Started out with absolutely nothing. 89 00:10:52,410 --> 00:10:55,800 He was doing extremely well out of this this office. 90 00:10:55,800 --> 00:11:02,490 He'd been given as a reward, obviously, and to ensure his loyalty to the family, to the Montagues. 91 00:11:02,490 --> 00:11:07,290 So when did Peeps first mention the plague in his diaries? Here's his first entry. 92 00:11:07,290 --> 00:11:17,490 And I certainly hope that I'm not wrong here. I don't think I was on the 7th of June and he was on a shopping trip, which wasn't unusual for Samuel. 93 00:11:17,490 --> 00:11:23,700 He liked his shopping. He liked his clothes. In fact, he he writes about his clothes nearly as much as he does about the plague. 94 00:11:23,700 --> 00:11:32,250 Through that summer, he was visiting the West End and he was in the new exchange, which was sort of a shopping mall, 95 00:11:32,250 --> 00:11:37,770 early 17th century shopping mall in competition with the royal exchange in the city itself. 96 00:11:37,770 --> 00:11:42,720 He does not relate what he bought there, but as he was walking back into the city, 97 00:11:42,720 --> 00:11:47,670 he passed by Drury Lane and he noticed that there were some shut up houses. 98 00:11:47,670 --> 00:11:52,080 So these were houses, obviously, with the Red Cross daubed on to the door. 99 00:11:52,080 --> 00:12:01,680 God help us on the door. And that alarmed him. And he went immediately into a shop and he bought some tobacco, as he said, to chew and to smell. 100 00:12:01,680 --> 00:12:11,370 It was a conviction, as probably some of your other contributors have mentioned, that tobacco was regarded as a kind of a panacea against infection. 101 00:12:11,370 --> 00:12:16,620 Oh, he was also made an interesting reference to being concerned about his own smell. 102 00:12:16,620 --> 00:12:19,890 Take that for what it's worth. So that's that was his first reference. 103 00:12:19,890 --> 00:12:26,500 And at that time, the plague was only to be found in certain states in the West. 104 00:12:26,500 --> 00:12:30,240 And I think Longacre Street was was a hot spot. 105 00:12:30,240 --> 00:12:40,290 And the bones of mortality by the end of that month were no more than I think that the last week of that month of June, 106 00:12:40,290 --> 00:12:44,160 something like 267 died of the plague. 107 00:12:44,160 --> 00:12:53,490 So they sent the people himself understood that, in fact, that figure was probably an underestimate of the reality. 108 00:12:53,490 --> 00:12:58,110 So here he was under no illusions about about the official figures. 109 00:12:58,110 --> 00:13:01,920 In a way, perhaps, which is going to ring some bells for many people today. 110 00:13:01,920 --> 00:13:12,750 So we have a picture of our shashlik control, the infection correction in the middle of the summer of 68 64. 111 00:13:12,750 --> 00:13:19,780 Pape's stayed in the city for most of the time because we had a job in the Oval Office. 112 00:13:19,780 --> 00:13:24,410 But he had sent his wife four down the river to Woolwich. 113 00:13:24,410 --> 00:13:32,740 And your hair fall out of it all, just outside of the heart of the infection. 114 00:13:32,740 --> 00:13:37,270 The searcher was a Christian. Look, a place the poor. 115 00:13:37,270 --> 00:13:41,410 There were some respectable people just over there. 116 00:13:41,410 --> 00:13:52,120 What amazes me about the Great Plague, or 16, 64, is how some sunblock, more than a little semblance of good. 117 00:13:52,120 --> 00:13:59,200 Doesn't look too remote. There was never a right search through social order. 118 00:13:59,200 --> 00:14:03,400 Good luck to a lot of rumours about the green rocks and the strange. 119 00:14:03,400 --> 00:14:17,820 We don't actually find them. As always, the circumstances of some creep over a approach to stay in the city because I have Durchslag like, well, 120 00:14:17,820 --> 00:14:31,960 so physicians or clergymen, some of them followed the culture of physicians all over the richer crematoriums. 121 00:14:31,960 --> 00:14:41,200 One of them was Thomas, certain famous physician throughout the left, loved them afterwards, wrote a book about play. 122 00:14:41,200 --> 00:14:48,940 But it's not clear that he did a precision schliersee in the case of the war. 123 00:14:48,940 --> 00:14:51,960 But there were people who filled out. 124 00:14:51,960 --> 00:15:00,570 You've got unlicensed medical practitioners stepping in to help those who are sick or if they could afford to pay. 125 00:15:00,570 --> 00:15:10,180 But I'm no long called for honest clergy moving in to fill the gaps left by the clergy who are left. 126 00:15:10,180 --> 00:15:15,500 I was fascinated to learn more about what life might have been like in the city at this time. 127 00:15:15,500 --> 00:15:19,810 And Keyes pointed out that there's more than one account to choose from. 128 00:15:19,810 --> 00:15:29,520 Unlike many people, certainly if one reads, that's that latter day history of the year by Daniel Defoe 1722. 129 00:15:29,520 --> 00:15:38,290 The plague, as it is, is central to Defoe's accounts. And I think that that really has shaped many people's understanding of the plague. 130 00:15:38,290 --> 00:15:45,190 I don't think it was really so different from many people's experience today, although, of course, the dangers were far greater. 131 00:15:45,190 --> 00:15:51,790 The mortality rate was something on the order of 65 to 80 percent of those who caught the plague. 132 00:15:51,790 --> 00:15:57,130 People got on with their lives because they needed to in that sense. 133 00:15:57,130 --> 00:16:02,260 I don't think that people's experience was unusual in that kind of condition. 134 00:16:02,260 --> 00:16:08,650 There was nothing he could do other than obviously avoid quoting obvious danger. 135 00:16:08,650 --> 00:16:16,870 Nobody really understood how the thing was caught, but you certainly didn't want to linger in places where you knew there was a lot of plague about. 136 00:16:16,870 --> 00:16:26,950 Having said that, on some occasions, he he would actually, surprisingly put himself in considerable risk, usually for the sake of visiting some woman. 137 00:16:26,950 --> 00:16:35,590 For example, Mrs. Bagwell, who had wished herself on peeps, says as his mistress at the behest of her husband, 138 00:16:35,590 --> 00:16:39,950 who was a ship's carpenter and wanted to better ship to be appointed to, 139 00:16:39,950 --> 00:16:46,420 he'd visit her down in Deferent, which was actually a plague hot spot at that time, and he knew it. 140 00:16:46,420 --> 00:16:53,200 So there's obviously a lot of different conflicting motivations going on for Samuel. 141 00:16:53,200 --> 00:16:57,790 So it wasn't all doom and gloom to people then if he was in turn to have a good time. 142 00:16:57,790 --> 00:17:06,580 It was for some very pragmatic reasons as far as he was concerned, engaged or not, a lot of drinking, a lot of eating and a lot of music making. 143 00:17:06,580 --> 00:17:14,950 In fact, he is most things composition, beauty, retire, a song called Beauty, which I was written during this period and at the end of the year. 144 00:17:14,950 --> 00:17:17,440 And he always provides a summary at the end of the year. 145 00:17:17,440 --> 00:17:23,950 He said he'd never lived so well nor earned so much in his entire life as he did during the plague year. 146 00:17:23,950 --> 00:17:32,180 That surprised me, given what we know about the plague. And I wondered how his particular experience compared to that of others in the city. 147 00:17:32,180 --> 00:17:40,210 Yes. Well, I think, again, you know, it's it's useful to consult on our own experience in these extraordinary times. 