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A miasma of plague hangs around Shakespeare's dramatic corpus, and Othello is a topical response to its occasional outbreak in 1603. Inevitably, its textual body is not only a palimpsest of traces recording epidemic outbreaks, but it is also a field of politico-clinical discourses that attempt to govern, quarantine, and direct the disease toward certain controllable ways. In other words, Othello is a representation of the rise of modern medical science. We know that as a medical term "Othello Syndrome" indicates a pathological and delusional jealousy, which is not primarily, however, the clinical subtext of the play that interests me; rather, the play's metaphoric depictions of the plague-stricken corpus politicum and its safety measure that is encapsulated by the word "immunization" fascinates me.1
The reason I would like to read Othello as a plague narrative by focusing on its representation of an immunitary crisis is not just because the play's semantic features obsessively revolve around words such as "plague," "infection," "pestilence," and "contamination."2 It is also because the play was produced in the heavy referential web of the plague visit in (and around) 1603-the year that Thomas Dekker called "The Wonderfull Yeare" when the Tudor-Stuart dynastic shiftoccurred.3 It is a truism to say that the history of English Renaissance is also the history of the plague, and inevitably literature produced between Shakespeare's birth and Milton's death provides records of pandemic outbreaks. It is quite intriguing, however, to remember that, as Richelle Munkhoffpoints out, the dynastic transitions in early modern England accompanied massive outbreaks-from Elizabeth to James in 1603 and from James to Charles in 1625.4 In particular, around the time of Elizabeth's death and James's accession, England had a severe outbreak, and James's passage through London did not happen until March 1604 because he remained in the north by ordering the Privy Council to bury Elizabeth without him.5 Thus the situation was very much as though, as Rebecca Totaro puts it, "the plague itself took the throne in the interim."6 The plague, which people simply called "death," was not just an unwelcome visitor in the suburbs and the ghettos of the metropolitan margins; rather, in popular imagination, even though Elizabeth's own death was not directly related to the plague, it was vested with regicidal power....