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Representing the Plague in Early Modern England. Edited by Rebecca Totaro and Ernest B. Gilman. New York and London: Routledge, 2010. Illus. Pp. viii + 260. $125.00 cloth.
As its title makes evident, this collection treats plague visitation in early modern England as a represented event; what makes these essays so conceptually and intellectually engaging is precisely how. Against prominent readings of René Girard and Susan Sontag,1 the contributors do not imagine plague as a metaphor of political and social disorder that has been evacuated of disordered bodies; they do not anatomize a cluster of metaphors that obscures the illness. Rather, representation and metaphor are part of the experience of plague: illness is metaphor. Ernest B. Gilman reminds us in his afterword that the term "plague" is a metaphor: a description of the expression of a pathogen and not the thing itself. So far as the encounter is with the symptom, one is automatically and immediately involved in interpretation. This displacement at the local level of the word is reproduced in numerous alienation effects: absent monarchs, quarantined houses, the red crosses on doors that indicated infection within. While many critical analyses of disease in the early modern period address the porous nature of the body-and the body politic-this fine collection reminds us of the enclosed, claustrophobic, and ultimately occluded experience of plague once a national strategy for plague control is imposed.
Certainly there was first-hand experience of plague visitations in early modern England: in 1603 alone, the year when monarchical power transferred from Elizabeth I to James I, London lost an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 people-20 percent of the population. No one could have been leftuntouched, yet as Barbara H. Traister observes (and other essays in the volume attest), "No dramatist in the period chose to dramatize those directly affected by plague such as victims or survivors mourning the loss of family or friends" (169). Rather, plague is notable for its absence and displacement in the plots of early modern English plays. Instead, a "few plays" explore plague through the representation of the "material manifestations" of visitation in the structure of the house (169). The Plague Act of 1604 strengthened previous orders so that all persons attempting to break quarantine could be violently restrained within...