148 00:17:40,210 --> 00:17:47,470 A single narrative just doesn't ring true, has it? People are experiencing what's happening in all sorts of different ways. 149 00:17:47,470 --> 00:17:53,850 And aside from the illness and everybody's concern about the spread of that illness, 150 00:17:53,850 --> 00:17:57,910 there are all sorts of winners and losers on all sorts of different levels. 151 00:17:57,910 --> 00:18:02,560 So we mustn't lose sight of the forest by focussing on a single tree. 152 00:18:02,560 --> 00:18:08,680 And as Paul already pointed out, he wasn't in London for the whole of this outbreak. 153 00:18:08,680 --> 00:18:13,020 I'm glad you raised that. The general assumption is that he was, in fact. 154 00:18:13,020 --> 00:18:20,350 No, he wasn't. He spent a great deal of time in village visiting Mrs Backbone, of course, on occasion, 155 00:18:20,350 --> 00:18:32,280 but also because the night the office itself was moved down to Greenwich and in the second half of September, for example, the. 156 00:18:32,280 --> 00:18:41,250 Almost disappears from his is his daily accounts, because he's spending a great deal of time down in Greenwich and and on on ships in the fleet. 157 00:18:41,250 --> 00:18:51,030 Indeed, he does not at one point that that that there was one crew member apparently sick of the plague, that it was only a single person. 158 00:18:51,030 --> 00:18:58,950 And in fact, the Navy did not suffer through the whole summer, whether by by good management or look, I don't know how he did go into London. 159 00:18:58,950 --> 00:19:05,970 I think it was on the 14th of September, sometime in the middle of September. And he noted how empty the streets were. 160 00:19:05,970 --> 00:19:11,640 He went to the royal exchange. He said there were no more than 50 people in the whole structure, 161 00:19:11,640 --> 00:19:17,430 which I found a little bit surprising because, I mean, 50 people under the circumstances seems rather low. 162 00:19:17,430 --> 00:19:23,090 But he said they were of the common sort. I was. There was nobody of any quality or importance. 163 00:19:23,090 --> 00:19:28,600 So there's there's your reference to class, I suppose, from from Samuel himself. 164 00:19:28,600 --> 00:19:34,570 I often remind my students that it's important to consider the biases of our sources and given that 165 00:19:34,570 --> 00:19:40,570 peoples experience would not have been shared by the huge number of poorer people in the city. 166 00:19:40,570 --> 00:19:47,790 Somewhat controversially, I wondered if we should really be including his testimony at all in this episode. 167 00:19:47,790 --> 00:19:56,580 Well, I wish he actually would become a little bit more central to the discussion, because, as I've indicated done on a couple of occasions already. 168 00:19:56,580 --> 00:20:07,320 I feel that people's understanding of what that experience was like is a very strongly coloured by fictionalised accounts. 169 00:20:07,320 --> 00:20:16,410 But not not not only to fall, but to a certain extent also in nature. 170 00:20:16,410 --> 00:20:27,630 Popularisation of the diaries. I'm thinking about Bryant during the 1930s who sexually approached the subject in a way 171 00:20:27,630 --> 00:20:35,790 which I don't think really admits the back story of peeps life during during that summer. 172 00:20:35,790 --> 00:20:41,490 Huge amount of interest, huge amounts of information on different subjects. 173 00:20:41,490 --> 00:20:47,050 It doesn't mean that the plague was unimportant. It was obviously a terrible experience for many people. 174 00:20:47,050 --> 00:20:56,060 But it really does bring the reality to the forefront of one life, very busy life in the middle of this catastrophe. 175 00:20:56,060 --> 00:21:04,020 And how did the effects of that epidemic were really almost secondary? 176 00:21:04,020 --> 00:21:11,850 Most days through that summer, as far as he was concerned, and I don't think that he was the only one who experienced that summer in that way. 177 00:21:11,850 --> 00:21:13,920 Returning to the broader picture. 178 00:21:13,920 --> 00:21:22,800 There were many people in places that did not escape as likely as peeps, including one now infamous village, as Paul outlines. 179 00:21:22,800 --> 00:21:28,090 So this just 16, six to six. You go off to the grove for a good long term. 180 00:21:28,090 --> 00:21:35,230 Plague has arrived in West Derbyshire Village of EEM. That's how the locals pronounce it. 181 00:21:35,230 --> 00:21:45,930 And again, Iguazu in a burial cloth from London, which might have come from the forest, but it got into the village. 182 00:21:45,930 --> 00:21:49,920 And this is a village in your mole, 500 people. 183 00:21:49,920 --> 00:22:02,910 They were persuaded by the Rexer William mom person to isolate themselves totally from the rest of Darbyshire. 184 00:22:02,910 --> 00:22:08,130 They did sort of trust food, the price of half of the population dying. 185 00:22:08,130 --> 00:22:12,310 Half of those 500, I'm not sure. 186 00:22:12,310 --> 00:22:16,860 But it has become a grower monitor. Much of self-sacrifice. Sure. 187 00:22:16,860 --> 00:22:24,030 Also, people go there to see what they what this village kind of looks like. 188 00:22:24,030 --> 00:22:32,260 It's always seemed to me that in the case of a village just didn't wholly have a free choice. 189 00:22:32,260 --> 00:22:42,360 But I think what's going on is a chocolate borgo struck between local mudar stress on the inhabitants of the village. 190 00:22:42,360 --> 00:22:51,210 The mother of Strategem, Darbyshire, saying, look, we're not going to bring food or give you money to buy food unless you can change yourself. 191 00:22:51,210 --> 00:22:56,010 I think that's what I want to try to say about him a little earlier. 192 00:22:56,010 --> 00:23:06,110 Village didn't. Didn't. How other five very frosty reception sites that requires Darkstar weather? 193 00:23:06,110 --> 00:23:20,800 Well, you know, there is some balance to be struck between the interest of people around uninfected city or some other extraordinary Subotic. 194 00:23:20,800 --> 00:23:33,900 Not extraordinary. One of the most notable things about the time to devise precautions against it is that there are always divisor. 195 00:23:33,900 --> 00:23:39,900 It involves shopping somebody up in order to protect all up. 196 00:23:39,900 --> 00:23:51,120 There's no such thought. Certainly am six shame such a wall where there was there were some cases of plague in York. 197 00:23:51,120 --> 00:23:56,760 The boss, the head of the council and the local andrle, Thomas SR1, 198 00:23:56,760 --> 00:24:10,750 was insisted that those of course play and I suspect within the walls of your Trubridge checking out saw and partial arches outside the walls. 199 00:24:10,750 --> 00:24:18,270 I'll bet they did it successfully. As a result, there was scarcely any academic reply at all. 200 00:24:18,270 --> 00:24:23,200 But necessarily he wasn't very popular at the time when he was doing it. 201 00:24:23,200 --> 00:24:36,110 No, you're fine to. I think there were any painless ways of dealing with an epidemic disease unless you get the first cases isolation. 202 00:24:36,110 --> 00:24:42,270 What did your brother want to show for a divided society or somewhat for the 203 00:24:42,270 --> 00:24:47,350 people who suffer most from the disease are also the ones suffering most from. 204 00:24:47,350 --> 00:24:58,970 The time was to control, that's it. This is the disadvantage to get more disadvantage, not less from the policies where we try to enforce. 