How can we be responsible to our audiences, and also go about our business, which involves bodies in proximity to one another? Though playwrights have always dreaded coughing patrons (it generally means we have induced boredom), now the cough is greeted with a different kind of dread. At the moment, most forward-thinking businesses are telling workers to work from home, to cancel all but essential travel and to have meetings by video.

But what if your business is presence?

During the 1590s plague, when the theaters were shut, William Shakespeare apparently chose to write poems instead. From his “Venus and Adonis,” penned while the playhouses were closed and writers were essentially quarantined, came this somewhat strange compliment: “The plague is banished by thy breath.” Should we theater people — writers, players and audiences alike — be staying home now and writing and reading poetry as a curative for the next month? Books, unlike group events, carry no germs.

My own children’s school has closed indefinitely, and I’ve been encouraging them to learn a new poetic form every day they are at home. So far, only my son has written a sonnet, an ode to candy. The final couplet: “Now I must eat you with a splendid grace/Remember how I put you in my solemn face.” But they all just looked at me with raised eyebrows when I mentioned a villanelle.

Thomas Dekker, a not very well-known Elizabethan playwright eclipsed by the competition, wrote an account of the plague year called “The Wonderfull Yeare, 1603” in which a seventh of London’s population died, despite shuttered theaters and quarantines. Dekker writes of the desolation and loneliness of that year, as well as of the triumphant reopening of the theaters, like “a merry epilogue to a dull play.”

“This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it,” he said.