Late in January 1593, the Privy Council, worried about what looked like a new bout of plague, wrote a letter to London’s authorities, ordering to close all playhouses. It was one of many times this happened: City fathers, Privy Council, Puritans – a lot of people seemed ready to blame the playhouses for anything, from the corruption of minds, to general dishonesty and health troubles. Let us say that an attempt to contain contagion was one of the saner reasons for closing them down…

We think it fit, the letter went, that all manner of concourse and public meetings of the people at plays, bear-baitings, bowlings and other like assemblies for sports be forbidden…

And 427 years later, it’s still happening in my corner of the world. Or very near to it: I’m not in the “red area”, and so far we’ve had no instances of contagion in the district of Mantua. Still, the whole of Lombardy has shut down theatres, cinemas, gyms, churches, sport events – in no particular order, and perhaps in a rather haphazard manner…

What strikes me is the way history repeats itself – or perhaps the way we react to the same things in much the same way across the centuries: precautions taken – not necessarily the best, but meant to contain a contagion of uncertain dynamics; theatres closed; people scrambling to procure pomanders with medicinal herbs; wherry-men on the Thames petitioning for the measures to be lifted – or they’ll go broke; daily counts of the ill and the dead; diffidence towards strangers; profiteering; predictions of doom, and flippant denial, and more than a touch of hysteria on both sides…

And of course “our” virus is absolutely nothing like the plague, and four centuries have passed, and science and society have changed enormously – and yet…

And yet, I’m endlessly fascinated by how, no matter how much time, change, and progress, certain things never change entirely.