alleyway-echoes

Not all footsteps remain silent.

“The Plague Play Hidden Inside Shakespeare's Hamlet“

I didn't set out to read Hamlet through a plague lens. It happened quietly, just as the plague silently spread through Shakespeare's London. I was deep in research on London's epidemic years, the closures, the silences, the way the city's imagination kept getting interrupted and then I was assigned Hamlet.

The first Act of the play didn't sound like the revenge trope that I'd always been told Hamlet wore. It started out too cold. Too eerie. Too paranoid. By the second Act, it had made much more sense to me. This isn't a revenge play at all. It reads too much like the language of plague London. It's air. It's coldness. It's ghost.

Once I saw plague in London and in Hamlet, I started seeing the play as written: a plague play disguised as a revenge play. Hamlet's mind behaves like a plague-shaped mind. Suddenly, questions that have circled the play began making sense to me.

I made the claim that Hamlet is not a revenge tragedy at all, rather, it is a plague play disguised as a revenge tragedy. Shakespeare's own title strips away the revenge trope in its own right. Several plays written during his lifetime were aptly titled as revenge tragedies. Hamlet is not. By focusing on Shakespeare's own language and the historical context of Hamlet, I was able to place it as Shakespeare intended it to be viewed, a plague play.

“The Language of Rot and Foul Air”

The language confirmed it for me. Hamlet is saturated with the vocabulary of rot, foulness, and corrupted air, the very terms that filled plague orders and civic records in Shakespeare's London. “Something is rotten,” “an unweeded garden,” “rank and gross,” “foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.” These lines aren't decorative metaphors, they are the emotional residue of a city that is terrified of invisible transmission, poisoned breath, and the air turning against them. The play speaks in the same register as the plague documents that I'd been reading. It breaths the same fear.

My research has allowed me to answer questions that Shakespeare scholars have wrestled with for centuries. Through plague-logic, several important scenes align with plague logic, not revenge logic.

The most confusing part of Hamlet has never been Hamlet himself, it's the world he lives in. Scholars have spent centuries trying to explain why the play feels structurally unstable, why it's atmosphere is already “foul” before the play begins, why the Ghost behaves like a containment breach rather than a father, and why the language is saturated with rot, disease, and corrupted air. Traditional readings, revenge, melancholy, political decay, can describe these elements, but they cannot explain them.

The play behaves like something is wrong with the environment itself. That is the question that plague-logic finally answers. Shakespeare makes Denmark / Elsinore a character in his play, just as London is a character in his reality.

My research answers questions about the environment, the Ghost, the “dram of eale”, Denmark as a prison, Gertrude's inability to see the Ghost as he is in her closet, the graveyard scene, the death of Polonius, the delay Hamlet has in murdering Claudius, the way that Laertes succumbs to Claudius's bribes, the mass death at the end, and Ophelia's tragic death.

What unites all of these moments is that they behave like symptoms, not plot points. The Ghost's return, the foul atmosphere, the instability of the court the break down of ritual, the sudden collapses of character, these are not the mechanics of a revenge tragedy. They are the mechanics of a world operating under plague logic. In Shakespeare's London, plague didn't just kill bodies; it warped perception, disrupted social order, and reshaped the emotional landscape. Hamlet reflects that world. Its scenes make sense when read as the unfolding of an environment already sick before the play begins.

Reading Hamlet through plague logic doesn't replace traditional interpretations; it finally explains them. The instability, the dread, the rot, the atmosphere of invisible threat, these aren't thematic flourishes. They are the fingerprints of the world Shakespeare lived in. When we restore the play to its historical environment, the questions that have haunted it for centuries fall into place. Hamlet is not a revenge tragedy with atmospheric oddities, it's a plague play wearing the mask of a revenge tragedy.

A little bit about me.

I write about London the way some people write about their first great love — with adoration, scholarship, irreverence, and the kind of loyalty you can’t fake.

I hold an MA in Literary Studies: Romantic and Victorian Literature and Culture from Goldsmiths, and I’ve spent years studying London’s history, literature, and atmospheric underbelly. But I’m not a stuffy academic. I’m a Londoner in exile, a punk at heart, and a chronicler of the city’s shadows.

Alleyway Echoes is where I write about the London I know — the one of fog, foxes, cracked pavements, and stories that refuse to stay buried.

What does loneliness feel like in London?

People ask me that sometimes. The answer isn’t what they expect.

Loneliness has many shapes. You can be in a relationship and feel lonely. You can be surrounded by people and feel lonely. But London? Lonely? Those two words don’t belong in the same sentence for me.

I once read The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon — a brilliant novel if you want to understand what loneliness meant for his characters. But I didn’t experience loneliness in London.

Being alone and being lonely are two different things. I prefer solitude. And walking around London never allowed loneliness to settle in. I was in my city. I heard the buildings sigh. I smelled the Thames. I listened to the traffic and the sirens wailing somewhere far off. I felt the air on my skin. I wasn’t lonely. I was alive. Walking through London is like walking with your most special person. She’s there with you — guiding you, pulling you, giving you moments you’ll never forget, moments you can hardly believe happened at all.

Whitechapel. That chaotic little borough with its old streets, cracked pavements, and a smell that’s both intoxicating and rancid — Chinese food fused with weak‑old rubbish. One night, walking with my companions, something peculiar happened. I was stepping exactly where they stepped, foot for foot, when the pavement decided it was hungry and tried to eat me. I let out an “oh shit,” which stopped them in their tracks. They turned to see me two inches lower than they were. Their faces? Utter laughter. Mine? Utter confusion. And honestly, if the roles were reversed, I’d have laughed too.

There were nights I didn’t have companions. But loneliness still never found me. I’d stroll the streets with my headphones, lost in thought. I’d stop by a café for a takeaway. Then I’d head back to my flat and write about my day.

My flat was my sanctuary. I’d dance. Brew coffee. Cook pasta. Listen to a show or music as I wrote into the late hours — my hours. The early morning, when London is quiet. Not asleep, just quiet. Foxes slipping through the streets. Cats pacing the pavement. Random people passing by, knackered from the night shift or a pub crawl.

Loneliness? No.

Alignment.

London met me where I met her — in the fog, guided by foxes and gas lamps.