What sort of sickos, you might ask, would watch this stuff for fun? Answer: Londoners in the last two decades of the sixteenth century. All the scenes above come from plays by Christopher Marlowe—respectively, “The Jew of Malta,” first performed in 1592, “Tamburlaine, Part 2” (1587), and “Edward II” (1592). Going to the theatre in that period was hardly an entertainment for the fainthearted, and calamity was not confined to the stage. Venues, known to be breeding grounds for infection, were often closed to prevent the spread of plague, and, at a performance of “Tamburlaine, Part 2” in November, 1587, a gun was mistakenly loaded with a projectile, rather than with powder alone, and fired. The shot went into the audience, killing a pregnant woman and a child.