What Was Life Like In Shakespearean Times?

Very hairy!. You were an old man in London at the age of 30! Plague, (Bubonic and Pneumonic), ruled, and if Bubonic didn't get you in four days, Pneumonic had already got you in two! Plus, you had to be good with a sword, (rapier), and dagger. Shakespeare knew murderers, Ben Johnson and Christopher Marlowe were two, add to that the unsanitary conditions of a heaving community without a sewer system and you can imagine not only the smell, but the rotting corpses, (not necessarily of animals), that littered every street!  York, for instance,  had a street called "The Shambles" and it was!