Of the many remarkable things about Hamlet perhaps the most extraordinary is its length

Of the many remarkable things about Hamlet perhaps the most extraordinary is its length. At roughly 4,000 lines, the Second Quarto – the closest thing we have to what Shakespeare wrote in late 1599 – could not have been performed uncut at the Globe. Nor could his revised version of the play, a couple of hundred lines shorter, which eventually appeared in the First Folio. Though the Elizabethan stage dispensed with time-consuming intermissions and changes in scenery, these versions of Hamlet would still have taken four hours to perform; even at top speed, actors couldn’t rattle off much more than a thousand lines of verse in an hour. With outdoor performances at the Globe beginning at two in the afternoon and the sun setting in late winter and early autumn around five o’clock, an uncut Hamlet staged in February or October would have left the actors stumbling about in the fading light by the Gravedigger scene; the fencing match, fought in the dark, could have been lethal.

J. Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), 339