The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

by Melvyn Bragg

The plays that were written by Shakespeare as well as those by his contemporaries, Marlowe, Jonson, Marston and Chapman, and later Webster and Middleton, attracted a truly incalculable proportion of the population of London. The Globe could hold between three thousand and three thousand five hundred people — and there were five other theatres in London which could rival the Globe. A ten-day run for a play counted as a long run and the London population of merely two hundred thousand inhabitants demanded constant novelty, especially as theatre-going became such a craze that most of those who wanted to had seen the play in the ten days. It has been estimated that a box-office hit like Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus would have been seen by one in two men in London. English’s seeding of words was no longer restricted to the courtier-poets and the scholars. In the theatre it had come into the open and now it faced the people. It was ready to take on the world. All the world was now, for English, a stage.