London plague of 1592-1594

Plague fells a reported fifteen thousand people in London in 1592.

The London theaters have been almost continuously closed from June 1592 through the remainder of the year, due to the epidemic; the closure will continue through 1593 and into 1594.

William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, has strengthened his hold over Elizabeth I in his two decades as Lord high Treasurer; in 1592, he collapses (possibly from a stroke or heart attack).

Robert, his only surviving son by his second wife, is well prepared to step into his father’s shoes as the Queen's principal adviser.

Since plague tends to abate in winter, some performances take place now; Lord Strange's Men act a play called Titus—perhaps Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus—three times in January.

Edward Alleyn and other actors will in the summer tour the towns and countryside beyond the city.

The London theaters are to remain closed for almost the entire year, due to the outbreak of bubonic plague that began the previous year.

Thomas Kyd has been in the service of an unidentified noble from 1587 to 1593, since, after his imprisonment in 1593 (see below), he wrote to have lost "the favors of my Lord, whom I haue servd almost theis vi yeres nowe".

Proposed nobles include the Earl of Sussex, the Earl of Pembroke, and Lord Strange.

He may have worked as a secretary, if he did not also write plays.

Christopher Marlowe had also joined this patron's service around 1591, and for a while Marlowe and Kyd shared lodgings, and perhaps even ideas.

Several bills are posted about London in early May 1593, threatening Protestant refugees from France and the Netherlands who have settled in the city.

One of these, the "Dutch church libel," written in blank verse, contains allusions to several of Marlowe's plays and is signed, "Tamburlaine".

The Privy Council issues an order on May 11, 1593, for the arrest of the authors of the "divers lewd and mutinous libels".

The next day, Kyd is among those arrested; he will later believe that he had been the victim of an informer.

His lodgings are searched and instead of evidence of the "libels" there is found an Arianist tract, described by an investigator as "vile heretical conceits denying the eternal deity of Jesus Christ found amongst the papers of Thos. Kydd (sic), prisoner ... which he affirmeth he had from C. Marley (sic)".

It is believed that Kyd had been tortured brutally to obtain this information.

Marlowe is not in London, but is staying with Thomas Walsingham, the cousin of the late Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's principal secretary in the 1580s and a man deeply involved in state espionage.

Marlowe is summoned by the Privy Council and, while waiting for a decision on his case, is killed ten days in Deptford in an incident involving known government agents, stabbed to death, perhaps accidentally, by one Ingram Frizer.

Whether the stabbing was connected to his arrest has never been resolved.

Given the murky inconsistencies concerning the account of Marlowe's death, a theory has arisen centered on the notion that Marlowe may have faked his death and then continued to write under the assumed name of William Shakespeare.

Kyd is eventually released but is not accepted back into his lord's service.

Believing he is under suspicion of atheism himself, he writes to the Lord Keeper, Sir John Puckering, protesting his innocence, but his efforts to clear his name are apparently fruitless.

The London theaters reopen in the spring of 1594, after two years of general inactivity due to the bubonic plague epidemic.

Many of the actors who used to be Lord Strange's Men form a new organization, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, under the patronage of Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon, now Lord Chamberlain of England.