Samuel already knew about the plague cases in Deptford.
Even if he hadn't, the growing numbers of boarded up houses, giant red crosses daubed onto their doors would have given it away.
He shouldn't be here. It was risky to be here, but he missed Elizabeth.
It had been weeks since he'd seen her last and her husband would be away at the shipyard today.
As he scampered down the street, he chewed his tobacco furtively, trying to keep away from the windows.
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.
They seemed happy. Singing and laughing in the afternoon breeze. But he didn't think that that would last long.
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.
And it's the last major outbreak of that horrific disease in England.
We might dispel some myths along the way. For example, it wasn't the great fire of London that finally defeated the disease.
Despite that oft repeated narrative and we'll drop in on one of the outbreaks, most famous commentators, Samuel Peeps.
Stay tuned to the end as well.
As we've also included a bonus conversation on Shakespeares experience during the earlier outbreaks, which led up to this final rate play.
But test, I caught up with Paul Slack, emeritus professor at early 1960s Street,
to ask him whether this was the same Plake strain that we saw in the Black Death.
It is the same disease in a less fatal form.
More tortures will much lower from the 16th century onwards.
So we're not talking about anything killing a third of the population of your book.
We're talking about regular academics, which might tell in that town 20 or 30 percent every five or 10 years.
They go on and Mangrum from the black US to the period.
I'm interested in, which often called the Great Plague of London.
Sixteen sixty four. Sixteen sixty six, which was the last of the last epidemic.
Or play in London where it might not offer Britain there were still plagues and other civil war, but they didn't affect England.
I asked Paul what we know about how this all began.
Most of it's in sixteen sixty five, but it starts from a of end of sixteen sixty four that there was disease,
the plague in two parishes on the outskirts of London.
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,
probably from Holland, which should come originally from Turkish attack.
It was thought to be the usual source of plague of this time shipping where it's Holland or to Britain, Quantou and Russians.
There was a war on where the Dutch. This sort of precaution occurred, Madame.
So that's December sixteen sixty four. Then there's no word of it.
But in 60 to 65 in March, it flares up again all over the city.
By the end of sixteen, 65 tons killed, about 80000 people getting on for 100000 people in a city of half a million.
London by this tourist, the largest city in Norway.
So this is a large dustbowl in a very large city.
Were they in London? The distribution of deaths from close was, of course, skewed, partly social.
They call it topographically the largest number for they Verster called Clode, were hidden in both the standard and the West Statens.
They were in Stepney White Chapel in the East and in submarkets in the fields of Westminster in the West.
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.
The reason for that was that the richest or so they were co-opted in the central city.
It got out of town pretty quickly to travel friends from the countryside.
Much of the inner city were soft deserts.
So what happened was that the the main rounds of mortality was borne by the poorer sections of the population.
Very large numbers of and supplies of the large section of the prosperous explains
why there was such a concentration of mortality amongst the poor in London.
Did the local authorities take any action to try to slow the spread?
The regular policy against plague in England was to isolate those who were fractured together with our relations in their own houses,
with the doors locked up, marked with a cross so that no one could move in or out.
How so? Were shot up together. If one of them called blooded.
Now, this was known at the time to be a primitive practise when compared with police before.
They're more civilised parts of your life. Really?
Where it was common to try to separate infections, combat contact, some related shoes to isolate both groups in separate institutions,
an enormously costly investment in hospitals, some loss of wretched in such a solid flaw.
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,
coping with the numbers we're talking about. People have to be isolated to their home.
Now, it's not surprising that the policy was enormously unpopular and was criticised at the time by some physicians as counterproductive.
If you were shot out, those initially infected with contrast, we are going to increase mortality very quickly.
In any case, it was impossible to enforce this policy rigorously.
That will buy us some jobs.
This protest was started when it was first and first shutting people out of a house sub to be abandoned altogether in September,
the number of people infected and crushed was sick.
Contractors were allowed out, much to the horror of people like groups all over stretchable citizens still.
So were terrified of culture. Pro pigs should already have been appalled by the stories of sick people day out of nowhere.
Those are just deliberately perea the faces of people who were prall certain bars.
This seems like a good time to introduce one of our key contemporary sources for the
period a a many of us associate with the great fire of sixteen sixty six Samuel peeps.