205 00:24:58,970 --> 00:25:05,620 So should we consider that in the 17th century the plague is mostly a disease of the poor? 206 00:25:05,620 --> 00:25:12,980 So very good question. When I was working on plague before sixty six to eight in London and in England, 207 00:25:12,980 --> 00:25:24,950 generally what struck me with the London plagues in the 16th century, that a big place in mortality was in 56 different. 208 00:25:24,950 --> 00:25:30,410 Just after Elizabeth was come to the saw them looking at the parish register of it. 209 00:25:30,410 --> 00:25:34,940 It seems to be very evenly distributed across the city. 210 00:25:34,940 --> 00:25:38,730 It would have been difficult to say from that rhythm. 211 00:25:38,730 --> 00:25:45,060 So the poor were discriminated against by the disease. 212 00:25:45,060 --> 00:25:50,660 But even so, mortality disappears gradually over the next hundred years. 213 00:25:50,660 --> 00:26:00,170 So you get to 60 in 65. But also what has changed, of course, is the size of the city of scope briga people. 214 00:26:00,170 --> 00:26:06,350 Lot of the social segregation was started to help poor living in particular areas. 215 00:26:06,350 --> 00:26:13,860 One doesn't know whether it's the disease which changed its nature or whether it's the debate. 216 00:26:13,860 --> 00:26:18,410 The distinction between rich and poor becomes more visible on the ground. 217 00:26:18,410 --> 00:26:24,470 An eye, it's probably a bit of both. But no one in fifty six to three would have surge in London. 218 00:26:24,470 --> 00:26:31,760 This is a disease of the poor. There might have thought we'd better keep away from those dots are people who live next door. 219 00:26:31,760 --> 00:26:36,790 But that's no less quite a different thing. For more, we're guessing by sixteen sixty five. 220 00:26:36,790 --> 00:26:43,420 I think it's partly a story in terms of play over victory, a victory. 221 00:26:43,420 --> 00:26:50,340 The guns play. It didn't come back. But the costs of doing my part enormous. 222 00:26:50,340 --> 00:26:58,350 The people who suffered or pay the price for the victory. Well, the very poor who were being shot out of. 223 00:26:58,350 --> 00:27:00,930 Given this huge level of suffering, 224 00:27:00,930 --> 00:27:10,110 I was interested to learn more about how the plague had been explained at the time and whether it had been blamed on any individual or group. 225 00:27:10,110 --> 00:27:15,150 Yes, it is interesting, isn't it, that this is part of what makes his account so remarkable. 226 00:27:15,150 --> 00:27:24,090 It's almost without judgement. Whereas some of the sources now I'm thinking of Thomas Vincent's call God's retribution. 227 00:27:24,090 --> 00:27:27,540 I can't remember the name of the pamphlet that came out two years later. 228 00:27:27,540 --> 00:27:34,620 Vincent will say a firebrand Anglican preacher who, too, did stay in London as well during that summer. 229 00:27:34,620 --> 00:27:38,400 And he was very clear that the perpetrator, 230 00:27:38,400 --> 00:27:46,340 they that the reason that this terrible thing had been visited on the city was that the moral condition of the people, 231 00:27:46,340 --> 00:27:51,170 it wasn't wasn't a class based representation of any sort. 232 00:27:51,170 --> 00:27:55,980 But as far as he was concerned, he was encouraging his congregations to see the flag. 233 00:27:55,980 --> 00:28:05,250 In that sense, that not that it really was a punishment for the Wicked Witch did create a problem for people like Vincent. 234 00:28:05,250 --> 00:28:10,660 Later on, when the plague began to abate, because people would justly reason, huh? 235 00:28:10,660 --> 00:28:14,850 Well, I guess all the senators have been killed. So I guess we must be the good guys. 236 00:28:14,850 --> 00:28:23,060 We must be the elect, which, you know, kind of took it and took the wind out of his sails, you might say. 237 00:28:23,060 --> 00:28:30,050 It's just Paul explains the word more sensible explanations of what was getting and how people could stay safe. 238 00:28:30,050 --> 00:28:40,220 There were handbook's telling people how to socially distanced themselves or swear words from people who might be infectious. 239 00:28:40,220 --> 00:28:46,690 So was the humbug. I think it extreme. Trencher are telling people. 240 00:28:46,690 --> 00:28:52,510 If you post someone else in the street, you must stay true prices away from them. 241 00:28:52,510 --> 00:29:05,750 Located in a new era for fear of caution. There are all these precautionary is sensible precautionary tactics which are enforced. 242 00:29:05,750 --> 00:29:11,160 So why does it work? Infectious diseases have been treated ever since. 243 00:29:11,160 --> 00:29:17,210 There were also some recommended cures from the time, which might sound a bit strange to us today. 244 00:29:17,210 --> 00:29:26,160 The sorts of things were who's to say they don't exist today? Are very sick, very fearful for the history. 245 00:29:26,160 --> 00:29:32,290 That's very difficult. You. I mean, it's easy to diagnose extraordinary phenomena. 246 00:29:32,290 --> 00:29:37,470 Sugar coma when they probably weren't. I think most people were sensible. 247 00:29:37,470 --> 00:29:42,980 But what they didn't know, my old pastor said this much earlier on. 248 00:29:42,980 --> 00:29:52,000 Well, they didn't know was that this was a disease carried by Ross Howard from ranch to here, room brings wide fleas. 249 00:29:52,000 --> 00:29:57,350 They didn't know that. They thought it was in the old book torturing operation. 250 00:29:57,350 --> 00:30:05,400 You might remark that they didn't realise the environmental conditions in which play. 251 00:30:05,400 --> 00:30:07,620 No, they're honest about the flourish. 252 00:30:07,620 --> 00:30:18,410 There were a striking instances I found when tempers of very close to identifying their certain sets of physician, 253 00:30:18,410 --> 00:30:24,760 a French physician in London, 16 64, who starts off of one of the books about plague. 254 00:30:24,760 --> 00:30:32,340 But it's one of the first symptoms of plague of the tokens, spots on the skin. 255 00:30:32,340 --> 00:30:37,570 And he says these skull spots are very light spots made by fleas. 256 00:30:37,570 --> 00:30:44,500 Sponge my bone, flesh. It doesn't jump extra stuff. 257 00:30:44,500 --> 00:30:55,760 And similarly with rats. It's quite interesting that the bricklayers come from there of London in the sixteen fifties before the flooding. 258 00:30:55,760 --> 00:31:02,120 So building houses of timber, fashionable thing to do other. 259 00:31:02,120 --> 00:31:10,730 If you build brick houses, you've got many less and hidden houses, including rats. 260 00:31:10,730 --> 00:31:17,540 Now go on. They do it later on in the urban centre. So this might be a success. 261 00:31:17,540 --> 00:31:31,910 But then the fear that I'm talking about 60, 65 percent chance that that contemporaries to be held by us for knowing that they were working blind, 262 00:31:31,910 --> 00:31:37,930 half blind and trying to tackle this disease is being blamed for these things. 263 00:31:37,930 --> 00:31:41,000 Right. Sigh of relief when it's all over. 264 00:31:41,000 --> 00:31:49,280 In reading accounts of the time, I had not seen much evidence of scam artists and quack doctors offering fake treatments, the disease. 265 00:31:49,280 --> 00:31:59,500 And I wondered if Paul knew it. No. Problem, because they maybe because the drugs are less visible, 266 00:31:59,500 --> 00:32:06,460 they've learnt to vocabulary about contagion under infection or non-existent self-contradiction. 