Parallels in Historical Plagues
“Once they closed those gates…we were all in the same boat.” — Neil Bartlett, THE PLAGUE
Streaming on demand October 7 through November 21, 2021, Lantern Theater Company’s U.S. premiere digital production of The Plague is an allegory for the social ills that infect our society like a virus. Adapted by Neil Barlett from the Albert Camus novel, The Plague’s metaphor is effective because it builds upon a phenomenon that has happened repeatedly in human history, with several recognizable behavioral patterns.
The Black Death, 1340s and 50s
The Bubonic Plague is the highly communicable illness responsible for the Black Death — a pandemic that killed anywhere from 30 to 60 percent of Europe’s population between about 1346 and 1353, in a world before antibiotics. While people of that time had no knowledge of bacteria or viruses, they did know the plague was contagious and took steps to attempt to limit the spread, including quarantining after exposure in some places.
While today’s Covid-19 and the Black Death are very different diseases, there are parallels both good and bad in society’s response. By reducing the population, the Black Death contributed to an increase in worker wages and options as survivors found themselves with more leverage over employers who were often property owners, e.g. local “lords” and proprietors. Some historians also believe that it contributed to the birth of the Renaissance on the reasoning that the mass death led philosophers and artists to focus more on life on earth, leading to a burst of creativity and curiosity. In addition, there is some evidence of “revenge spending” — purchases and travel incurred to make up for the lost time within the pandemic — as we are observing today as well.
Sadly, the Black Death was also characterized by a tendency we have not overcome: the urge to scapegoat migrants or marginalized groups as somehow responsible for the plague, and to shun or harm them in imagined retaliation.
Cholera in Oran, 1849
While the disease of The Plague is the Bubonic Plague, Albert Camus’s original novel was inspired by an 1849 outbreak of cholera in Oran, his hometown in Algeria, then under French rule. Cholera, an infection of the small intestine, spreads primarily through unsafe food and drinking water, making it especially deadly for those in poverty, without access to clean water or sanitation.
A group of Spanish colonists in Oran desperate for the cholera plague to end carried a statue of the Virgin Mary to the top of a local mountain in supplication. Local legend says that heavy rains the next day washed away the plague. This turn toward forces greater than ourselves to save us might be recognizable today — for some, it outweighs the benefits of modern medicine.
Smallpox, 1700s
Smallpox, a viral infection that caused flu-like symptoms and a sometimes disfiguring rash, has been eradicated since 1980 thanks to vaccines. But those vaccines were not always welcome — another unfortunate parallel to today’s pandemic.
In 1721 Boston, an outbreak of smallpox killed roughly 1 in every 13 infected people. Onesimus, a man enslaved by the influential Rev. Cotton Mather, had a solution. He told Mather about being inoculated against the illness in West Africa, something that had been practiced in African and Asian countries for centuries. Mather tested inoculation based on Onesimus’s guidance and gathered data during the 1721 outbreak; he found that the risk of death to the inoculated was 2%, but the risk to the uninoculated was nearly 15%. While not without risk, inoculation was an important safeguard.
But a Boston newspaper run by James Franklin dedicated itself to undermining the inoculation, partially out of dislike for Mather. The paper spread misinformation and purposefully sowed doubt, contributing to sometimes violent opposition to the inoculation effort. Fifteen years later, James’s younger brother — Benjamin Franklin — lost his uninoculated four-year-old son to smallpox, something he regretted bitterly for the rest of his life; he wrote about the loss several times, urging parents to inoculate their own children.
Inoculation took a month to recover from, and was risky — it involved infecting the patient with a live virus so that they contracted what was hopefully a less severe version, giving them lifelong immunity. With smallpox ravaging American troops in 1777, then General George Washington mandated inoculation for every soldier who had not yet had the disease, establishing the nation’s first mass immunization initiative.
Influenza, 1918–1919
This deadly flu pandemic infected one-fifth of the world’s population and killed between 50 and 100 million people. It was called the Spanish Flu, not because it originated there, but because Spain was the first to report on it. Most Western governments, embroiled in World War I and not wanting to further harm morale, never publicly mentioned the disease, hampering newspapers like the ones in The Plague from reporting the scale of the outbreak. But pretending it would miraculously disappear did not work — in the United States, over 670,000 people died, which was more than all the wars of the 20th century combined. We have far surpassed this grim milestone in 2021, making Covid-19 the country’s most deadly pandemic ever.
While there were no vaccines, there were public health measures that we would recognize today: a push for increased sanitation and hand washing, mask wearing, and efforts at social distancing. And like today, a faction of the population rejected those efforts. In Philadelphia — the city hardest hit by the flu — 200,000 people gathered for a parade at the beginning of the epidemic, driving a spike in infections and death. Schools, theaters, and other gatherings shut down a week later. Nationwide, new waves of the pandemic were driven by public health interventions being relaxed too early.
Throughout history, plagues have reverberated into art and politics. While not all of the elements of these historical epidemics are present in The Plague, their cyclical nature is, as are the ways in which humanity first adjusts and then willfully sets aside many lessons learned in an effort to move on — whether from illness or from dangerous political movements. In the world of The Plague, another catastrophe is always possible; another illness is always ready to infect an unprepared populace. It is our duty to inoculate ourselves from their worst effects, and to stand ready to band together to fight them when they reemerge. For even in the face of terrible repetition and lessons unlearned, as Dr. Rieux says in the play, “there is more to admire about people than to despise or despair of.”
Related reading: Artist Interview: Charles McMahon, Director — The director of The Plague on the resonance and lessons of the play
The Plague was filmed at St. Stephen’s Theater in Center City Philadelphia in July 2021 with strict adherence to all CDC, state, and local health and safety guidelines, and is streaming on demand October 7 through November 21, 2021. Visit our website for tickets and information.
