"On any given afternoon, they all converged on the nearby playhouses"

"Norton Folgate was a decidedly mixed neighborhood, though by no means as mixed as the adjacent parish of St. Botolph, Bishopsgate, with its high crime rate and heightened susceptibility to plague. Still, it was insalubrious and crowded enough, and it undoubtedly saw its share of the dubious characters who trolled many of the streets of London. These characters in Marlowe's time had an array of colorful names:  'Anglers,' thieves who carried hooked staffs with which they could snare linen hanging from upstairs windows; 'Abraham Men,' beggars who pretended to be mad, along with 'Counterfeit Cranks,' who feigned falling sickness; 'Cony-Catchers,' con men on the lookout for easy marks; 'Priggers of Prancers,' horse thieves; 'Rufflers,' former soldiers who showed their real or pretended wounds in order to compel charity; 'Bawdy Baskets,' 'Walking Morts,' 'Kichin Morts,' and other names for women who worked the sex trade. The likes of these, together with cutpurses, pickpockets, and all the rest of London's lower depths, rubbed elbows with the street hawkers, fortune tellers, tinkers, tradesmen, maids, apprentices, porters, bailiffs, sailors, perfumed courtiers, idle gentlemen, fashionable ladies, and on occasion, as in the case of Marlowe, poets and playwrights. On any given afternoon, they all converged on the nearby playhouses, those large wooden O's that had room for all of them."

-- Stephen Greenblatt, Dark Renaissance