Читать книгу Shakespeare - Билл Брайсон, Bill Bryson - Страница 9

FEW PLACES IN history can have been more deadly and desirable at the same time as London in the sixteenth century. Conditions that made life challenging elsewhere were particularly rife in London, where newly arrived sailors and other travellers continually refreshed the city’s stock of infectious maladies.

Plague, virtually always present somewhere in the city, flared murderously every ten years or so. Those who could afford to left the cities at every outbreak. This in large part was the reason for the number of royal palaces just outside London – at Richmond, Greenwich, Hampton Court and elsewhere. Public performances of all types – in fact all public gatherings except for church-going – were also banned within seven miles of London each time the death toll in the city reached forty, and that happened a great deal.