How Plague Trained Us

GEORGE:
Today: How Plague Trained Us
How plague trained Elizabethan culture—audiences included—
toward certain fears and reflexes…
and how COVID trained us in remarkably similar ways.

GEORGE:
Quick reminder: my Shakespeare can look back from the present day—films, scholarship, modern claims—
but he cannot predict the future. No prophecy.

WILL:
Memory, yes.
Foresight, no.

GEORGE:
Now, When I say “habits of mind,” I mean the reflexes that become automatic:

how you interpret a cough
how you feel about crowds
what you do with your hands
what you believe when you’re afraid
what you do to feel safe
who you trust, and how quickly you withdraw trust

WILL:
An epidemic trains a person the way war trains a person—
not by speeches, but by repeated fear.

GEORGE:
Exactly. Repetition makes instinct.

Transcript

GEORGE:
Today: Plague Habits of Mind.
How plague trained Elizabethan culture—audiences included—
toward certain fears and reflexes…
and how COVID trained us in remarkably similar ways.

GEORGE:
Quick reminder: my Shakespeare can look back from the present day—films, scholarship, modern claims—
but he cannot predict the future. No prophecy.

WILL:
Memory, yes.
Foresight, no.

GEORGE:
Now, When I say “habits of mind,” I mean the reflexes that become automatic:

how you interpret a cough
how you feel about crowds
what you do with your hands
what you believe when you’re afraid
what you do to feel safe
who you trust, and how quickly you withdraw trust

WILL:
An epidemic trains a person the way war trains a person—
not by speeches, but by repeated fear.

GEORGE:
Exactly. Repetition makes instinct.

GEORGE:
Will—give me the plague-trained mind in your world. What habits did people acquire?

WILL:
I will give you six, sir—six habits the plague taught my city.

Habit 1: Vigilance without rest
WILL:
The plague teaches you to scan.
To listen for coughs.
To watch faces.
To read the street like a warning.

GEORGE:
Hypervigilance.

WILL:
Yes. And it is exhausting.

Habit 2: Suspicion of the crowd
WILL:
A crowd used to mean life: trade, talk, theatre, worship.
Then a crowd begins to mean danger.
So the mind learns to flinch at togetherness.

GEORGE:
And even after reopening, that flinch remains.

WILL:
Yes. The body remembers.

Habit 3: Ritualized cleanliness and “protective gestures”
People develop small acts that feel like control:
carrying scents, washing, avoiding certain places, refusing certain foods—
sometimes practical, sometimes symbolic.

GEORGE:
Little rituals that say, “I’m doing something.”

WILL:
Exactly.

Habit 4: Hunger for news
WILL:
People become addicted to updates.
“Who died?” “Where is it now?” “Is it closer?”
They read tallies, ask neighbors, listen for announcements—
because uncertainty is unbearable.

Habit 5: Moral meaning-making
WILL:
The mind demands a reason.
And if a reason is not provided, it invents one.
Sometimes it invents mercy.
Sometimes it invents judgment.

Habit 6: The search for scapegoats
WILL:
When fear grows large, people look for a human face to pin it on.
It is easier to hate a person than to hate a wind.

GEORGE:
That’s as true now as then.

GEORGE (reading, narrative tone):
“The city teaches you new instincts.

You hear a cough and your body turns before your mind decides.
You see a closed door and you count it as a sign.
You see a stranger and you wonder: danger or harmless?

You begin to choose routes the way animals choose routes—
by scent, by memory, by avoidance.

You wash your hands not only for cleanliness
but to wash away fear.

And at night you practice a strange prayer:
not ‘Let no one die’—
because you know that prayer will not be granted—
but ‘Let it not be my house next.’”

(Pause.)

WILL (soft):
Yes.
A terrible prayer.
And an honest one.

23:00–30:00 NOW: COVID habits of mind (mirrors and differences)
GEORGE:
Now COVID. Let’s mirror those habits.

COVID Habit 1: The flinch reflex
Coughing in a store. Someone steps too close. A hand reaches for a doorknob.
Your nervous system reacts before your beliefs do.

WILL:
The body becomes a guard.

COVID Habit 2: The choreography of distance
GEORGE:
Standing apart, moving sideways in aisles, avoiding faces, watching airflow—
we learned a dance.

WILL:
And forgetting the dance later is not as easy as learning it.

COVID Habit 3: Hand rituals
GEORGE:
Sanitizer. Wiping groceries. Washing hands until skin is raw.
Some of it practical. Some of it symbolic. Some of it both.

WILL:
A ritual can be sensible and desperate at once.

