What Was It Like To Live In England When Shakespeare Was Alive?

Dirty!. Nobody knew what a sewer was! Water was used only for animals! Squalid! You lived in a "house", that you shared with any livestock you owned. If you lived alone,(as Shakespeare did in London), you probably lived in a small room rented from the owner, in which all your chattels and personal belongings where thrown in with everything else! Dangerous! Shakespeare himself knew of two murderers with which he conversed almost on a daily basis, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Johnson, and, proverbially, owed his "start" in the theatre to a killing one night between two actors of the company he belonged to, which "elevated" everybody else up a notch in the pecking order. Shakespeare, at the time, was outside holding the horses! Sinister! Were you a Catholic, you would be constantly looking over your shoulder, fearful of arrest, which would lead to unspeakable torture by a very powerful and secretive man, Sir Francis Walsingham, who even the Queen, Elizabeth 1, kept at arms length! Short! London was a young man's town, the Bubonic plague saw to that. If you were over 30, you were aged! If Bubonic didn't get you, its nastier brother Pneumonic did!