267 00:32:06,460 --> 00:32:12,690 You do get because this is now the 17th century of the scientific revolution. 268 00:32:12,690 --> 00:32:23,570 And so you do get people inventing new tools, new especially chemical remedies, which they think are going to kill people. 269 00:32:23,570 --> 00:32:33,000 There's no evidence that they ever did. But it seems to me perfectly rational for education people in London to think. 270 00:32:33,000 --> 00:32:35,820 We've never succeeded in curing this disease before. 271 00:32:35,820 --> 00:32:44,760 Why not try these new fangled medicines and they weren't robe's the people who were selling them, trying them. 272 00:32:44,760 --> 00:32:50,340 Some of them were heroes as well. One man whose name I've forgotten about, a chemical physics student. 273 00:32:50,340 --> 00:32:57,990 We're actually just sick to it. Bob didn't in order to find out whether his chemical remedies were worth getting. 274 00:32:57,990 --> 00:33:06,770 Unfortunately, the worms that once might cure there was no miracle cure except to get away from lunch simply destroyed. 275 00:33:06,770 --> 00:33:12,540 But Keyes did pick up on a few more suspicious cures that people tried at the time. 276 00:33:12,540 --> 00:33:20,040 Well, certainly the city was full of medical professionals as they would styled themselves, and we would probably call cracks. 277 00:33:20,040 --> 00:33:25,440 He did take more remedies than just chewing tobacco on occasion, for example. 278 00:33:25,440 --> 00:33:28,470 He did try. I think it was at some point in July. 279 00:33:28,470 --> 00:33:36,390 Venice, Trinkle, as it was known, are theory acq, which was a combination of ingredients, namely poisons. 280 00:33:36,390 --> 00:33:44,560 Some sixty two different ingredients that have been developed in the first century A.D. supposedly worked on a homeopathic level. 281 00:33:44,560 --> 00:33:47,470 So I'm just trace elements of these various things. 282 00:33:47,470 --> 00:34:00,700 He was given flag water by Lady Carteret, the wife of his superior in the Navy office, which appeared to just be an infusion of a fairly benign herbs. 283 00:34:00,700 --> 00:34:08,470 Thinking about the broader picture in them. I was keen to know how the city was still managing to function through this period 284 00:34:08,470 --> 00:34:14,250 with such a huge and disruptive disease spreading fast through its population. 285 00:34:14,250 --> 00:34:23,150 So overall, it seems to me quite striking, they basic activities of government. 286 00:34:23,150 --> 00:34:28,440 Well, still maintained all of our people were dying in a sort of sheer numbers. 287 00:34:28,440 --> 00:34:34,290 The administrative fabric of the city was somehow held together. 288 00:34:34,290 --> 00:34:39,850 A love, especially Shame's Tubridy, the level of the parish. 289 00:34:39,850 --> 00:34:43,560 So what you'll find in his parish parishes, over a hundred parishes? 290 00:34:43,560 --> 00:34:55,850 No. What you'll find is that there are capable parish officers somehow over recording, training, bogeying vast numbers of the dead. 291 00:34:55,850 --> 00:34:59,590 It just it's just awful. People were just crushed. 292 00:34:59,590 --> 00:35:07,330 An astonishing thing for them to do. I was really surprised to hear him say eighty thousand. 293 00:35:07,330 --> 00:35:12,150 Eighty thousand for a girl, after all. Nine thousand is a lot of trouble. 294 00:35:12,150 --> 00:35:17,800 True, Burls recorded. And the bills of more charges. 295 00:35:17,800 --> 00:35:23,050 Not necessarily attributed to plug the bills of mortality. 296 00:35:23,050 --> 00:35:27,920 We're supposed to record the diseases that people died or. 297 00:35:27,920 --> 00:35:37,990 But it's well known that quite often try to call plug something else or not have a formula shut out of control. 298 00:35:37,990 --> 00:35:46,930 So I think the urge is out and probably a minimum number of people have died from it. 299 00:35:46,930 --> 00:35:54,820 On the other hand, you have to acknowledge that our side, London was the largest city with half a million people in it. 300 00:35:54,820 --> 00:36:06,230 And a lot of those are a blur. So one is not measuring HSR against half a million, but just miles from just over 100000 or something. 301 00:36:06,230 --> 00:36:12,660 So the more challenge level is actually quite hard, not as high as it should've been. 302 00:36:12,660 --> 00:36:20,170 And some fudge earlier on, like the black Dussel versus one third of the population overall, Don. 303 00:36:20,170 --> 00:36:29,380 But it still was a monstrous rail load for the structure to survive on that dust. 304 00:36:29,380 --> 00:36:33,050 Savar plus it does survive some. 305 00:36:33,050 --> 00:36:42,040 Something that impressed me work was the extremely good coordination of the authorities in producing the bills of mortality. 306 00:36:42,040 --> 00:36:45,820 Every parish has to make the reports of deaths, you know, and causes a desk. 307 00:36:45,820 --> 00:36:55,240 There's actually a form which they just fill in, you know, with the figures cut all the possible ways that a person could die in the 17th century. 308 00:36:55,240 --> 00:37:01,270 Teeth was one of the more common reasons for deaths. 309 00:37:01,270 --> 00:37:05,720 They would have to submit these on Tuesday at a certain hour of the day. 310 00:37:05,720 --> 00:37:11,110 They'd be correlated on Wednesday and printed up and distributed on Thursday morning. 311 00:37:11,110 --> 00:37:16,340 First to the authorities. And within several hours you could you could buy a copy on the streets. 312 00:37:16,340 --> 00:37:23,800 So extremely well coordinated, despite the fact that the statistics, of course, are profoundly misleading. 313 00:37:23,800 --> 00:37:32,100 How would these misleading? We're pretty sure that the bills of mortality were downplaying the impact of the plague itself. 314 00:37:32,100 --> 00:37:37,930 That the people were very keen, obviously, to keep their houses from being shut up. 315 00:37:37,930 --> 00:37:44,530 Now, if you are suspected of having somebody in the house with plague, you would get a visit by a searcher, 316 00:37:44,530 --> 00:37:52,690 so-called, usually an old woman with very, very little medical knowledge who would make the decision. 317 00:37:52,690 --> 00:38:00,520 Now, these these searches are very poorly paid. So it was relatively easy even for a modest household to to kind of, you know, 318 00:38:00,520 --> 00:38:08,920 introduce a little bit of doubt in her mind and a penny or two put her purse to to give her some other cause of death. 319 00:38:08,920 --> 00:38:18,760 I was keen to hear about the end of the outbreak. What do we know about how it all starts to come to a close towards the end? 320 00:38:18,760 --> 00:38:30,970 People began to come back to fill the vacant slots, 60 to 65 search crews to bring the last row. 321 00:38:30,970 --> 00:38:36,700 Certain things around lower mark. Well, not been. 322 00:38:36,700 --> 00:38:45,100 So always fears of plague returning coming in from Turkey, perhaps by the bandits right now. 323 00:38:45,100 --> 00:38:56,540 I mean something. Twenty. There's a particular panic when there was a great and famous close Marseille's and provokes in the south of France. 324 00:38:56,540 --> 00:39:08,090 There were big fears that the plague might well be brought ships into the ports of London, all the ports around the British Isles. 