As another week passes and we're no closer to solving the problems of so-called Broken Britain, there's a place within our beleaguered kingdom which may hold some clues to a better way of life. Stratford-upon-Avon, where our very own David Tennant is currently not so much treading the boards as pummelling the state-of-the-art marble flooring into shards of righteous indignation as Hamlet, is one of the few towns in the UK which does everything in its tourism-attracting power to pretend we're still living 450-odd years ago.

Here, in a town which stars an infinite vista of wonkily-built, black and white beamed taverns, is the place you can not only behold the world's most famous theatrical drama, but also the lifestyle Shakespeare lived, as did most in the Elizabethan era. It was not, as we sometimes imagine, some bubbling mire of plague, black teeth and "cut-purse" vagabonds (although if you were dirt poor, it was), but rather, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica still maintains, a golden era when England was generally "merrie and in love with life, expressed in music and literature, in architecture and adventurous seafaring" (even if they did cut off Mary Queen Of Scots' head).

This week, then, let's ponder afresh our most pressing social concerns and see what lessons we can learn from a time when homes had large holes where glass windows are now (and we think we've got heating bill problems...): 1. Rising unemployment and no jobs for life. Shakespeare's dad, John, worked in the family home, a glover who fashioned gloves, wallets and bags for the local townsfolk. The law protected him with a blanket ban on imports from any other town, as it did for a spectrum of local trades. Today, instead, everything is a global bun-fight where only the cheapest survive, as long as they sell the most, made by people you pay the least, the further away from home the better.

2. The longest working hours in Europe. The Elizabethans loved their merriment so much they enforced a bank holiday-type day off every single month. One of them, Shrove Tuesday, encouraged mobs of apprentices to run amok everywhere, because it supposedly cleansed the town of vices before the start of abstemious Lent.

Now, of course, apprentices run amok every single day on building sites, hiding from the gaffer after smoking a forest canopy's worth of hallucinogenic 'erb.

3. The breakdown of the family. Some 450 years ago the family which slept together stayed together and the marital bed hosted a "truckle bed" underneath, like a drawer on wheels, where the kids slept until six years old. After that, among the middle classes, servants slept there instead. No professionals today, as far as we know, attach their poorly paid Polish cleaner to their very own bed in a practice you'd certainly call "accommodating".

4. Teenage pregnancy. Men were encouraged to stay away from women until they were educated and solvent, with their own business, around the age of 28. Today, many 28-year-old men have fathered several children they don't know anything about, still live tethered to their mum's fridge and cooker, while their greatest goal in life is to find the latest internet cheat for some Xbox palaver for 10-year-olds.

5. Binge drinking. Beer was drunk so steadily, day and night, it was even drunk with breakfast, which would certainly obliterate binge drinking overnight. The average daily amount was a gallon, including for monks, while the better-off drank wine, generally by the pint. And these people still understood Shakespeare.

6. Computer meltdown. No modern day passes without someone's life being "ruined" by the inbuilt obsolescence which turns their PC into a pumpkin on the stroke of three years. Several years' worth of work and communications disappear into infinity (as has just happened to me, yet again, and four chums this month alone). The Elizabethans used quill and ink and we have their works and communications still. All invented without any need whatsoever for ye olde Googlee or any such like.

7. On-screen entertainment. Let's face it, it's killing us. The relentless intrusion of sounds, words and images distracting us ever further from thinking about anything which might actually matter. Seeing Hamlet in Stratford last week, the skew-crowned prince a mere two feet away if you were in the front row (some of us were overly keen), tearing his soul asunder, made you realise what entertainment can do - inspire soul-boggling inner queries on the infinite human conundrums of madness, deceit, the supernatural, love, destiny, suicide and retribution (while having an unapologetic swoon at your favourite actor who is in the same room as you and everything).

So there we have it - 450-odd years of supposed cultural progression and we're considerably worse off in most ways. Oh well, as Hamlet surely tells us in the end, some things never change. Then again, later this month, someone will emerge victorious from the Big Brother house and we'll know a great deal more about them than we ever have or ever will about the most famous writer in the history of the English language.

Forsooth, right enough.