Physical and Spiritual Illness: Narrative Appropriations of the Bills of Mortality

Abstract

Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the presence of plague in England profoundly shaped literary and theatrical production. As many theater historians have shown, the arrival of the plague meant the closure of London theaters, leading writers and actors to pursue new ways of selling their creative wares, such as touring the provinces or turning their attention to nondramatic literature.1 One thing that has received less direct attention, however, is the mechanism by which London offi cials declared the city too plague-ridden for theatrical gatherings. Their decisions were strongly infl uenced by the numbers of plague deaths reported by each of the city’s parishes, a system that by the 1520s was in nascent form and that by the early 1600s had resulted in weekly, printed broadsides containing local breakdowns of plague deaths in the city.2 Known as the London Bills of Mortality, these broadsides have long been prized by historians of demography and epidemiology for their statistical content but have only recently garnered the attention of cultural historians and literary scholars. Perhaps this is not surprising; a cursory glance at a typical London bill reveals many lists and numbers but little narrative comment upon which a literary analysis might be based.