Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage. Darryl Chalk and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. vi + 292 pp. €74.96

• Published in: Renaissance quarterly 2021-07, Vol.74 (2), p.709-711
• Main Author: Purnis, Jan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Context; COVID-19; Drama; English literature; Medicine; Political discourse; Storytelling
• ISSN: 0034-4338; 1935-0236
• DOI: 10.1017/rqx.2021.91

Jennie Votava reads The Comedy of Errors in the context of antitheatricalist Stephen Gosson's concerns about the communal pathophysiological effects of performances on audiences, while Amy Kenny draws attention to how the infectious nature of smells portrayed in Julius Caesar was mirrored by the audience's experience of the noisome odors of animal blood and gunpowder used for special effects. Bronwyn Johnston focuses on the importance of touch in spreading disease and wickedness, demonstrating how the pathogenic function of the devil in The Witch of Edmonton illustrates the complexity of early modern understandings of contagion and immunity. Clifford Werier reads competing political discourses about food distribution in Coriolanus through the lens of meme theory; J. F. Bernard presents Hamlet as an example of contagious storytelling (both within the play and in relation to early modern theatrical publicity); John Charles Estabillo considers The Alchemist in the context of tensions between providential and materialistic interpretations of disease, and related polemical identification of atheism with contagion; and Rebecca Totaro invites a reading of Verona in Romeo and Juliet “as an ecosystem in which the biotic and abiotic constituents are disposed toward spontaneous generation,” calling this ecosystem an “epidemic assemblage” (255).