Facemasks and Content Warnings: Teaching Plague Drama in a Pandemic
As a teacher and researcher of early modern literature, my academic experience has often been shadowed by historical experiences of bubonic plague.
The plague’s impact is ever-present in the literature I teach. Outbreaks also feed into the financial precarity encountered by the dramatists and acting companies I study. The second module that I ever offered at university included a week on Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (a play whose events take place during and are enabled by a plague outbreak). Since then, I have often included Jonson’s play in university-level modules. My experience of researching early modern plague narrative goes back even further. Like many UK pupils, I spent Year 9 of high school studying William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: another play in which bubonic plague crucially influences the narrative.
With the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the context in which I encounter and experience these plays took on a totally new dimension. I was due to teach The Alchemist as core reading for an undergraduate literature module running in 2020-21. At the same time, I was working with a consultant to create resources for use in secondary-school English literature lessons: we had decided that Romeo and Juliet would be a key text. We had to decide whether to retain such materials at a time when staff and students might have lost loved ones to or be experiencing significant anxiety about the ongoing pandemic. Suddenly, these themes had acquired a new relevance. A topic that had previously seemed “academic” suddenly resonated powerfully with people’s immediate experience. I was wary of forcing connections between historical and contemporary experiences in ways that might distort narratives or flatten nuances, but I also wanted students and pupils to have the option of drawing connections between the material they were studying and their own experience. I started looking for public research talks that might provide a model for negotiating such discussions. I found some helpful blogs and podcasts by scholars at Bristol and Cardiff universities who reflected on how radically perceptions of the plague-ridden world of The Alchemist had shifted over the past year. Ultimately, I decided to retain references to the plague in both our school educational resources and my own teaching on The Alchemist. However, I did add content warnings so that staff and students could make their own judgements about whether to engage directly with this theme.
The Alchemist stayed on my university syllabus, but my approach to teaching this comedy altered. The plague had previously been a topic that I treated quite light-heartedly, stressing how writers such as Jonson and Thomas Dekker made light of the extreme measures that early modern men and women took to protect themselves from contagion. When teaching Jonson’s play through a facemask and at a distance of two metres from our students, I instead found myself empathising with those characters who were trying to quarantine themselves, test to see if they were infected, and look for fantastical new cures. In fact, I suspect that I would have been one of them! The way I read and talked about this work changed. I felt I had a new appreciation of the menace of the plague, and people’s resulting awareness of financial, bodily, and aerial precarity. Weren’t these factors likely to have influenced the composition and early performance history of early modern plague dramas?
When teaching Jonson’s play through a facemask and at a distance of two metres from our students, I instead found myself empathising with those characters who were trying to quarantine themselves, test to see if they were infected, and look for fantastical new cures.
My own reading and teaching of plague drama shifted as a result of COVID. In seminars, I found myself flagging up the significance of disease imagery in The Alchemist. This theme also appeared more overtly in my assessment questions. I noticed that my students wanted to research and write about the plague. It felt important teaching such plays because of the newly challenging nature of their subject matter. Now, nearing the end of the academic year, I wonder how future students will respond to such material. I’m also curious about what will happen beyond the University. In the summer, will open-air theatres choose to avoid staging plague drama such as Romeo and Juliet and The Alchemist? Or will they foreground plays like these for their topical relevance? It will be fascinating to see. Perhaps early modern plague narratives offer a way for us to reflect upon what we have gone through: a historically distanced way of engaging with all too immediate and painful experiences of anxiety, lockdown, and loss. Perhaps, too, they might unlock a corresponding desire to seek out opportunities for laughter and togetherness, especially in times of crisis and precarity, that will give new meaning to such comedy.
