‘And how may one tell the difference between love and plague?’ said the young man.
‘O! But they are one and the same!’ cried the old, ‘For in both activities, the participants are shut away from the world behind a closed door. In both, those outside can think and talk of little else. And both’ - here he brought his lips close to the young man’s ear - ‘are marked by a kiss.’
Date of publication : 3.4.20
In this lesson, we will consider why we aren’t allowed to go around kissing people when there’s a plague on. Why that is, and who made it up.
THE SKILL OF WOMEN
We have, of course, already noted that women have historically been better at kissing than men (I use my italics advisedly, for there is nothing to say that, at the dawn of time, men were not good at it too). Consensus in modern scholarship is that the supremacy of women in kissing was not, in fact, biologically predetermined, but was, rather, the result of a series of a socio-economic accidents of history, coupled with their natural inclination to sneakiness. Female sneakiness reached its zenith when women disguised kissing as a job, creating the first profession.
The Great Bamboozle.
Jesus Christ is the only man in the world to have ever seen through this, famously telling Mary Magdalene to ‘stop it!’ (John 8:11). He said there was no way he was paying for kissing and he didn’t think his friends should either. Mary of course realised that there was a danger that all the men would listen to Jesus and stop paying for kissing, so she spread a rumour that Jesus was not a man at all, but God Almighty, which meant he didn’t didn’t know what he was talking about when it came to kissing. Christ dug his heels in and assured her that he was definitely a man and that he knew loads about kissing. And so Magdalene suggested the now infamous compromise: ‘how about we say you are both man and God?’ This was enough to keep Jesus Christ happy and enough to convince all the other men that he was a bit different, which meant they only half listened to him and continued to pay for kissing.
The institution of which we speak, is of course, the brothel, where you may find great skill in kissing of many genres and also sexual intercourse. But in 1495, an outbreak of a horrible new disease called syphilis (or the ‘French’ Disease or the ‘Italian’ Disease) broke out in Italy while the French were fighting there. So the French Army ran all the way home, visiting lots of brothels on the way. And it was soon seen that kissing spread not only life, but also death, which got women into a tight spot. It came to be believed that this sickness itself sprang immaculate from women’s bodies and this fact got written down.
A sad day for humanity.
THE THEATRE
Another great human institutation.
Theatres didn’t exist until 1576, when the first theatre in London was built. This new theatre was called The Theatre, so everyone would know what it was, even though no one knew what a theatre was because it was a new thing. People could go to The Theatre and watch people kissing on stage and watch people pretending to kiss on stage and then play spot the difference and sometimes even get a little kiss themselves, so everyone absolutely loved it and within a few years, there were loads of theatres all over the place. It reminded Londoners of how much they had loved going to Church in the olden days before stupid pax boards came in and everyone stopped kissing and started arguing. It also reminded Londoners of brothels, which were almost exactly the same thing as theatres - except that in theatre, mostly men did it, so it was serious as well as fun. So here we were in Elizabethan England and all was going well in this golden age of culture until suddenly, in 1592, a pale horse named Pestilence galloped into London leading to the shut down of all the theatres.
For plague does not understand nice distinctions between real kisses and pretend kisses. Plague does not understand fiction.
Some audiences cried, ‘O no what on earth will we do without plays!’ but luckily almost everyone remembered a time before The Theatre existed, and they quickly went back to telling funny stories and singing bawdy songs and looking at pictures as they had in days of yore and forgot about plays and everyone was happy.
Except that they were dying and their loved ones were dying.
Except that their loved ones were dying.
Except for that.
WAR
Another great human institution.
So what occurs if war rides with pestilentce? Let us consider an example…
The year is 1346 and The Hundred Years War is raging, though at this stage no one knows it will last for a hundred years. France and England are locked together in an existential battle for supremacy when suddenly, travelling at the speed of darkness, The Black Death sweeps Northwest across Europe, killing perhaps half the population as it goes.
In the mediterranean countries (Spain, Italy, Southern France) as many as four in five go to their deaths.
Four in five.
What was war to do in the face of such catastrophic devastation?
Now, all experienced generals know that their foot soldiers like to hold onto each other when they are afeared, and this was, of course, a fearful time. And they know too that even great soldiers (like Horatio Nelson) want a little kiss when Death is near. And they knew that it was the custom of soldiers to fraternise with the locals as they crossed countries and it was soon seen that all this terrible plague needed was the tiniest of kisses, a mere hint of a kiss, for sickness to hop from person to person, so that a marching army became itself a rampant machine of death, but not in a good way.
For it became clear that the sufferers of plague, in the mad delirium of fever, simply forgot to care about the difference between France and England. Just as their children’s children, in their ravings, would lose sight of the difference between transubstantiation and comnhmsubstantiwatsit. And so it was that the great ones of the earth said ‘we can’t have this’ and they called a truce and hid in their castles while the sickness raged, and they told everyone to stay very still, and they prayed for deliverance. They prayed and they died. They died while they prayed.
1346 - 1352
The Great Plague.
The Great Mortality.
The Pestilence.
The Silence.
.
In such time, the public houses are boarded up.
The brothels are closed.
The theatres are shut down.
Wars cease.
Clocks stop.
Even the hills and the dales, the marshes and the henges, are put as it were on hold, for it is known that the beauty of nature, too, can incline our lips together, and so the countryside is emptied with the cry, ‘Go home and take your dog!’, and the waters of the lakes run black.
HOPE
In the darkest years of the plagues, afflicted houses were daubed with a special sign.
X
If you saw a door marked by this sign, you would not enter.
Unless you were a wrestler. Also called, a doctor.
The wrestler, the doctor sometimes wore protective clothing : a long leather coat, leather boots, a medical mask with a big nose stuffed with juniper berries or rose petals, and special eyewear, commonly known as ‘silly spectacles’. These wrestlers, or doctors could be seen cautiously picking their way through the empty streets of London, Paris, Venice, Milan, Athens… travelling from door to door until they found the mark.
X
Rat. Rattatat. Ratatatatatat.
They would knock.
The door would open.
And the wrestler would disappear into the secret beyond.
We may not know, we can not tell, what happened behind those doors. Kissing games played with Death are mysterious - some we win, and some we lose. But all memory of these encounters exists far beyond the realms of my lessons in history… they exist only as shadows in the theatres of the mind, as phantoms in the private rooms of our jolting hearts, so I can’t really tell you more… I don’t know how to what can I do -
EXERCISE LESSON ONE
Put your lips together, kiss, and blow.
Images
Death and the Maiden : Pierre Puvis de Chavames
Death and the Maiden : Egon Schiele
Stolen Kiss : Jean Honoré Fragonard
Death and the Maiden : Lenkiewicz
A contemporary illustration of Charles De Lorme, doctor to Louis XV : Anonymous
Renaissance plague hospital
A doctor
Date of publication : 3.4.20