COVID Habit 4: Doomscrolling and dashboard addiction

GEORGE:
The hunger for news became constant. Updates weren’t weekly; they were endless.
And endless updates create endless anxiety.

WILL:
Your century learned a new kind of captivity:
the mind locked inside a stream of warnings.

COVID Habit 5: Moralization
GEORGE:
People turned rules into identity: “good people do X,” “bad people do Y.”
Sometimes that created community. Sometimes it created cruelty.

WILL:
Yes.
Virtue can become a club.

COVID Habit 6: Scapegoats and conspiracies
GEORGE:
Same ancient reflex, now amplified by speed.
People demanded simple villains for complex reality.

WILL:
A simple villain is easier to carry than complicated grief.

SFX (optional): projector click

GEORGE:
Now
In movies, the end of the epidemic is often a clean ending:

vaccine arrives
music swells
crowds celebrate
life resumes

What do screens usually miss?

WILL:
They miss the aftershocks.
They miss the nervous system.
A film can end in two hours.
A mind takes longer.

GEORGE:
They also miss the social residue:
friendships strained, institutions distrusted, grief delayed, habits calcified.

WILL:
Yes.
The “after” is not a montage.
It is a slow unlearning.

Modern claim: “After a pandemic, people return to normal quickly and completely.”

GEORGE:
Here’s the modern claim:
“After a pandemic, people return to normal quickly and completely.”
Meaning: once the danger passes, society snaps back like a rubber band.
Will—your reaction?

WILL (immediate):
No.

GEORGE:
Give us the lived-experience rebuttal.

WILL:
An epidemic changes three things that do not change quickly:

The body’s reflexes.
The mind’s trust.
The community’s memory.




GEORGE:
Let’s take those one at a time.

WILL:
Reflexes:
After plague, a cough remained a warning long after proclamations.
The body learns fear faster than it unlearns fear.

Trust:
People learned which institutions protected them, which failed them, which punished them.
That knowledge doesn’t evaporate because the streets reopen.

Memory:
Some people try to forget. Others cannot.
And those two groups live in the same city like strangers.

GEORGE:
That’s such a powerful point: “two groups living in the same city.”

WILL:
Yes.
One says, “Enough, I will not speak of it again.”
The other says, “I cannot stop speaking of it because it is still inside me.”

GEORGE:
So the claim fails because it expects uniform recovery.

WILL:
Exactly.
Recovery is unequal.

GEORGE:
And I want to emphasize how this affected Shakespeare’s audience, because you asked for that earlier and it’s crucial here:
If the audience is plague-trained, then certain themes hit harder:
sudden reversals
betrayal
exile
suspicion
fragile joy
the nearness of death






WILL:
Yes.
A plague-trained audience recognizes fragility instantly.
They do not need to be taught that “fortune changes.”
They have watched it happen in their kitchens.

GEORGE:
So “normal” wasn’t restored; it was renegotiated.
People came back carrying habits.

WILL:
Yes.
And theatre was one place those habits could be witnessed, named, and—sometimes—softened.

GEORGE:
So the better claim is:
people attempt to return to normal quickly
society often pressures “normal” for economic and emotional reasons
but full unlearning is slow, uneven, and sometimes never complete

WILL:
Precisely.
Normal is not a switch.
It is a construction project—
and some of the workers are grieving.

GEORGE:
Here’s the human part:
Even when someone thinks they’re “fine,” a smell, a headline, a crowded room can flip the old switch.

WILL:
Yes.
The mind does not heal in a straight line.
It circles. It returns. It surprises you.

GEORGE:
And this is where compassion matters.
You don’t know what habit of mind someone is fighting:
the habit of panic
the habit of denial
the habit of suspicion
the habit of numbness

WILL:
Yes.
And cruelty is often just fear trying to disguise itself.

GEORGE (reading):
Imagine!
“The room is full again.
People laugh again.
Music plays.

And the person smiles, because smiling is expected—
but their body is doing mathematics:
How close is too close?
How many breaths are in this air?
Where is the door?
Someone coughs—just once—
and the smile becomes a mask on top of a mask.
They remind themselves:
‘It’s fine now. It’s normal now.’
But the nervous system replies, quietly, honestly:
‘Normal is not a word.
Normal is a feeling.
And I’m not there yet.’”

WILL (soft):
Yes.
A truthful ending.

GEORGE:
Next episode: “The Mercy Season.”
We’ll end this arc by asking: after all this—plague, COVID, grief, mistrust—
what does mercy look like?
Not sentiment. Not slogans. Practical mercy.

WILL:
Ah.
The finest subject—and the hardest.

GEORGE:
See you next time.

(Music out.)