325 00:39:08,090 --> 00:39:14,360 The British document prepared its defences and Kurdish place of Iraq. 326 00:39:14,360 --> 00:39:22,080 So they were calling chain precautions. Were precautions should play London. 327 00:39:22,080 --> 00:39:26,360 If London restricted by getting some trenches. 328 00:39:26,360 --> 00:39:36,470 The British government decided there should be armed guards surrounding cities to prevent and reportedly plague troop count. 329 00:39:36,470 --> 00:39:42,350 Just as there were armed guards around the city of Marseille, Strong's. 330 00:39:42,350 --> 00:39:50,180 Not surprisingly, there was a great outcry about British liberties, some trenches. 331 00:39:50,180 --> 00:39:56,000 The legislation which was going through parliament had to be abandoned. 332 00:39:56,000 --> 00:40:00,320 The government was fortunate. The plague did not arrive. 333 00:40:00,320 --> 00:40:07,160 But it might have been a quote from the same two ships from Cyprus with suspect 334 00:40:07,160 --> 00:40:14,990 cargoes well stocked in quarantine and Kent in the Medway submarine trenches. 335 00:40:14,990 --> 00:40:20,620 And in the end, they were Berton's. The ships unloaded, cargo were burnt up. 336 00:40:20,620 --> 00:40:25,260 Who's to say that resource stocks are not a plague in London? 337 00:40:25,260 --> 00:40:30,180 There might have been other reasons, but you can see that the danger. 338 00:40:30,180 --> 00:40:37,370 She would still be in the early 18th century after that. 339 00:40:37,370 --> 00:40:49,810 There comes a moment when the British and the maritime powers generally in general begin to think the plague is no longer a threat. 340 00:40:49,810 --> 00:41:03,680 I think that's a quality justify to them, not by the vast resources to states in your reporting and to call on and precautions of various kinds, 341 00:41:03,680 --> 00:41:11,310 not only against shipping, but on borders between countries between one city and another. 342 00:41:11,310 --> 00:41:19,340 It's a whole host of problems, trade measures being adopted across Europe in the early itchin century. 343 00:41:19,340 --> 00:41:25,770 I mean, it seems to me that they had had mobs, in fact, cumulate certainly. 344 00:41:25,770 --> 00:41:37,000 I mean, you never say that a column, too, was successful, but take them all together and they do seem to count for the watch. 345 00:41:37,000 --> 00:41:49,070 Amazing in retrospect, historical fact, that there was no plague in your western go off to southern Turin fortune. 346 00:41:49,070 --> 00:41:58,130 It had disappeared, although there were still play in Turkey amongst the on the southern side of the Mediterranean. 347 00:41:58,130 --> 00:42:02,330 Egypt and Turkey until we actually in fortunes. 348 00:42:02,330 --> 00:42:12,960 So you might say that in the end, the precautions that these people were taking in self-defence against Plug was successful. 349 00:42:12,960 --> 00:42:21,910 You want to also say, well, the costs involved in terms of increasing mortality for those people who were shut out of Sicher, 350 00:42:21,910 --> 00:42:28,910 long, awkward and lots of wretched hospitals elsewhere were indeed very large. 351 00:42:28,910 --> 00:42:38,310 But I think that's the long term story of the trajectory of the history of PLI from 60, 65 onwards. 352 00:42:38,310 --> 00:42:44,100 And as Paul points out, it wouldn't be fair to judge our ancestors too harshly, 353 00:42:44,100 --> 00:42:49,590 given how little information they had about how this disease was spreading. 354 00:42:49,590 --> 00:42:54,750 They're fighting an unseen enemy. They don't know what it is that they're fighting. 355 00:42:54,750 --> 00:43:01,230 But they do what they do, which is that the poor tend to get it more quickly than we get. 356 00:43:01,230 --> 00:43:08,010 So we're going to get out or we're going to avoid war. It's tempting to say that we're not wholly of life. 357 00:43:08,010 --> 00:43:14,160 I mean, I am tempted to say, look at the misery sitting over people's homes. 358 00:43:14,160 --> 00:43:20,670 It's not a case of discrimination, of a kind. Look, over time. 359 00:43:20,670 --> 00:43:28,390 We're very gaja. We have to re-examine ourselves so carefully before saying we're much more in law. 360 00:43:28,390 --> 00:43:34,020 We're in the past before we finished our conversation. I wanted to clear one thing up. 361 00:43:34,020 --> 00:43:40,070 Did the Great Fire of London really have anything to do with the ending of the plate? 362 00:43:40,070 --> 00:43:45,370 I I think five London had anything to do with it at all. 363 00:43:45,370 --> 00:43:54,610 So the fire destroyed houses largely in the centre of the city, within the walls of the old business community. 364 00:43:54,610 --> 00:44:01,060 And also, I would have said plague was in the suburbs, in the lousy housing in the suburbs. 365 00:44:01,060 --> 00:44:07,720 About they went from those houses were not brought up by I mean, I've been pulled down and rebuilt and a bit lateral. 366 00:44:07,720 --> 00:44:13,900 But the fire doesn't destroy the plague of total. End of story. 367 00:44:13,900 --> 00:44:24,350 At the start, I promised you a bonus conversation about another famous author and his own experiences of earlier plague outbreaks. 368 00:44:24,350 --> 00:44:33,350 I'd like to introduce you to my good friend and colleague, Emma Smith, professor of Shakespeare Studies and fellow at my own Hosford colleague. 369 00:44:33,350 --> 00:44:37,210 In a video called The Wi-Fi Let us down on a few occasions, 370 00:44:37,210 --> 00:44:42,710 but I'm sure you'll agree that Emma's insight into this period more than makes up for them. 371 00:44:42,710 --> 00:44:47,960 So Shakespeare's baptised in the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-Upon-Avon in 50 64. 372 00:44:47,960 --> 00:44:58,490 And just weeks after the notification of his baptism, the vicar writes this very ominous phrase hick in Keepit Pastis here began the play. 373 00:44:58,490 --> 00:45:05,090 Here begins the plague. And we can see the effects of that plague just in the number of funerals. 374 00:45:05,090 --> 00:45:11,720 The death tally in Stratford is pretty high and it's really sort of well, it's an amazing example, 375 00:45:11,720 --> 00:45:18,630 actually, of how Shakespeare has this first brush with the plague as a as a tiny influence. 376 00:45:18,630 --> 00:45:25,670 And a good reminder, actually, of all the countless counterfactuals of people who die in any kind of pandemic. 377 00:45:25,670 --> 00:45:32,030 You never know what they would have gone on to do. When you start to think of it from the point of view of somebody who escaped it, 378 00:45:32,030 --> 00:45:39,770 thinking about the plague in the context of Shakespeare's period, would it have been seen as an endemic disease? 379 00:45:39,770 --> 00:45:45,420 Yeah, this is something that they in the late 60s, early 70s, actually people lived alongside. 380 00:45:45,420 --> 00:45:50,360 They're not they're not trying to be and they're not waiting for it to be over. It's just it's kind of part of life. 381 00:45:50,360 --> 00:45:57,710 I'd read that one of the earliest ways plague impacted on Shakespeare was in the closing of the theatres in London. 382 00:45:57,710 --> 00:46:04,730 What do we know about the period? So we don't know exactly when Shakespeare goes to London to try and make it as a playwright. 