‘Purple Plagues or Crimson War’

Abstract

AbstractChapter 7 sifts the Jacobean state’s efforts to impose its authority over London, its suburbs, and Irish plantations—efforts which were underwritten by the emergent discipline of demography. It turns out that Shakespeare’s Jacobean plays share the king’s acute anxieties about urban overpopulation in the aftermath of the 1603 plague. The chapter detects proto-Malthusian rhetoric in Measure for Measure’s grim view of human sexuality, implicating the levelling of Overdone’s bawdy houses with legislative crackdowns on urban sprawl and unwanted pregnancies. Population pressures reached a boiling point again after the 1607 dearth but Coriolanus poses tough questions about the state’s attempt to vent them through war or through the colonization of war-ravaged Ulster. Coriolanus reckons with early modern justifications of war as a medicinal blood-letting of the body politic, an opinion trumpeted by anti-Irish hawks at the Stuart court, and responds to the crisis ignited by the rebellion of the Gaelic chieftain Cahir O’Doherty, who turned on his allies and burned down the English settlement at Derry. Shakespeare’s Roman tragedy is also an Irish tragedy. To sketch a fuller picture of the environmental degradation Ulster suffered, however, the chapter turns from Shakespeare to Irish bardic poetry.