I asked one of the experts on his life, oxfords, Dr. Kees Wendland, who exactly Heap's was right.
Samuel keeps his diary, which cover the entire decade of the 16th sixties, have become really one of the most celebrated,
justly celebrated sources for social historians of the restoration period.
And that's that's largely due to the that the rich detail that he provides piece doesn't appear to have any filters.
He just writes about everything that happens to him.
And the plague itself almost disappears from from much of what he has to say about that year in sixteen,
sixty five, because there's so much else going on in his life.
He's a young man on the make. He's 32 years old. He came from very humble origins.
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.
But his family was, fortunately for Samuel, a very well-connected in their home region of Huntington.
Sure. And as a consequence, he was able to to, first of all, acquire a good grammar school education,
even to send poems, which at that time was just next to the cathedral.
And from there, he went to Cambridge and became the private secretary to Edward Montagu, who was made the Earl of Sandwich.
At that point, Samuel Peeps became secretary to the Navy office with a house attached to the
Navy office and seething lane just just a stone's throw from from Tower Hill.
And sixteen sixty five was really the great turning point for him.
He was making enormous amounts of money compared to most people at the time.
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.
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.
Or calculating how a skilled craftsman might turn.
If he were lucky enough to spend 80 years working flat out, he might have made that kind of money.
So for a young man of 32. Started out with absolutely nothing.
He was doing extremely well out of this this office.
He'd been given as a reward, obviously, and to ensure his loyalty to the family, to the Montagues.
So when did Peeps first mention the plague in his diaries? Here's his first entry.
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.
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.
Through that summer, he was visiting the West End and he was in the new exchange, which was sort of a shopping mall,
early 17th century shopping mall in competition with the royal exchange in the city itself.
He does not relate what he bought there, but as he was walking back into the city,
he passed by Drury Lane and he noticed that there were some shut up houses.
So these were houses, obviously, with the Red Cross daubed on to the door.
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.
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.
Oh, he was also made an interesting reference to being concerned about his own smell.
Take that for what it's worth. So that's that was his first reference.
And at that time, the plague was only to be found in certain states in the West.
And I think Longacre Street was was a hot spot.
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,
something like 267 died of the plague.
So they sent the people himself understood that, in fact, that figure was probably an underestimate of the reality.
So here he was under no illusions about about the official figures.
In a way, perhaps, which is going to ring some bells for many people today.
So we have a picture of our shashlik control, the infection correction in the middle of the summer of 68 64.
Pape's stayed in the city for most of the time because we had a job in the Oval Office.
But he had sent his wife four down the river to Woolwich.
And your hair fall out of it all, just outside of the heart of the infection.
The searcher was a Christian. Look, a place the poor.
There were some respectable people just over there.
What amazes me about the Great Plague, or 16, 64, is how some sunblock, more than a little semblance of good.
Doesn't look too remote. There was never a right search through social order.
Good luck to a lot of rumours about the green rocks and the strange.
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,
so physicians or clergymen, some of them followed the culture of physicians all over the richer crematoriums.
One of them was Thomas, certain famous physician throughout the left, loved them afterwards, wrote a book about play.
But it's not clear that he did a precision schliersee in the case of the war.
But there were people who filled out.
You've got unlicensed medical practitioners stepping in to help those who are sick or if they could afford to pay.
But I'm no long called for honest clergy moving in to fill the gaps left by the clergy who are left.
I was fascinated to learn more about what life might have been like in the city at this time.
And Keyes pointed out that there's more than one account to choose from.
Unlike many people, certainly if one reads, that's that latter day history of the year by Daniel Defoe 1722.
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.
I don't think it was really so different from many people's experience today, although, of course, the dangers were far greater.
The mortality rate was something on the order of 65 to 80 percent of those who caught the plague.
People got on with their lives because they needed to in that sense.
I don't think that people's experience was unusual in that kind of condition.
There was nothing he could do other than obviously avoid quoting obvious danger.
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.
Having said that, on some occasions, he he would actually, surprisingly put himself in considerable risk, usually for the sake of visiting some woman.
For example, Mrs. Bagwell, who had wished herself on peeps, says as his mistress at the behest of her husband,
who was a ship's carpenter and wanted to better ship to be appointed to,
he'd visit her down in Deferent, which was actually a plague hot spot at that time, and he knew it.
