Shakespeare’s Work Was Repeatedly Interrupted By The Plague. Where Is It In His Plays?

The theatre historian J. Leeds Barroll III, who carefully sifted through the surviving records, concluded that in the years between 1606 and 1610—the period in which Shakespeare wrote and produced some of his greatest plays, from “Macbeth” and “Antony and Cleopatra” to “The Winter’s Tale” and “The Tempest”—the London playhouses were not likely to have been open for more than a total of nine months. It is all the more striking, then, that in his plays and poems Shakespeare almost never directly represents the plague. – The New Yorker