Shakespeare, Southampton, and Plague

A commentary on how orthodox analysis 'works' - but doesn't

Our upcoming conference, “The first heir of my invention”: the Mystery of the Southampton dedications, and the genesis of Venus and Adonis & The Rape of Lucrece has led me back to a piece I had written considering how the covid pandemic encouraged scholars (and continues to encourage them) to investigate the role of the plague in the writings of Shakespeare with a new urgency and arguably, a new understanding. This was certainly the case in a 30-minute BBC Radio 4 documentary from January 2021, “A Plague On All Our Houses” in which the former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Greg Doran, considered how Shakespeare’s life was punctuated by outbreaks of plague and how they affected his work.