So there's obviously a lot of different conflicting motivations going on for Samuel.
So it wasn't all doom and gloom to people then if he was in turn to have a good time.
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.
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.
And he always provides a summary at the end of the year.
He said he'd never lived so well nor earned so much in his entire life as he did during the plague year.
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.
Yes. Well, I think, again, you know, it's it's useful to consult on our own experience in these extraordinary times.
A single narrative just doesn't ring true, has it? People are experiencing what's happening in all sorts of different ways.
And aside from the illness and everybody's concern about the spread of that illness,
there are all sorts of winners and losers on all sorts of different levels.
So we mustn't lose sight of the forest by focussing on a single tree.
And as Paul already pointed out, he wasn't in London for the whole of this outbreak.
I'm glad you raised that. The general assumption is that he was, in fact.
No, he wasn't. He spent a great deal of time in village visiting Mrs Backbone, of course, on occasion,
but also because the night the office itself was moved down to Greenwich and in the second half of September, for example, the.
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.
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.
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.
I think it was on the 14th of September, sometime in the middle of September. And he noted how empty the streets were.
He went to the royal exchange. He said there were no more than 50 people in the whole structure,
which I found a little bit surprising because, I mean, 50 people under the circumstances seems rather low.
But he said they were of the common sort. I was. There was nobody of any quality or importance.
So there's there's your reference to class, I suppose, from from Samuel himself.
I often remind my students that it's important to consider the biases of our sources and given that
peoples experience would not have been shared by the huge number of poorer people in the city.
Somewhat controversially, I wondered if we should really be including his testimony at all in this episode.
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.
I feel that people's understanding of what that experience was like is a very strongly coloured by fictionalised accounts.
But not not not only to fall, but to a certain extent also in nature.
Popularisation of the diaries. I'm thinking about Bryant during the 1930s who sexually approached the subject in a way
which I don't think really admits the back story of peeps life during during that summer.
Huge amount of interest, huge amounts of information on different subjects.
It doesn't mean that the plague was unimportant. It was obviously a terrible experience for many people.
But it really does bring the reality to the forefront of one life, very busy life in the middle of this catastrophe.
And how did the effects of that epidemic were really almost secondary?
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.
Returning to the broader picture.
There were many people in places that did not escape as likely as peeps, including one now infamous village, as Paul outlines.
So this just 16, six to six. You go off to the grove for a good long term.
Plague has arrived in West Derbyshire Village of EEM. That's how the locals pronounce it.
And again, Iguazu in a burial cloth from London, which might have come from the forest, but it got into the village.
And this is a village in your mole, 500 people.
They were persuaded by the Rexer William mom person to isolate themselves totally from the rest of Darbyshire.
They did sort of trust food, the price of half of the population dying.
Half of those 500, I'm not sure.
But it has become a grower monitor. Much of self-sacrifice. Sure.
Also, people go there to see what they what this village kind of looks like.
It's always seemed to me that in the case of a village just didn't wholly have a free choice.
But I think what's going on is a chocolate borgo struck between local mudar stress on the inhabitants of the village.
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.
I think that's what I want to try to say about him a little earlier.
Village didn't. Didn't. How other five very frosty reception sites that requires Darkstar weather?
Well, you know, there is some balance to be struck between the interest of people around uninfected city or some other extraordinary Subotic.
Not extraordinary. One of the most notable things about the time to devise precautions against it is that there are always divisor.
It involves shopping somebody up in order to protect all up.
There's no such thought. Certainly am six shame such a wall where there was there were some cases of plague in York.
The boss, the head of the council and the local andrle, Thomas SR1,
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.
I'll bet they did it successfully. As a result, there was scarcely any academic reply at all.
But necessarily he wasn't very popular at the time when he was doing it.
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.
What did your brother want to show for a divided society or somewhat for the
people who suffer most from the disease are also the ones suffering most from.
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.
So should we consider that in the 17th century the plague is mostly a disease of the poor?
So very good question. When I was working on plague before sixty six to eight in London and in England,
generally what struck me with the London plagues in the 16th century, that a big place in mortality was in 56 different.
Just after Elizabeth was come to the saw them looking at the parish register of it.
It seems to be very evenly distributed across the city.
It would have been difficult to say from that rhythm.
