and chances incident to all mortality. The profits swelled in term time and dwindled in vacation.[1] Easter, Whitsuntide, Bartholomew Fair, were recurring seasons of prosperity.[2] Were the streets full for such an occasion as the entry of an ambassador, the theatres reaped their harvest.[3] A period of public mourning, on the other hand, as at the deaths of Elizabeth and of Prince Henry, meant the cessation of business.[4] Political changes—although, like the other elements of Stuart society, the players probably paid little attention to the forces that were gathering for their ultimate overthrow—might prove more disastrous still. But the dreaded enemy, in whose mysterious workings the Puritans recognized a direct expression of the wrath of God, was undeniably the plague. The menace, and too often the actual reality, of plague, in a city whose growth had far outstripped the advance of sanitary knowledge, was one of the principal domestic preoccupations of Elizabethan administrators. And the precaution, which was always resorted to, of forbidding public assemblies as probable centres of infection, reacted terribly upon theatrical enterprise. A study of the plague calendar which forms an appendix to the present volumes will show that there were three grave visitations of plague during the years which it covers, in 1563, in 1592-4, and in 1603; that in the long period 1564 to 1587 following the first visitation, and in the shorter period 1604 to 1609 following the third visitation, plague had become endemic, generally showing itself from July to November and reaching its maximum in September or October; that during these periods certain years, such as 1579 and 1580 in the one and 1604 in the other were comparatively free; and that probably during 1588-91, and certainly during 1595-1602 and 1610-16, plague was so far absent as to be practically negligible. In fact, after 1609 plague did not again become a serious factor in London
- ↑ Dekker, Work for Armourers (1609, Works, iv. 96), 'Tearme times, when the Twopeny Clients and Peny Stinkards swarme together to heere the Stagerites'.
- ↑ Dekker, The Dead Tearme (1608, Works, iv. 22), of Bartholomewtide, 'when thou (O thou beautifull, but bewitching Citty) . . . allurest people from all the corners of the land, to throng in heapes, at thy Fayres and thy Theators'.
- ↑ Dekker, Seven Deadly Sins of London (1606, Works, ii. 52), 'The players prayd for his [Sloth's] comming: they lost nothing by it, the comming in of tenne Embassadors was never so sweete to them, as this our sinne was: their houses smoakt every after noone with Stinkards who were so glewed together in crowdes with the steames of strong breath, that when they came foorth, their faces lookt as if they had beene per-boyld'.
- ↑ Cf. App. D, Nos. cxxxi, cli.
