ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how bustling was London when Shakespeare was playing an active part as a dramatist. However, to explain the bustle in concrete terms, such an ambiguous estimate of the population, is confusing. The classical census in 1695 by Gregory King is not early enough to offer a clue to the population of England, not to mention London, during the English Renaissance when mobility was especially high. There are very few studies which attempt to estimate the population of London in the sixteenth century. In the early 1980s, there was no consensus among scholars about the population of London in Shakespeare's time. Later on, the progress of demography was rapid, with a number of excellent reports, but in the sense that there is no consensus among scholars the present situation appears to remain the same as it was more than thirty years ago.