383 00:46:04,730 --> 00:46:09,680 We don't really know much about that kind of thought processes and the planning that went into that. 384 00:46:09,680 --> 00:46:16,640 But what we do know is that pretty early on in his attempts to sort to be a London playwright 385 00:46:16,640 --> 00:46:22,370 and before the foundation of the company with which he's associated the Chamberlains man. 386 00:46:22,370 --> 00:46:30,050 We know that there's a prolonged period of plague which shuts the theatres and interesting, 92 to three. 387 00:46:30,050 --> 00:46:34,670 And it's kind of interesting to think about sort of freelance scenes, effectively freelancers in the theatre now. 388 00:46:34,670 --> 00:46:42,740 I mean, that's a really tough time for them. Shakespeare was a freelancer and not necessarily a very altogether experienced one. 389 00:46:42,740 --> 00:46:47,180 And what he does during that period is something he doesn't do again. 390 00:46:47,180 --> 00:46:56,300 Even though Clay does close the theatres at other times in his career, he turns to a completely different genre, the genre of narrative poetry. 391 00:46:56,300 --> 00:47:05,780 And he writes two long poems, Venus and Adonis and Liquorice, which we tend to the rape of Lucretia, both of which are based on of it there, 392 00:47:05,780 --> 00:47:18,290 of a really fashionable kind of erotic narrative poem that writers like Christopher Marlowe and a bit later 393 00:47:18,290 --> 00:47:27,260 John Marston are associated with that works aimed really at clever young man and certainly Venus and Adonis, 394 00:47:27,260 --> 00:47:36,140 which is all about how the goddess Venus has the hots for the beautiful boy Adonis who prefers hunting. 395 00:47:36,140 --> 00:47:43,230 And she just keeps throwing herself at him, really. And I mean, it kind of hard to imagine why that was such a success with young young man. 396 00:47:43,230 --> 00:47:47,390 That is, of course. But for some reason. For some reason it was. 397 00:47:47,390 --> 00:47:52,250 So Shakespeare writes these two long poems, both dedicated to a wealthy patron. 398 00:47:52,250 --> 00:47:57,090 That was what you did if you wrote poetry and there were a huge success. 399 00:47:57,090 --> 00:48:05,510 And that's so interesting to me because it does look as if Shakespeare could have continued to make it as a as a poet. 400 00:48:05,510 --> 00:48:13,250 And yet he throws himself back into the world of the theatre when as soon as the theatres reopen. 401 00:48:13,250 --> 00:48:21,460 And that's the medium in which he wants to make his his name and make his his career from from thenceforward, there are few other poems. 402 00:48:21,460 --> 00:48:25,910 But poetry or non-dramatic poetry is not really Shakespeare's thing. 403 00:48:25,910 --> 00:48:32,630 In what reminds me of our current experience, Lagu impacted on the whole of the theatre industry at the time. 404 00:48:32,630 --> 00:48:41,160 We can see that living with the plague is one of the things that the theatre industry in Shakespeare's time has to ask to come to terms with. 405 00:48:41,160 --> 00:48:45,740 And one document which really brings that home is it is a really striking one. 406 00:48:45,740 --> 00:48:53,460 It's one King James, the 6th of Scotland who becomes the first of England in sixty three when he takes up the English throne. 407 00:48:53,460 --> 00:48:59,090 Written soon after that, he takes on the patronage of one of the leading acting companies. 408 00:48:59,090 --> 00:49:04,160 And it's the company associated with Shakespeare. The Chamberlains man, they become called the King's Man. 409 00:49:04,160 --> 00:49:13,160 And the sort of letters that adopt the King's man give them permission to perform both in London and across the kingdom. 410 00:49:13,160 --> 00:49:18,680 As soon as the plague lifts and makes it possible for performances again. 411 00:49:18,680 --> 00:49:23,650 And it's a great document and in some ways quite a moving document. 412 00:49:23,650 --> 00:49:35,200 For us now thinking about theatre in a very perilous state, but this is almost the high point of Shakespeare's companies recognition. 413 00:49:35,200 --> 00:49:37,840 This is this must have been an absolute red letter day for them. 414 00:49:37,840 --> 00:49:44,260 They've got the king's patronage, but they have also got that when the theatres can't open. 415 00:49:44,260 --> 00:49:50,200 This is being closed is really the main impact of the plague of Shakespeare. 416 00:49:50,200 --> 00:49:56,680 But I remember reading that his son amnot had died of the disease and wondered if that was true. 417 00:49:56,680 --> 00:50:04,210 There's long been interesting speculation that this was a play that perhaps most recently and brilliantly by making a thoroughly in her novel, 418 00:50:04,210 --> 00:50:08,500 which is called Hamlet, which is a completely brilliant novel to recommend to everybody. 419 00:50:08,500 --> 00:50:13,130 And like all novels or great novels, it's probably not true. 420 00:50:13,130 --> 00:50:24,280 And I think that because plague transmission tended to result in household, you know, a lot of household illness or household fatalities. 421 00:50:24,280 --> 00:50:33,820 And so far as we can see in the extended Shakespeare household in 1960, young Younghusband is the only is the only casualty. 422 00:50:33,820 --> 00:50:37,500 So that makes it less likely that that's a that's a plague. 423 00:50:37,500 --> 00:50:42,550 That's just before we get into Shakespeare's own references to play. 424 00:50:42,550 --> 00:50:49,720 I want to briefly set the scene with some of the other writing we know about from the early part of the 17th century. 425 00:50:49,720 --> 00:51:00,650 How was play talked about in HBO's contemporary world? So in 16, 03, the year that the heaviest year of plague deaths a year dumped, 426 00:51:00,650 --> 00:51:05,390 ironically, by Shakespeare's fellow writer Thomas Dekker, the wonderful year, 427 00:51:05,390 --> 00:51:15,560 that's the year that sees the big outbreak of publications about plague, plague, hygiene and plague and plague sort of containment measures. 428 00:51:15,560 --> 00:51:19,670 We might have looked at these documents about about modern plague and the things people were saying, 429 00:51:19,670 --> 00:51:25,970 like, you know, take honey for it or eat toast or, you know, this this kind of thing. 430 00:51:25,970 --> 00:51:32,390 We would've just said, oh, there was so they were so ill educated or they had such little idea about disease 431 00:51:32,390 --> 00:51:39,440 then and actually seeing how people tried to explain a really difficult. 432 00:51:39,440 --> 00:51:45,440 And for most of us, scientifically inexplicable plague or or pandemic now. 433 00:51:45,440 --> 00:51:50,390 And the, you know, five G and all of that. I mean, in brackets, really. 434 00:51:50,390 --> 00:51:54,950 I'm not suggesting that this is true, but but there are people saying on the saying that this you know, 435 00:51:54,950 --> 00:52:01,070 this is to do with all kinds of of kind of ideas about where this comes from and therefore 436 00:52:01,070 --> 00:52:06,020 what you might be able to do to protect yourself and what we're pleased like at that time. 437 00:52:06,020 --> 00:52:11,870 I think theatre my sense of what the theatre is like in this period is that it's a really escapist form. 438 00:52:11,870 --> 00:52:15,230 It's where you go to get away from everyday life. 439 00:52:15,230 --> 00:52:20,540 We don't really have kitchen sink drama in this period, not least because we don't really have kitchen sinks, 440 00:52:20,540 --> 00:52:31,250 but that we're not it's not a really, really a story kind of gritty kind of it is much more fairy tale romantic, much more far away. 441 00:52:31,250 --> 00:52:36,770 You know, we always think about the way characters talk in Shakespeare and think nobody really talked like that. 442 00:52:36,770 --> 00:52:41,030 The whole point is that this is an experience which is which is different from everyday life. 443 00:52:41,030 --> 00:52:47,270 It's a heightened experience. It's an exalted one. It takes you away from your everyday experience. 