So the poor were discriminated against by the disease.
But even so, mortality disappears gradually over the next hundred years.
So you get to 60 in 65. But also what has changed, of course, is the size of the city of scope briga people.
Lot of the social segregation was started to help poor living in particular areas.
One doesn't know whether it's the disease which changed its nature or whether it's the debate.
The distinction between rich and poor becomes more visible on the ground.
An eye, it's probably a bit of both. But no one in fifty six to three would have surge in London.
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.
But that's no less quite a different thing. For more, we're guessing by sixteen sixty five.
I think it's partly a story in terms of play over victory, a victory.
The guns play. It didn't come back. But the costs of doing my part enormous.
The people who suffered or pay the price for the victory. Well, the very poor who were being shot out of.
Given this huge level of suffering,
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.
Yes, it is interesting, isn't it, that this is part of what makes his account so remarkable.
It's almost without judgement. Whereas some of the sources now I'm thinking of Thomas Vincent's call God's retribution.
I can't remember the name of the pamphlet that came out two years later.
Vincent will say a firebrand Anglican preacher who, too, did stay in London as well during that summer.
And he was very clear that the perpetrator,
they that the reason that this terrible thing had been visited on the city was that the moral condition of the people,
it wasn't wasn't a class based representation of any sort.
But as far as he was concerned, he was encouraging his congregations to see the flag.
In that sense, that not that it really was a punishment for the Wicked Witch did create a problem for people like Vincent.
Later on, when the plague began to abate, because people would justly reason, huh?
Well, I guess all the senators have been killed. So I guess we must be the good guys.
We must be the elect, which, you know, kind of took it and took the wind out of his sails, you might say.
It's just Paul explains the word more sensible explanations of what was getting and how people could stay safe.
There were handbook's telling people how to socially distanced themselves or swear words from people who might be infectious.
So was the humbug. I think it extreme. Trencher are telling people.
If you post someone else in the street, you must stay true prices away from them.
Located in a new era for fear of caution. There are all these precautionary is sensible precautionary tactics which are enforced.
So why does it work? Infectious diseases have been treated ever since.
There were also some recommended cures from the time, which might sound a bit strange to us today.
The sorts of things were who's to say they don't exist today? Are very sick, very fearful for the history.
That's very difficult. You. I mean, it's easy to diagnose extraordinary phenomena.
Sugar coma when they probably weren't. I think most people were sensible.
But what they didn't know, my old pastor said this much earlier on.
Well, they didn't know was that this was a disease carried by Ross Howard from ranch to here, room brings wide fleas.
They didn't know that. They thought it was in the old book torturing operation.
You might remark that they didn't realise the environmental conditions in which play.
No, they're honest about the flourish.
There were a striking instances I found when tempers of very close to identifying their certain sets of physician,
a French physician in London, 16 64, who starts off of one of the books about plague.
But it's one of the first symptoms of plague of the tokens, spots on the skin.
And he says these skull spots are very light spots made by fleas.
Sponge my bone, flesh. It doesn't jump extra stuff.
And similarly with rats. It's quite interesting that the bricklayers come from there of London in the sixteen fifties before the flooding.
So building houses of timber, fashionable thing to do other.
If you build brick houses, you've got many less and hidden houses, including rats.
Now go on. They do it later on in the urban centre. So this might be a success.
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,
half blind and trying to tackle this disease is being blamed for these things.
Right. Sigh of relief when it's all over.
In reading accounts of the time, I had not seen much evidence of scam artists and quack doctors offering fake treatments, the disease.
And I wondered if Paul knew it. No. Problem, because they maybe because the drugs are less visible,
they've learnt to vocabulary about contagion under infection or non-existent self-contradiction.
You do get because this is now the 17th century of the scientific revolution.
And so you do get people inventing new tools, new especially chemical remedies, which they think are going to kill people.
There's no evidence that they ever did. But it seems to me perfectly rational for education people in London to think.
We've never succeeded in curing this disease before.
Why not try these new fangled medicines and they weren't robe's the people who were selling them, trying them.
Some of them were heroes as well. One man whose name I've forgotten about, a chemical physics student.
We're actually just sick to it. Bob didn't in order to find out whether his chemical remedies were worth getting.
Unfortunately, the worms that once might cure there was no miracle cure except to get away from lunch simply destroyed.
