In his 1985 study of the bubonic plague, Paul Slack discusses the connections between the established epidemic and the so-called new diseases in early-modern society, and notes that : As a consequence, historians and literary critics would have us believe that it is not always easy to distinguish syphilis from the other ailments. Also, once the infection spread, and the individual’s immunity system was affected and resistance impaired, other diseases had a chance to assert themselves. I wish to study the unfavourable image formation, or stereotyping that accompanied the arrival of the new disease in England by looking at the intellectual origins of this tendency to stereotype, as well as the intertextual network of allusions it produced in the writings of the period.ĥ Before discussing the impact of syphilis on Tudor and Stuart literature, it seems worth noting that it was not the only new early-modern type of disease to vie with the more traditional plague.
In doing so, I do not wish to establish that stereotyping took place, but how. Instead, I wish to study how the phenomenon known as syphilis affected the Englishman’s image of the French as the former first tried to come to terms with the new disease in the sixteenth century. (New York : Vintage, 1986), 12.1197 and L (.)Ĥ Given the vast amount of critical attention already devoted to the disease, it is not my intention here to rewrite the history of «syphilisation» in England, to use a rather playful term generally thought to derive from James Joyce’s Ulysses although it more likely derives from Lord Byron’s Don Juan 4. In the final analysis, the greatest merit of Fabricius’s study is its encyclopedic scope its only flaw an unnecessary attempt to establish that Shakespeare was a syphilitic himself 3. Fabricius discusses a vast range of English Renaissance examples, but he is also acutely aware of the immediate European context. Bentley’s Shakespeare and the New Disease (New York : Peter Lang, 1989 ), which concentrates on syphilis and satire in Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and Timon of Athens Stanislav Andreski’s rather speculative but nevertheless intriguing study entitled Syphilis, Puritanism and Witch Hunts which suggests a connection between the spread of syphilis during the early-modern period on the one hand, and the rise of Puritanism as well as the witch hunts on the other 2 and Johan Fabricius’s Syphilis in Shakespeare’s England. To the more recent contributions belong G.W.
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