How long was shakespeare an actor?

Answer 1

Shakespeare's plays, if played uncut from the Folio or good quarto texts, run for about 3 hours. However, the Prologue of Romeo and Juliet contains the line "is now the two hours' traffic of our stage" which suggests that a performance lasted two hours. This would be more in line with the length of the "bad" quartos and suggests that many of the lines we find in the folio versions were cut for performance (as they tend to be nowadays anyway)

Answer 2

Shakespeare was an actor for about twenty-five years. We cannot be sure exactly when he started but we know he retired about 1613 and there is no reason to think he did not continue acting right up to his retirement. We know he started working in theatre after 1585 but before 1592.

Answer 3

The longest of Shakespeare's plays is Hamlet with 3,924 lines. The play with the least lines is The Comedy of Errors with 1,770 lines. The shortest of Shakespeare's tragedies is Macbeth with 1,993 lines. Most of Shakespeare's plays when performed take about three hours if the text is not cut. However, it is possible that the texts we have do not represent the plays as they were originally performed. The first Quarto versions of both Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, which are thought to be reconstructions from memory of a performance, take more like two hours to perform. And the line from Romeo and Juliet "is now the two hours' traffic of our stage" also suggests that the usual runtime was closer to two hours.

Answer 4

Shakespeare was active as a playwright for about twenty-two years, from about 1590 to about 1612. He may have started working with the theatre even earlier, but we have no way of knowing when.

Answer 5

The Globe opened in 1599, before September, possibly in June. It burned in 1613 and was rebuilt and reopened in 1614. Shakespeare purportedly retired in 1613, but there is evidence that he returned to London from 1614 to 1615 to live near Blackfriars, and returned to Stratford where he died in 1616. So, depending on how you care to calculate it, it is between thirteen and sixteen years.

Answer 6

It is not completely known when his career in theater started, but it was around 1592. He wrote his last plays in 1613, so his career lasted around 20 years.

Answer 7

William Shakespeare was about 25-30 years old when he became an actor.

Answer 8

We do not know exactly when he started, but if we say at a guess 1590, he was an active playwright for 23 years, as the last play he worked on is thought to have been completed in 1613.