But Keyes did pick up on a few more suspicious cures that people tried at the time.
Well, certainly the city was full of medical professionals as they would styled themselves, and we would probably call cracks.
He did take more remedies than just chewing tobacco on occasion, for example.
He did try. I think it was at some point in July.
Venice, Trinkle, as it was known, are theory acq, which was a combination of ingredients, namely poisons.
Some sixty two different ingredients that have been developed in the first century A.D. supposedly worked on a homeopathic level.
So I'm just trace elements of these various things.
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.
Thinking about the broader picture in them. I was keen to know how the city was still managing to function through this period
with such a huge and disruptive disease spreading fast through its population.
So overall, it seems to me quite striking, they basic activities of government.
Well, still maintained all of our people were dying in a sort of sheer numbers.
The administrative fabric of the city was somehow held together.
A love, especially Shame's Tubridy, the level of the parish.
So what you'll find in his parish parishes, over a hundred parishes?
No. What you'll find is that there are capable parish officers somehow over recording, training, bogeying vast numbers of the dead.
It just it's just awful. People were just crushed.
An astonishing thing for them to do. I was really surprised to hear him say eighty thousand.
Eighty thousand for a girl, after all. Nine thousand is a lot of trouble.
True, Burls recorded. And the bills of more charges.
Not necessarily attributed to plug the bills of mortality.
We're supposed to record the diseases that people died or.
But it's well known that quite often try to call plug something else or not have a formula shut out of control.
So I think the urge is out and probably a minimum number of people have died from it.
On the other hand, you have to acknowledge that our side, London was the largest city with half a million people in it.
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.
So the more challenge level is actually quite hard, not as high as it should've been.
And some fudge earlier on, like the black Dussel versus one third of the population overall, Don.
But it still was a monstrous rail load for the structure to survive on that dust.
Savar plus it does survive some.
Something that impressed me work was the extremely good coordination of the authorities in producing the bills of mortality.
Every parish has to make the reports of deaths, you know, and causes a desk.
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.
Teeth was one of the more common reasons for deaths.
They would have to submit these on Tuesday at a certain hour of the day.
They'd be correlated on Wednesday and printed up and distributed on Thursday morning.
First to the authorities. And within several hours you could you could buy a copy on the streets.
So extremely well coordinated, despite the fact that the statistics, of course, are profoundly misleading.
How would these misleading? We're pretty sure that the bills of mortality were downplaying the impact of the plague itself.
That the people were very keen, obviously, to keep their houses from being shut up.
Now, if you are suspected of having somebody in the house with plague, you would get a visit by a searcher,
so-called, usually an old woman with very, very little medical knowledge who would make the decision.
Now, these these searches are very poorly paid. So it was relatively easy even for a modest household to to kind of, you know,
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.
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?
People began to come back to fill the vacant slots, 60 to 65 search crews to bring the last row.
Certain things around lower mark. Well, not been.
So always fears of plague returning coming in from Turkey, perhaps by the bandits right now.
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.
There were big fears that the plague might well be brought ships into the ports of London, all the ports around the British Isles.
The British document prepared its defences and Kurdish place of Iraq.
So they were calling chain precautions. Were precautions should play London.
If London restricted by getting some trenches.
The British government decided there should be armed guards surrounding cities to prevent and reportedly plague troop count.
Just as there were armed guards around the city of Marseille, Strong's.
Not surprisingly, there was a great outcry about British liberties, some trenches.
The legislation which was going through parliament had to be abandoned.
The government was fortunate. The plague did not arrive.
But it might have been a quote from the same two ships from Cyprus with suspect
cargoes well stocked in quarantine and Kent in the Medway submarine trenches.
And in the end, they were Berton's. The ships unloaded, cargo were burnt up.
Who's to say that resource stocks are not a plague in London?
There might have been other reasons, but you can see that the danger.
She would still be in the early 18th century after that.
There comes a moment when the British and the maritime powers generally in general begin to think the plague is no longer a threat.
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,
not only against shipping, but on borders between countries between one city and another.
It's a whole host of problems, trade measures being adopted across Europe in the early itchin century.
I mean, it seems to me that they had had mobs, in fact, cumulate certainly.
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.
Amazing in retrospect, historical fact, that there was no plague in your western go off to southern Turin fortune.