444 00:52:47,270 --> 00:52:54,860 And I guess that's something that you need even more, perhaps when when things are when things are difficult than the one things than in good times. 445 00:52:54,860 --> 00:53:00,770 So the theatre is performing a social, psychological function. 446 00:53:00,770 --> 00:53:05,540 And I think it's the function of release or of or of escape. 447 00:53:05,540 --> 00:53:13,010 Largely going to the theatre to see a play about the plague was probably the last thing you would want to do in six, 448 00:53:13,010 --> 00:53:20,780 you know, three or or in six in a nine or whatever. It is interesting to think about. 449 00:53:20,780 --> 00:53:24,350 I don't know, Busby Berkeley musicals during the Depression or some saying, you know, 450 00:53:24,350 --> 00:53:30,710 what people want is big entertainment that takes them away from what's really happening. 451 00:53:30,710 --> 00:53:35,480 They don't necessarily want to go and have a mirror held up to how how life is. 452 00:53:35,480 --> 00:53:42,000 And it's kind of existential traumas. Now, we did a lot of tragedies during this period. 453 00:53:42,000 --> 00:53:48,080 So the periods in three to nine is is the period where Shakespeare writes tragedies 454 00:53:48,080 --> 00:53:53,300 and then and then moves to the later tragic comedies of his last period. 455 00:53:53,300 --> 00:54:04,470 So certainly there's an engagement with mortality and with the questions that tragedy is always asking about the nature of the good life. 456 00:54:04,470 --> 00:54:12,770 What makes the things that happen happen? I think those questions continue to be under Shakespeare's sort of microscope. 457 00:54:12,770 --> 00:54:25,630 But what I think he does is to really push back against one of the major traumas of of clay. 458 00:54:25,630 --> 00:54:26,900 The thing that the French. 459 00:54:26,900 --> 00:54:36,830 There is zero talks about, which is that the sort of the absolute terrible indistinct mass of the plague burial pits where all all our beautiful, 460 00:54:36,830 --> 00:54:42,230 unique human life ends in this kind of, you know, 461 00:54:42,230 --> 00:54:47,610 just being thrown indiscriminately into into a pit where no where we're all mingled and nobody knows who we are. 462 00:54:47,610 --> 00:54:51,830 I mean, tragedy or tragedy in Shakespeare's hands is the complete opposite of that tragedy 463 00:54:51,830 --> 00:54:57,470 is all about the individual under the sort of sublime beauty of that individual, 464 00:54:57,470 --> 00:55:00,800 even if they're behaving terribly or they're in a terrible situation. 465 00:55:00,800 --> 00:55:13,280 They are unique and poetic centre stage in ways which seem to sort of spotlight individuality in the face of 466 00:55:13,280 --> 00:55:22,730 this erasure and in distinctness that that mass plague or a mass illness must disease might seem to promote. 467 00:55:22,730 --> 00:55:28,190 We're talking about plague as an endemic disease, always there in the background. 468 00:55:28,190 --> 00:55:30,770 How much did this impact on culture at the time? 469 00:55:30,770 --> 00:55:40,250 I think the fact that the plague was endemic is a really important element in how a plague culture, plague literature works in this period. 470 00:55:40,250 --> 00:55:49,370 And the plague. Not by Shakespeare, but by Ben Johnson, his great rival called The Alchemist, which takes place. 471 00:55:49,370 --> 00:55:55,700 In a house in London, which is shut up and only has the servants there because the master has gone to the 472 00:55:55,700 --> 00:56:02,000 country to escape a production that's that's raised immediately when the theatres reopen. 473 00:56:02,000 --> 00:56:12,860 So that it's a post plague play. But looking back now, it seems to me much more difficult to say that that's that that's the case. 474 00:56:12,860 --> 00:56:16,580 Rather than it being post plague, it's really into plague. 475 00:56:16,580 --> 00:56:22,520 We've always thought about it, as you know, saying goodbye to the plague, but looking really at how that disease worked. 476 00:56:22,520 --> 00:56:26,240 I think it's much more with a sense the plague will come back. 477 00:56:26,240 --> 00:56:29,220 It always does. It mean if it goes way. 478 00:56:29,220 --> 00:56:39,860 Moving on to Shakespeare's works, specifically, some of the clearest references to play in these plans would seem to be where it's used as a curse. 479 00:56:39,860 --> 00:56:50,580 Pretty much every one of Shakespeare's plays includes a curse, you know, wishing to play or bestowing the plague on somebody or a play, 480 00:56:50,580 --> 00:56:55,650 a plague on a plague on both your houses, you know, famously in Romeo and Juliet. 481 00:56:55,650 --> 00:56:57,750 That feels to us. 482 00:56:57,750 --> 00:57:10,140 Or did feel perhaps just a figure of speech, something that's that's quite a mild oath compared with some of the interdiction on blasphemy, 483 00:57:10,140 --> 00:57:15,660 which is one of the forms of censorship that comes in in the first decade of the 17th century. 484 00:57:15,660 --> 00:57:21,610 And that plague might seem to be a more polite way of saying Jesus Christ or something. 485 00:57:21,610 --> 00:57:33,360 But I think back in context. We wish Ching's wishing the plague on somebody, as Caliban does on his master Prospero, for instance, in The Tempest. 486 00:57:33,360 --> 00:57:43,950 Probably Folta or risk or as King Lear does on on his daughter might have registered as a much more powerful kind of curse. 487 00:57:43,950 --> 00:57:48,210 It's almost as if they bring the symptoms of plague into conversation. 488 00:57:48,210 --> 00:57:55,020 You know, you're not being allowed to forget the sort of the presence of this invisible disease. 489 00:57:55,020 --> 00:57:59,970 But I don't recall anyone in Shakespeare's plays actually becoming a victim of plague. 490 00:57:59,970 --> 00:58:02,820 So nobody in Shakespeare's plays dies of plague. 491 00:58:02,820 --> 00:58:12,570 They die of all kinds of elaborate and theatrical means, but nobody dies of plague apart from just a bit of a stretch. 492 00:58:12,570 --> 00:58:21,870 But maybe Romeo and Juliet. So what happens is in that play, of course, is that Friar Lawrence sends a message to Romeo to say, 493 00:58:21,870 --> 00:58:26,310 you're going to hear that she's that dead, but she isn't. So part of my plan, 494 00:58:26,310 --> 00:58:29,250 and it's only towards the end of the play that we discover that that message never 495 00:58:29,250 --> 00:58:34,980 reaches Romeo because the carrier was caught up in in a quarantine situation, 496 00:58:34,980 --> 00:58:43,770 was was was forced to quarantine because of crossing into an infected area and therefore was unable to deliver that. 497 00:58:43,770 --> 00:58:55,950 And it always feels in the play if that one terrible coincidence, fatal coincidence had not happened, then maybe Romeo and Juliet would not have died. 498 00:58:55,950 --> 00:59:06,870 Maybe the tragedy would not have unfolded as it did. So it's a really interesting example of how in the background of the play is this 499 00:59:06,870 --> 00:59:13,380 sense of a plague environment which audience members recognise and understand. 