A reading from chapter six of Peter Ackroyd’s history of early seventeenth-century England, Civil War (or Rebellion, as the book has been retitled in its America, apparently not to upset anybody buying it by accident and hoping to read about a different Civil War).

Ackroyd uses two texts to paint a brief picture of London at the time: Thomas Dekker’s The Seven Deadly Sins of London (1607), and Ben Jonson’s play Bartholomew Fair(1614).

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