Lest you long for the "good old days"......

     William Shakespeare was born into a world that was short of people and struggled to keep those it had.  In 1564 England had a population of between three million and five million - much less than three hundred years earlier, when plague began to take a continuous,  heavy toll.  Now the number of living Britons was actually in retreat.  The previous decade had seen a fall in population nationally of about 6 percent.  In London as many as a quarter of the citizenry may have perished.
     But plague was only the beginning of England's deathly woes.  The embattled populace also faced constant danger from tuberculosis, measles, rickets, scurvy, two types of small pox (confluent and hemorrhagic), scrofula, dysentery, and a vast amorphous array of fluxes and fevers - tertian fever, quartian fever, puerperal fever, ship's fever, quotidian fever, spotted fever - as well as "frenzies," "foul evils," and other peculiar maladies of vague and numerous type.  These were, of course, no respecters of rank.  Queen Elizabeth herself was nearly carried off by smallpox in 1562, two years before William Shakespeare was born.

-Bill Bryson,  Shakespeare:  The World as Stage