Shakespeare
A working playwright writes for a commercial audience and reshapes the language.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 23 years
- Known to
- ± 2 years
- Era
- Early Modern, Holocene
Between about 1590 and 1613 Shakespeare writes some 38 plays for the London public theatres — a commercial business competing for paying audiences of all classes. He is credited with introducing or popularising over a thousand words and a great many still-current phrases. His plays survive largely because two colleagues collected them in the First Folio of 1623, seven years after his death; eighteen would otherwise be lost.