Rebecca Totaro is Professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast University. She is the author of Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton.Ernest Gilman is Professor of English at NYU. He is the author of Plague Writing in Early Modern England.

• Acknowledgments Introduction, Rebecca Totaro Section One: Making the Plague Serve Form and Function, 1563-1666 1: Writing the Plague in English Prose Satire, William Kerwin 2: Plague Space and Played Space in Urban Drama, 1604, Kelly J. Stage 3: Physical and Spiritual Illness: Narrative Appropriations of the Bills of Mortality, Erin Sullivan Section Two: Governing Bodies in Plague-Time 4: Contagious Figurations: Plague and the Impenetrable Nation after the Death of Elizabeth, Richelle Munkhoff 5: "Thinking to pass unknown": Measure for Measure, the Plague, and the Accession of James I, James D. Mardock Section Three: Performances, Playhouses, and the Sites of Re-Creation 6: "Sweet recreation barred": The Case for Playgoing in Plague-time, Nichole DeWall 7: Shakespeare’s Dual Lexicons of Plague: Infections in Speech and Space, Paula S. Berggren 8: "A plague on both your houses": Sites of Comfort and Terror in Early Modern Drama, Barbara H. Traister Section Four: Contemporary Turns 9: Plague in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Girardian Reading of Bottom and Hippolyta, Matthew Thiele 10: Dekker’s and Middleton’s Plague Pamphlets as Environmental Literature, Charles Whitney Afterword: Plague and Metaphor, Ernest B. Gilman Notes on Contributors Index

"This is an extraordinary collection, filled with many strong and engaging arguments, readable and broad in its treatment of literary works and perspectives." --Catherine I. Cox, Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi, Renaissance Quarterly, Summer 2011"Highly recommended." --M. Cole, Edison State College, Choice, January 2011