A Plague On Both Your Houses: The First Chronicle of Matthew Bartholomew (Chronicles of Matthew Bartholomew)

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Though Camus casts his plague in the role of an efficient bureaucrat, events (like viruses) contradict this persona. Bernard Rieux, a general practitioner, who is caught up in the chaotic conditions that develop in the city of Oran during a plague epidemic. But he is distracted by the sudden and inexplicable death of the Master of Michaelhouse – a death the University authorities do not want investigated. Langmuir first introduced the idea of surveilling communicable diseases of national importance, 1 and Henderson applied rigorous and evidenced-based public health principles and methodologies to the eradication of smallpox. Third, picking up the last point, Camus’s La Peste sheds light on the risky nature of religion in a time of pandemic plague.

The sky was beginning to turn from dark blue to silver in the east, and he shivered in the crispness of the early morning. Matthew’s main problem is that he does not know whom he can trust – and makes some wrong assumptions along the way.The audience is informed that two young members of the families fall in love and the result is tragic, but that their death brings about reconciliation between the two families. Bartholemew is a doctor at Michaelhouse college, who invariably ends up assisting his colleague and friend, the Senior Proctor, in solving crimes.

John Wilkes famously responded to an insult in Parliament to the effect that he would die either "of the pox or on the gallows" by saying "That depends on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress. Too many people with last names that are Christian names (Bartholomew, Oliver), brothers with the same last name (Oliver, Stanmore), and characters whose first name begins with the same letter (Wilson, William; Alcote, Augustus, Aelfrith, Abigny). Rieux and Rambert the journalist conversing in The Plague by Albert Camus (Vintage Books, Random House, New York, 1972. His pursuit for the truth leads him into a complex tangle of lies and intrigue that causes him to question the innocence of his closest friends, and even his family.Paneloux dying of something other than the plague, during a performance of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, in which most of the cast succumb! Bartholomew, however, is distracted by the sudden and inexplicable death of the Master of Michaelhouse - a death the University authorities do not want investigated. Matthew Bartholomew, unorthodox but effective physician to Michaelhouse college in medieval Cambridge, is as worried as anyone about the pestilence that is ravaging Europe and seems to be approaching England. Only the previous week he had had to ask his neighbours to help him free the branch of a tree that had entangled itself in the spokes, and he was loathe to impose on their good graces again. But ‘A Plague on Both Your Houses’ has nothing gripping; the narration and the detection have nothing spectacular.

Gregory does try to convey the effect of the Plague where almost half the population died, the issues with how to manage burials, contagion and the inevitable gaps in society. Given the near interchangeability of the curse, even though it may not do to say that one man's pox is another man's plague, the opportunity to misremember Mercutio's line has always been present.He came up with two major poems while the theatres were closed between 1593and 1594 – The Rape of Lucrece and the love story, Venus and Adonis.