Quotes About Southwark

Living a literary gentleman-poet's lifestyle took so much of Strachey's time in the early 1600s that he seems not to have had many hours to devote to the business of making money. And what with evenings at the theater and afternoons spent in Southwark watching cockfights and bearbaitings and hours spent drinking and swapping lies with his friends, Strachey found himself forced to borrow heavily from London's moneylenders.

Southwark therefore became a setting for a long-running battle between the highest concentration of hedonists in he country, and a movement whose adherents believed that if you tapped your foot to music, you might as well just go the whole hog, rename yourself Beelzebub and have sexual intercourse with the corpse of a recently sacrificed goat.