But no one in Shakespeare’s plays dies of the plague. Romeo and Juliet, who die because the friar’s letter is held up by quarantine measures in northern Italy, are the nearest his work comes to plague fatalities.

Just as Shakespeare never set a play in contemporary London, neither did he address directly the most prominent cause of sudden death in his society. Documentary realism was not Shakespeare’s style.

It is to other literary forms and authors — in particular Shakespeare’s contemporaries, the dramatist and pamphleteer Thomas Dekker, who wrote a series of feverishly inventive, sardonic prose pamphlets on the plague, or the poet and playwright Ben Jonson, whose play “The Alchemist” captures the manic energy of a house during a plague lockdown left in the hands of the servants while the master is away — that we must look to find the direct effects of plague on 17th-century society.

Shakespeare does something different. René Girard, the French critic, wrote in a famous essay that “the distinctiveness of the plague is that it ultimately destroys all forms of distinctiveness.” Mass burial pits for plague victims were one visible symbol of the way the disease erased social, gender and personal difference.

Mr. Dekker noted that in the communal grave, “Servant and master, foul and fair / One livery wear, and fellows are.” Plague was indifferent to the boundaries erected by society, and its appetite was ravenous. Thousands of husbands, wives and children were led to the grave, Mr. Dekker recalled, “as if they had gone to one bed.”

The imagery common in late medieval culture — known as the “danse macabre,” or dance of death — depicted death, personified as a skeleton, moving obscenely among the living. He is with them, unseen, in the bedroom, at table, in the street, in the counting house.

While grimly terrifying, the depiction also domesticates death: Death cares about our particularity enough to stalk us as we go about our daily business. Shakespeare’s tragedies share this intimacy. Their response to plague is not to deny mortality but rather to emphasize people’s unique and inerasable difference.