Did Shakespeare’s Company Cut Long Plays Down to Two Hours Playing Time?

For over 75 years, arguments have been proposed that some unwritten law or commonly followed practice constrained Elizabethan and Jacobean plays to be performed in little more than two hours of playing time. Nevertheless, Shakespeare, Jonson, and others regularly composed plays which if performed as they appear in printed versions would require three or more hours from start to finish. This has led many critics to argue that because of this hypothetical two-hour time limit, many of Shakespeare's plays, along with Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, would never have been acted as written, even in Shakespeare's time and by Shakespeare's own acting company. This article regards such theories, which have led to a skewed perspective on the relationship between so-called cut 'bad quartos' and their 'full length' folio versions, as completely mistaken, and instead offers documentation that casts considerable doubt upon the supposed two-hour limitation on plays performed by Shakespeare's company. By drawing on contemporary accounts of theatre-going, material evidence of cutting practices, laws governing stage playing, and sections of plays that are widely accepted to have been added some time after their initial composition, the essay dismantles the largely unfounded arguments in favour of the 'two-hour theory' posited by critics even today. Ultimately, the article seeks to argue in opposition to the currently fashionable vision of an artistic parsimony that doled out only two-hour tranches of comedies, tragedies, and histories, suggesting instead that Shakespeare and his company, free from arbitrary time constraints, participated fully in bold, risk-taking, and expansive theatrical ventures.