This collection of twelve essays (including significant introduction and conclusion), which emerged from a 2008 Shakespeare Association of America Seminar, focuses on representations of bubonic plague in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature. All but one of the authors have advanced degrees in English; the exception is completing a PhD in history. The volume offers a useful contribution to what we know about early modern English health culture. Each society’s imaginative arts represent beliefs, fears, and practices surrounding health events—birth, illness, injury, and death. Early modern England suffered repeated waves of bubonic plague outbreaks, which, the essays agree, had an exceptionally strong impact on English worldview and literature.

The collection is divided into four main sections. The first, “Making the Plague Serve Form and Function, 1563–1666,” includes three essays: William Kerwin’s comparison of satirical treatment of plague in mid-sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century works; Kelly J. Stage’s interpretation of meanings and uses of urban and rural social space in urban drama; and Erin Sullivan’s illuminating discussion of evolving readings and utilization of the London Bills of Mortality. The second section, “Governing Bodies in Plague Time,” contains two essays focusing on the complex relationship between plague, popular culture, and royal bodies (those of Elizabeth I and James VI and I): Richelle Munkhoff offers an interpretation of responses to the death of Elizabeth, which (she argues) were colored by anxieties generated by the plague epidemic raging at the time. Similarly, James D. Mardock argues that the new King James’s conventionally observed standoffishness may have been more closely related to plague-related strategies than to either his personal character or political sensibilities that were so dramatically different from those of his predecessor. Section 3, “Performances, Playhouses, and the Sites of Re-creation,” offers three essays: Nichole DeWall considers humoral medicine’s faith in the healing powers of mirth in contrast to the mirth-killing advocacy (as well as action) of closing theaters during plague time. Paula S. Berggren reflects on the language relating closed space and infection in Shakespeare’s plays—observing, at the same time, that this drama is actually marked by the absence of the literal disease. Barbara Traister focuses on the relationship between a variety of houses—dwellings, pesthouses, playhouses—and their roles and meanings in plague time. Finally, the fourth section offers two essays and an afterword related to “Contemporary Turns”: Matthew Thiele interprets plague imagery in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Charles Whitney considers two plague pamphlets as early modern “environmental literature”; and Ernest B. Gilman explores the porous boundaries between early modern—and contemporary—metaphor and literal “reality,” particularly as these concepts relate to natural philosophy and science.

My reading of this collection is affected by my historical perspective on early modern English suffering and healing, on the one hand, and considerable lack of sophistication regarding early modern drama, on the other. I found the strengths of these essays to lie in their focus on the relationship between health culture and popular culture. We cannot understand the rapidly developing imaginative literature of this important period without understanding contemporary ideas about causes, prevention, and therapeutic approaches to disease. Equally, imaginative literature offers a valuable window into a diverse multifaceted medical world that was already up to its neck in the scientific revolution. The collection historicizes the links between plague outbreaks and the evolving world of printed literature and public theatrics. Finally, it explores the porous boundaries between imaginative literature and historical evidence. As Ernest Gilman points out in his concluding essay, the metaphorical and literal always overlap more than conventionally recognized—even in supposedly objective realms such as science and technology.

This having been said, I found the collection uneven. Despite the title’s stated focus on early modern England, the essays gave disproportionate attention to the 1603 plague outbreak and Thomas Dekker’s pamphlet The Wonderful Year, published in that year. The essays focus almost exclusively on London, with areas outside the metropolis serving as a vague other. With the exception of Rebecca Totaro’s brief review of the historical scholarship regarding sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English ill health and medical care, the main references in the collected essays to this literature were to Paul Slack’s work on plague. Along the same lines, apart from Erin Sullivan’s excellent discussion of the London Bills of Mortality, there was little attention given to the considerable body of primary nonliterary source materials regarding plague during the period under consideration; Samuel Pepys’s extensive descriptions of plague-infested London spring to mind. Furthermore, despite repeated references to the lack of literal plague in much imaginative literature, including Shakespeare’s plays, the authors’ focus on plague as a proxy for all contagious disease and other disruptions in the period distorts the reader’s vision as well; important as plague was, there was plenty of misery afoot during the period—contagious and not—to go around. Finally, in these essays there was rather too much display of literary legerdemain that sometimes distracted attention from what I took to be the point of the collection—exploration of early modern English mentalities through the representation of plague in its popular literature.