In “Troilus and Cressida” (ii. 3), Ulysses says of Achilles:
“He is so plaguy proud that the death tokens of it
Cry—‘No recovery.’”
King Lear, too, it would seem, compares Goneril (ii. 4) to these fatal signs, when he calls her “a plague sore.” When the tokens had appeared on any of the inhabitants, the house was shut up, and “Lord have mercy upon us” written or printed upon the door. Hence Biron, in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2), says:
“Write, ‘Lord have mercy on us,’ on those three;
They are infected, in their hearts it lies;
They have the plague, and caught it of your eyes.”
The “red pestilence,” referred to by Volumnia in “Coriolanus” (iv. 1), probably alludes to the cutaneous eruptions common in the plague:
“Now the red pestilence strike all trades in Rome,
And occupations perish!”
In “The Tempest” (i. 2), Caliban says to Prospero, “The red plague rid you.”
Poison. According to a vulgar error prevalent in days gone by, poison was supposed to swell the body, an allusion to which occurs in “Julius Cæsar” (iv. 3), where, in the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius, the former declares:
“You shall digest the venom of your spleen,
Though it do split you.”
We may also compare the following passage in “2 Henry IV.” (iv. 4), where the king says: