데커의 역병 팸플릿에서 드러나는 역병 담론의 정치 = The Politics of the Plague Discourse in Early Modern England: Thomas Dekker’s Plague Pamphlets

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper explores Thomas Dekker’s two early plague pamphlets, The Wonderful Year (1603) and News from Gravesend (1604), which were written after the outbreak of the plague in London in 1603. The effect of the great plagues in late 16th and early 17th century London can be compared to that of the atomic bomb in modern times, sweeping away 1/8 to 1/6 of the metropolitan population and devastating the whole city system. Writing about plagues is far from objective, deploying writers’s socio-political perspective. It is especially true in early modern England, in which different disciplines such as medicine, politics, and literature had not been as discrete as they were after the Enlightenment. As Thomas Lodge’s A Treatise of the Plague (1603) typically shows, early modern plague discourses tried to explain the ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’ of the plagues through natural means and supernatural myths, relying on various classical texts and the Bible. They also presented the horrors of the pestilence and suggested to people the ways to survive. They, along with the plague Orders from the London government, usually attributed the origin of the plague to the ‘base’ and ‘immoderate’ poor and their overcrowded housing in the ‘sinful’ suburbs, urging Londoners who had the means to, to flee from the city during the outbreaks. In this sense the plague and the plague Order in the first decade of the seventeenth century served to intensify, highlight, and express an increasing polarization of social conditions based on wealth. Dekker’s plague pamphlets can be posited as one alternative voice among various political voices in early modern England, articulating the interests of the poor. Unlike most pamphlet writers of his times, he pointed out that sin, not contagion, causes the plague, and the greed and selfishness of the wealthy are the root of God’s displeasure. His persistent message is that only charity can bring the cessation of the plague, conveying a pressing need for social reform to alleviate the suffering of the poor. Through Dekker’s pamphlets, we can hear a voice different from the self-representation of the state as well as the powerful and affluent metropolitan elite of the early modern London at the time of the social crisis.

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