'A sufficient prevention': Plague representation in Renaissance literature (Thomas Dekker, John Taylor, John Donne, Ben Jonson)

Plague representations in early modern English literature display surprising assertions of control over erratic, epidemic disasters. This is most obvious in religious/medical utilitarian literature which confidently presents divine discipline as first cause and paradoxically presents material remedies with equal confidence. Reassurance that plague could be controlled by repentance, reform, and medicine was crucial to the official containment project.; Proto-journalistic pamphlets describe plague suffering with vivid detail, portraying the disease as a powerful, unpredictable, and profoundly disruptive force. Yet, Dekker's narration locates these tragic events in healing contexts of social continuity. Taylor's bitter, partisan work is still, like Dekker's pamphlets, an effort to stimulate reformed responses to plague circumstances. Crafted to varying degrees from actual events, these works serve as a touchstone for the vivid representation of plague suffering in other genres. Donne integrates similarly vivid representations into a consolatory sermon reformulating the immediate suffering of his congregation into a reassuring and life-affirming context.; The view of theaters as potential sites of moral and civil disorder, as well as physical contagion, which led to the closing of the stages whenever plague threatened, also encouraged playwrights to self-censor, to represent plague with considerably less intensity than the authors of proto-journalistic pamphlets did. Anxieties about disorderly responses to dynamic representation of plague suffering from the poorer segments of audiences, about offending officials, and the possibility of genuine but conflicted acquiescence with generally accepted control policies are among the influences tending towards self-censorship. Widespread plague imprecation reflects plague anxieties, and carnivalesque empowerment and various figurative uses of plague language which insinuate plague anxieties onto the stage often fall into healing patterns of satire/reform, the moral modeling of tragedy, and the Galenic tonic of humor in comedy.; The generally scant and oblique reference to plague in the works of two of the period's major poets, John Donne and Ben Jonson, reflects the illusion of control that their elite audiences maintained by exercising their right, even their prescribed duty, to separate themselves from the immediate experiences of plague suffering and disorder. In this poetry, as in the drama which had a separate set of limiting circumstances, de-emphasizing the vivid representation of plague suffering and disorder helped to create the reassuring and stabilizing illusion that plague was less disruptive than it is known to have been.