My current book in progress, Pestilent Congregations: Plagues on the Early Modern Stage, explores the representation of the plague throughout the extant corpus of early English drama. It provides the first comprehensive overview of on-stage depictions of the plague and outlines direct representations and references across the period’s drama, from medieval cycle and morality plays to the closing of the theaters in the seventeenth century. While scholarly attention to infectious disease has surged, especially post-covid-19, such an overview remains curiously missing. Although many have unpacked the era’s deep connections between the theater and the plague, it has become commonplace to note that the plague was only directly represented onstage a mere three times, with most citing the traumatic experience of infection, and the dangers of contagion, as contributing to this omission. Yet, by tracking the full body of English drama, my book reveals that on-stage references to the plague are remarkably consistent, though they take different forms than might be expected. Allegorical figures called “God’s Plague” strike characters with bubonic symptoms; materio-spiritual Vice figures of the late morality stage rub elbows with audience members; staged prayers led by Biblical prophets eerily allude to recent plague-time events; elaborate scammers take advantage of the changing contours of city life under the plague: all of these examples speak to the unique ways writers shaped the pestilence. By crafting my book around these paradigmatic examples of the plague—including lesser-known works like William Wager’s Enough is as Good as a Feast and more well-known plays like Romeo and Juliet and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist—I argue that writers represented a lived experience of the plague that was not, as it is now, constructed solely on physical symptoms nor belonging to a kind of realism avant la lettre. With a more expansive understanding of disease than our own, writers crafted plagues that were both mimetic and allegorical, and they often signaled this medical state through amplified, off-stage narratives.

Outside of Pestilent Congregations, I have published and presented on a variety of topics including early modern citterns and amulets; sexual violence and penetrative poetics; occasional worship in colonial and English forms of repentance; and revenge and gender in early modern drama, among other topics.