500 00:59:13,380 --> 00:59:21,090 That's echoed in the language of the play. In the queue, shares famous cast a plague, a plague on both your houses. 501 00:59:21,090 --> 00:59:27,510 So it's there in the background, but really in the foreground, 502 00:59:27,510 --> 00:59:36,870 the consequences of plague are much more hidden or much more oblique court or much more poetic. 503 00:59:36,870 --> 00:59:47,340 I suppose that what you've got is two young people falling into this fatal love. 504 00:59:47,340 --> 00:59:50,430 You've got the symptoms of love, which lots of writers at the time, 505 00:59:50,430 --> 00:59:57,180 including Shakespeare in his poem Venus and Adonis, compared to the symptoms of play. 506 00:59:57,180 --> 01:00:03,540 There's a moment when Olivia in Twelfth Night talks about falling in love and says, even so quickly, can one catch the plague? 507 01:00:03,540 --> 01:00:17,370 So the the poetic associations between love and a sense that love was fatal and sort of pleasurably physical and plague are always present. 508 01:00:17,370 --> 01:00:24,540 So Romeo and Juliet, the plague that Romeo and Juliet have got is a plague of forbidden love, 509 01:00:24,540 --> 01:00:31,240 and it takes their lives just as it took the lives predominantly of young people. 510 01:00:31,240 --> 01:00:35,970 One of the things about bubonic plague is its mortality rates. 511 01:00:35,970 --> 01:00:44,930 Contrary to what we are now used to, mortality rates are much higher in the kind of teens and 20s, and it's much less virulent in older people. 512 01:00:44,930 --> 01:00:49,050 So there's something about that youth in Romeo and Juliet and that the kind of the passion and 513 01:00:49,050 --> 01:00:54,690 the fire and the sense that falling in love is like getting an infection and does nothing. 514 01:00:54,690 --> 01:00:59,940 It's all consuming and sort of marvellous and doomed in all these ways. 515 01:00:59,940 --> 01:01:04,690 That feels to me a way of a very particular way of narrative. 516 01:01:04,690 --> 01:01:12,540 Guys dying and romanticising plague, of course, really getting bubonic plague is not a tool like that. 517 01:01:12,540 --> 01:01:14,010 During our conversation. 518 01:01:14,010 --> 01:01:23,190 I began to wonder whether Emma had started to see any of Shakespeare's work in a new light after our recent collective experiences of Kobie. 519 01:01:23,190 --> 01:01:28,470 One of the things I think I love about Shakespeare's plays is how they. 520 01:01:28,470 --> 01:01:31,980 Our contemporary world can help you see them in quite different ways, 521 01:01:31,980 --> 01:01:39,120 and that's happened to me over this lockdown period and the play that I've come to see completely differently really is measured from Asia. 522 01:01:39,120 --> 01:01:51,330 So we had heard lots about Shakespeare, wrote King Lear in lockdown, you know, and I'm not sure that that's a particularly helpful source opposition. 523 01:01:51,330 --> 01:01:52,350 But measure for measure, 524 01:01:52,350 --> 01:02:04,380 which is about comes from 16 034 for that period of of closures at the beginning of the reign of King James is about a city, a disease city. 525 01:02:04,380 --> 01:02:13,140 And in fact, in measure for measure, the disease is sort of sexual immorality and therefore venereal disease is is the pox rather than the plague. 526 01:02:13,140 --> 01:02:22,650 But it doesn't take much to shift our imagination across into the more pressing public health crisis of that period, 527 01:02:22,650 --> 01:02:37,710 which which which is plague, and where that play seems to dramatise two distinct, two distinct kind of approaches to living with plague. 528 01:02:37,710 --> 01:02:52,950 And one is a kind of super spreader kind of mentality or a sort of I read a bit about disaster disaster X or or end of the world. 529 01:02:52,950 --> 01:02:59,280 Sachs, as it was called in in New York after 9/11, the kind of comfort, 530 01:02:59,280 --> 01:03:08,490 physical contact us as comfort and as a kind of a psychological antidote against against plague. 531 01:03:08,490 --> 01:03:13,530 So there are the super spreaders who are who have the kind of brothel owners and 532 01:03:13,530 --> 01:03:21,450 frequenters and they're all about human contact and the kind of Carnel world in which. 533 01:03:21,450 --> 01:03:27,140 In which we live. And then there are the kind of neurotics. 534 01:03:27,140 --> 01:03:30,690 The sort of noley Matangi, a kind of I can't be touched. 535 01:03:30,690 --> 01:03:36,090 I will immediately be infected. 536 01:03:36,090 --> 01:03:42,930 And that's sort of ANGELLO that the deputy izabella the nun. 537 01:03:42,930 --> 01:03:51,420 And between them, there is no kind of moderation about how to live together, how to live together in the city. 538 01:03:51,420 --> 01:04:01,620 The play shows that you're either the kind of the locus of disease or you are so separate from it that you're hardly alive at all. 539 01:04:01,620 --> 01:04:06,510 And there's no there's no kind of middle ground. We always knew more of measure for measure was a play about extremes. 540 01:04:06,510 --> 01:04:11,910 But it's come to me to seem to be a play much more about the extremes of living. 541 01:04:11,910 --> 01:04:16,650 Living under plague than I had previously ever been able to notice. 542 01:04:16,650 --> 01:04:22,680 It is interesting that a book like Commune's The Plague, which has been one of the great reads of 2020, 543 01:04:22,680 --> 01:04:27,000 was a book we always used to think about as not being about the plague. 544 01:04:27,000 --> 01:04:32,510 So the plague was, you know, if you were to say, oh, this is about a plague that happened, it would be the most intriguing of all. 545 01:04:32,510 --> 01:04:38,950 But it seems that now the plague is a metaphor for all kinds of all kinds of other of other things that that are going on. 546 01:04:38,950 --> 01:04:43,860 Now, in some ways, that seems to be the opposite for Shakespeare, that we don't get a play called the plague. 547 01:04:43,860 --> 01:04:50,700 We don't really get plague sent to stage. Other things, though, are a metaphor for it. 548 01:04:50,700 --> 01:04:57,450 I think that plague is pretty omnipresent in in Shakespeare, but it's always in translation. 549 01:04:57,450 --> 01:05:02,550 Maybe that's the way to think of it. Next time on future, maybe. 550 01:05:02,550 --> 01:05:09,830 We leave the plague behind for now and meet the second of our pandemic diseases, smallpox. 551 01:05:09,830 --> 01:05:14,850 We will discover the hatrick that smallpox brought to 18th century Europe. 552 01:05:14,850 --> 01:05:24,810 How the health profession reacted and why a milkmaid may or may not have inspired the concept of vaccination. 553 01:05:24,810 --> 01:05:30,750 I hope you can join me then for the next episode of our history of pandemic season. 554 01:05:30,750 --> 01:05:49,340 I'm Peter Milliken and you've been listening to Future Makers. 555 01:05:49,340 --> 01:05:53,990 Feature makers was produced in-house at the University of Oxford. 556 01:05:53,990 --> 01:05:59,030 The show was presented by Peter Milliken from Half a College, a voice actor. 557 01:05:59,030 --> 01:06:02,660 At the beginning of the show was Tom Wilkinson. 558 01:06:02,660 --> 01:06:11,150 The soundtrack was created and produced by Richard Watts, and the show was produced by Ben Howard, The May Steve Prichard. 559 01:06:11,150 --> 01:06:32,364 Thanks again for listening to The History of Pandemic's.