It had disappeared, although there were still play in Turkey amongst the on the southern side of the Mediterranean.
Egypt and Turkey until we actually in fortunes.
So you might say that in the end, the precautions that these people were taking in self-defence against Plug was successful.
You want to also say, well, the costs involved in terms of increasing mortality for those people who were shut out of Sicher,
long, awkward and lots of wretched hospitals elsewhere were indeed very large.
But I think that's the long term story of the trajectory of the history of PLI from 60, 65 onwards.
And as Paul points out, it wouldn't be fair to judge our ancestors too harshly,
given how little information they had about how this disease was spreading.
They're fighting an unseen enemy. They don't know what it is that they're fighting.
But they do what they do, which is that the poor tend to get it more quickly than we get.
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.
I mean, I am tempted to say, look at the misery sitting over people's homes.
It's not a case of discrimination, of a kind. Look, over time.
We're very gaja. We have to re-examine ourselves so carefully before saying we're much more in law.
We're in the past before we finished our conversation. I wanted to clear one thing up.
Did the Great Fire of London really have anything to do with the ending of the plate?
I I think five London had anything to do with it at all.
So the fire destroyed houses largely in the centre of the city, within the walls of the old business community.
And also, I would have said plague was in the suburbs, in the lousy housing in the suburbs.
About they went from those houses were not brought up by I mean, I've been pulled down and rebuilt and a bit lateral.
But the fire doesn't destroy the plague of total. End of story.
At the start, I promised you a bonus conversation about another famous author and his own experiences of earlier plague outbreaks.
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.
In a video called The Wi-Fi Let us down on a few occasions,
but I'm sure you'll agree that Emma's insight into this period more than makes up for them.
So Shakespeare's baptised in the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-Upon-Avon in 50 64.
And just weeks after the notification of his baptism, the vicar writes this very ominous phrase hick in Keepit Pastis here began the play.
Here begins the plague. And we can see the effects of that plague just in the number of funerals.
The death tally in Stratford is pretty high and it's really sort of well, it's an amazing example,
actually, of how Shakespeare has this first brush with the plague as a as a tiny influence.
And a good reminder, actually, of all the countless counterfactuals of people who die in any kind of pandemic.
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,
thinking about the plague in the context of Shakespeare's period, would it have been seen as an endemic disease?
Yeah, this is something that they in the late 60s, early 70s, actually people lived alongside.
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.
I'd read that one of the earliest ways plague impacted on Shakespeare was in the closing of the theatres in London.
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.
We don't really know much about that kind of thought processes and the planning that went into that.
But what we do know is that pretty early on in his attempts to sort to be a London playwright
and before the foundation of the company with which he's associated the Chamberlains man.
We know that there's a prolonged period of plague which shuts the theatres and interesting, 92 to three.
And it's kind of interesting to think about sort of freelance scenes, effectively freelancers in the theatre now.
I mean, that's a really tough time for them. Shakespeare was a freelancer and not necessarily a very altogether experienced one.
And what he does during that period is something he doesn't do again.
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.
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,
of a really fashionable kind of erotic narrative poem that writers like Christopher Marlowe and a bit later
John Marston are associated with that works aimed really at clever young man and certainly Venus and Adonis,
which is all about how the goddess Venus has the hots for the beautiful boy Adonis who prefers hunting.
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.
That is, of course. But for some reason. For some reason it was.
So Shakespeare writes these two long poems, both dedicated to a wealthy patron.
That was what you did if you wrote poetry and there were a huge success.
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.
And yet he throws himself back into the world of the theatre when as soon as the theatres reopen.
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.
But poetry or non-dramatic poetry is not really Shakespeare's thing.
In what reminds me of our current experience, Lagu impacted on the whole of the theatre industry at the time.
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.
And one document which really brings that home is it is a really striking one.
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.
Written soon after that, he takes on the patronage of one of the leading acting companies.
And it's the company associated with Shakespeare. The Chamberlains man, they become called the King's Man.
And the sort of letters that adopt the King's man give them permission to perform both in London and across the kingdom.
As soon as the plague lifts and makes it possible for performances again.
And it's a great document and in some ways quite a moving document.
For us now thinking about theatre in a very perilous state, but this is almost the high point of Shakespeare's companies recognition.
