Hardly a Soul Was Left Alive Post
Note this is post 2 in a series of 4 to start at the beginning CLICK HERE Continue to post 3 at the bottom
Plague continued to be the very real ‘bogey man’ of society throughout the following centuries. By the 16th-century the playwright William Shakespeare would make use of its reputation at least 25 times in his plays.
Tragically his two older siblings would die of the disease in childhood in the market town of Stratford-Upon-Avon. The town was an ideal candidate for the disease as it was a meeting place for so many folk coming in from outside to an important local market.
It was he, William, of course, who coined the phrase ‘A plague on both your houses’. Is a line spoken by Mercutio to the warring families in the play Romeo and Juliet.
Interestingly Shakespeare never made it a subject of any play. Nor is it the cause of death, (and he created many deaths), of any of his characters. He used the term rather as a curse, a problem, a calamity, or a discomfort. In some renditions of the play, the curse is replaced by the word ‘Pox’, referring to a disease of a completely different nature. Both, however, thoroughly unpleasant.
As a metaphor, and etymologically the word ‘Plague’ has not always been a reference to a disease, but rather calamity. Deriving from the Middle-English word
‘Plage’, itself a derivative of the Latin ‘plaga’ meaning “a blow'', as in smiting or slaughter.
Professor Rasmussen of Sweden, who discovered the tooth DNA in our neolithic woman (mentioned in the part 1 email) is convinced that Plague evolved from a relatively harmless organism, and over the years has dynamically evolved much the same as Smallpox, Malaria, Ebola and Zika.
“In 1665 hardly a soul was left alive”
Almost exactly 49 years after Shakespeare’s death, The Plague or The Black Death would visit London. Breaking out in May of that year in the poor and overcrowded parish of St.Giles-in the-Field 43 deaths were recorded.
In June, 6137
July, 17,036
and by August 31,159
By the end of that summer, it is recorded that 69,596 had succumbed. Modern science puts the figure at probably closer to 100,000 and that out of a population of 450,000. More than 20%!
