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While plague lent itself to a variety of metaphorical uses across early modern English drama, it was rarely employed as an occasion for action or plot. Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist is a notable outlier, focused on the racketeering enabled when disease comes to an urban center. Romeo and Juliet is another. The familiar line, “a plague a’ both your houses,” is incantatory, uttered by Mercutio three times to make sure no one mistakes his meaning: both Capulets and Montagues, both Tybalt and Romeo, are to blame for his death (3.1.101–2). Plague is not only metaphorical, however; Friar John is kept from Mantua just on the chance of carrying “the infectious pestilence,” having needed to find a fellow friar from the town in order to gain access. Presuming from their status as Franciscans that they had been “visiting the sick,” Mantua “Sealed up the doors [. . .] So fearful were they of infection” (5.2.7–16). This scene, so clearly capturing real fears in an ongoing global pandemic, is cut from The National Theatre’s filmed production. That cut captures a trend of the production in that, just at the moment it might acknowledge an exigency of which Romeo and Juliet was newly capable given the current socio-political climate, it instead reinforces problematic power structures rather than interrogating them.
Casting is chief among the aspects of this production that contribute to the reinforcement of power structures. The production is diversely cast in respect of race/ethnicity, although no character is cross-gender cast. However, if a company chooses to use what Ayanna Thompson calls “color-conscious casting,” the production must also consider how the alignment of actors’ race and characters’ roles affects the play’s dramaturgy (Thompson 76–81). Are actors of color cast across status groups and genders within the world of the play? In this case, actors of color are in secondary roles only, with the overwhelming emphasis in both marketing and screen time being on the two white leads, and other characters played by white celebrities (such as Tamsin Greig’s Lady Capulet) having their roles substantially enhanced. Outside the world of the play, this typically equates to a difference in pay as compared to their white counterparts. Such inconsistency in representing and therefore compensating communities of color is, of course,...