This is this must have been an absolute red letter day for them.
They've got the king's patronage, but they have also got that when the theatres can't open.
This is being closed is really the main impact of the plague of Shakespeare.
But I remember reading that his son amnot had died of the disease and wondered if that was true.
There's long been interesting speculation that this was a play that perhaps most recently and brilliantly by making a thoroughly in her novel,
which is called Hamlet, which is a completely brilliant novel to recommend to everybody.
And like all novels or great novels, it's probably not true.
And I think that because plague transmission tended to result in household, you know, a lot of household illness or household fatalities.
And so far as we can see in the extended Shakespeare household in 1960, young Younghusband is the only is the only casualty.
So that makes it less likely that that's a that's a plague.
That's just before we get into Shakespeare's own references to play.
I want to briefly set the scene with some of the other writing we know about from the early part of the 17th century.
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,
ironically, by Shakespeare's fellow writer Thomas Dekker, the wonderful year,
that's the year that sees the big outbreak of publications about plague, plague, hygiene and plague and plague sort of containment measures.
We might have looked at these documents about about modern plague and the things people were saying,
like, you know, take honey for it or eat toast or, you know, this this kind of thing.
We would've just said, oh, there was so they were so ill educated or they had such little idea about disease
then and actually seeing how people tried to explain a really difficult.
And for most of us, scientifically inexplicable plague or or pandemic now.
And the, you know, five G and all of that. I mean, in brackets, really.
I'm not suggesting that this is true, but but there are people saying on the saying that this you know,
this is to do with all kinds of of kind of ideas about where this comes from and therefore
what you might be able to do to protect yourself and what we're pleased like at that time.
I think theatre my sense of what the theatre is like in this period is that it's a really escapist form.
It's where you go to get away from everyday life.
We don't really have kitchen sink drama in this period, not least because we don't really have kitchen sinks,
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.
You know, we always think about the way characters talk in Shakespeare and think nobody really talked like that.
The whole point is that this is an experience which is which is different from everyday life.
It's a heightened experience. It's an exalted one. It takes you away from your everyday experience.
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.
So the theatre is performing a social, psychological function.
And I think it's the function of release or of or of escape.
Largely going to the theatre to see a play about the plague was probably the last thing you would want to do in six,
you know, three or or in six in a nine or whatever. It is interesting to think about.
I don't know, Busby Berkeley musicals during the Depression or some saying, you know,
what people want is big entertainment that takes them away from what's really happening.
They don't necessarily want to go and have a mirror held up to how how life is.
And it's kind of existential traumas. Now, we did a lot of tragedies during this period.
So the periods in three to nine is is the period where Shakespeare writes tragedies
and then and then moves to the later tragic comedies of his last period.
So certainly there's an engagement with mortality and with the questions that tragedy is always asking about the nature of the good life.
What makes the things that happen happen? I think those questions continue to be under Shakespeare's sort of microscope.
But what I think he does is to really push back against one of the major traumas of of clay.
The thing that the French.
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,
unique human life ends in this kind of, you know,
just being thrown indiscriminately into into a pit where no where we're all mingled and nobody knows who we are.
I mean, tragedy or tragedy in Shakespeare's hands is the complete opposite of that tragedy
is all about the individual under the sort of sublime beauty of that individual,
even if they're behaving terribly or they're in a terrible situation.
They are unique and poetic centre stage in ways which seem to sort of spotlight individuality in the face of
this erasure and in distinctness that that mass plague or a mass illness must disease might seem to promote.
We're talking about plague as an endemic disease, always there in the background.
How much did this impact on culture at the time?
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.
And the plague. Not by Shakespeare, but by Ben Johnson, his great rival called The Alchemist, which takes place.
In a house in London, which is shut up and only has the servants there because the master has gone to the
country to escape a production that's that's raised immediately when the theatres reopen.
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.
Rather than it being post plague, it's really into plague.
We've always thought about it, as you know, saying goodbye to the plague, but looking really at how that disease worked.
I think it's much more with a sense the plague will come back.
It always does. It mean if it goes way.
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.
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,
a plague on a plague on both your houses, you know, famously in Romeo and Juliet.
That feels to us.
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,
which is one of the forms of censorship that comes in in the first decade of the 17th century.
