Shakespeare References in The Plague

This seemed like a good time to revisit The Plague by Albert Camus, a book I hadn’t read since my late teens. And I suppose it should have come as no surprise to me to find a couple of Shakespeare references in it. The first is a reference to Macbeth. Camus writes, “The reason was this: when the most pessimistic had fixed it at, say, six months; when they had drunk in advance the dregs of bitterness of those six black months, and painfully screwed up their courage to the sticking-place, straining all their remaining energy to endure valiantly the long ordeal of all those weeks and days – when they had done this, some friend they met, an article in a newspaper, a vague suspicion, or a flash of foresight would suggest that, after all, there was no reason why the epidemic shouldn’t last more than six months; why not a year, or even more?” (p. 68). Part of that sentence refers to Lady Macbeth’s line “But screw your courage to the sticking-place/And we’ll not fail.” The other reference is to Hamlet. Camus writes, “So does every ill that flesh is heir to,” reminding us of Hamlet’s line “The heartache and the thousand natural shocks/That flesh is heir to.”

The Plague was published in 1947. The Vintage Books edition was published in 1972. It was translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert.