1.  
In 1599 a German visitor commented on how much Londoners loved the theatre. 'Daily at two in the afternoon,' he reported, 'London has two, sometimes three plays running in different places. They compete with each other, and the companies which perform best attract the most spectators.' And there were plenty of spectators to compete for. In 1605 about 21,000 Londoners went to the theatre every week -about one in ten of the city's population.

2.  
Rather like today's television audience, the people of that time constantly wanted to see new plays. So, there was an enormous demand for playwrights to meet. William Shakespeare was one of those playwrights. Between about 1590 and 1610, Shakespeare wrote over 100,000 lines of drama and created 1,277 different characters. His vocabulary was one of the richest of any English writer. There are over 30,000 different words used in his works, double the average vocabulary for an educated person in the late 20th century.

3.  
As well as being a great playwright, Shakespeare was a successful11 actor and part-owner of the famous London theatre, the Globe. By the standards of the time, this playhouse was huge. It could hold an audience of about 2,000 people. However, most of the stage was open to the sky, so rain could stop the play. The actors had only a few props and special effects to hold the attention of their audience. The stage was bare for much of the action, and the success or failure of a play depended almost entirely on the magic of words.

4.  
In Shakespeare's time, only men could act on the stage, so women's roles were performed by boys. Although these actors were called 'boy players', they probably played females until they were in their twenties. Shakespeare sometimes had fun by making the boy players act the parts of women disguised as men. In the film Shakespeare in Love, Gwyneth Paltrow plays a woman who disguises herself as a boy because she wants to act. After watching her play Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, an angry royal official jumps onto the stage, shouting, 'That woman is a woman!'

5.  
Sadly, on 29 June 1613 disaster struck at the Globe, when a cannon was fired as a special effect during a performance of Henry VIII. Sparks landed on the thatched roof of the theatre and started a fire. Only one man was hurt - his trousers caught fire, but he poured beer over them to put the flames out. The Globe, however, was burned to the ground. Soon after this, Shakespeare retired from writing. The loss of his old theatre may have been the reason for his decision.

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