And that plague might seem to be a more polite way of saying Jesus Christ or something.
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.
Probably Folta or risk or as King Lear does on on his daughter might have registered as a much more powerful kind of curse.
It's almost as if they bring the symptoms of plague into conversation.
You know, you're not being allowed to forget the sort of the presence of this invisible disease.
But I don't recall anyone in Shakespeare's plays actually becoming a victim of plague.
So nobody in Shakespeare's plays dies of plague.
They die of all kinds of elaborate and theatrical means, but nobody dies of plague apart from just a bit of a stretch.
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,
you're going to hear that she's that dead, but she isn't. So part of my plan,
and it's only towards the end of the play that we discover that that message never
reaches Romeo because the carrier was caught up in in a quarantine situation,
was was was forced to quarantine because of crossing into an infected area and therefore was unable to deliver that.
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.
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
sense of a plague environment which audience members recognise and understand.
That's echoed in the language of the play. In the queue, shares famous cast a plague, a plague on both your houses.
So it's there in the background, but really in the foreground,
the consequences of plague are much more hidden or much more oblique court or much more poetic.
I suppose that what you've got is two young people falling into this fatal love.
You've got the symptoms of love, which lots of writers at the time,
including Shakespeare in his poem Venus and Adonis, compared to the symptoms of play.
There's a moment when Olivia in Twelfth Night talks about falling in love and says, even so quickly, can one catch the plague?
So the the poetic associations between love and a sense that love was fatal and sort of pleasurably physical and plague are always present.
So Romeo and Juliet, the plague that Romeo and Juliet have got is a plague of forbidden love,
and it takes their lives just as it took the lives predominantly of young people.
One of the things about bubonic plague is its mortality rates.
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.
So there's something about that youth in Romeo and Juliet and that the kind of the passion and
the fire and the sense that falling in love is like getting an infection and does nothing.
It's all consuming and sort of marvellous and doomed in all these ways.
That feels to me a way of a very particular way of narrative.
Guys dying and romanticising plague, of course, really getting bubonic plague is not a tool like that.
During our conversation.
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.
One of the things I think I love about Shakespeare's plays is how they.
Our contemporary world can help you see them in quite different ways,
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.
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.
But measure for measure,
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.
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.
But it doesn't take much to shift our imagination across into the more pressing public health crisis of that period,
which which which is plague, and where that play seems to dramatise two distinct, two distinct kind of approaches to living with plague.
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.
Sachs, as it was called in in New York after 9/11, the kind of comfort,
physical contact us as comfort and as a kind of a psychological antidote against against plague.
So there are the super spreaders who are who have the kind of brothel owners and
frequenters and they're all about human contact and the kind of Carnel world in which.
In which we live. And then there are the kind of neurotics.
The sort of noley Matangi, a kind of I can't be touched.
I will immediately be infected.
And that's sort of ANGELLO that the deputy izabella the nun.
And between them, there is no kind of moderation about how to live together, how to live together in the city.
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.
And there's no there's no kind of middle ground. We always knew more of measure for measure was a play about extremes.
But it's come to me to seem to be a play much more about the extremes of living.
Living under plague than I had previously ever been able to notice.
It is interesting that a book like Commune's The Plague, which has been one of the great reads of 2020,
was a book we always used to think about as not being about the plague.
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.
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.
Now, in some ways, that seems to be the opposite for Shakespeare, that we don't get a play called the plague.
We don't really get plague sent to stage. Other things, though, are a metaphor for it.
I think that plague is pretty omnipresent in in Shakespeare, but it's always in translation.
Maybe that's the way to think of it. Next time on future, maybe.
We leave the plague behind for now and meet the second of our pandemic diseases, smallpox.
We will discover the hatrick that smallpox brought to 18th century Europe.
How the health profession reacted and why a milkmaid may or may not have inspired the concept of vaccination.
I hope you can join me then for the next episode of our history of pandemic season.
I'm Peter Milliken and you've been listening to Future Makers.
Feature makers was produced in-house at the University of Oxford.
The show was presented by Peter Milliken from Half a College, a voice actor.
At the beginning of the show was Tom Wilkinson.
The soundtrack was created and produced by Richard Watts, and the show was produced by Ben Howard, The May Steve Prichard.
Thanks again for listening to The History of Pandemic's.