Warm Bodies in Plague and Shakespeare's "Womb of Death"

This humanoid stick figure in profile (see figure 1, next page)is the image used for Wikipedia’s entry “Plague (disease).”2 The uncanny resemblance to a human highlights the zombie-like objectness of the microbe: it is alive, like a human, but it is also essentially an immobile object; its movements are as imperceptibly microscopic as it is. Further, plague seems to cross the territory between life and death: it returns after years, even centuries, of dormancy—seemingly absent after the eighth century Justinian y. pestis outbreak only to remerge with even more viru-lence in the fourteenth century as the Black Death. Its very nature seems to invite us to think of plague as both alive and dead; incapable of chas-ing its prey, plague spreads and kills with terrifying efficiency whenever it rises from its own grave-like dormancy. This slightly altered image of Figure 1 neatly conjoins the plague object with the human, and together they engender an environs populated by the living humans, the still-living soon to be “corpse” of the infected, and the ever growing population of dead objects.