The Bodleian Library in Oxford in 1605 possessed almost six thousand books. Of these, just thirty-six were in English.

From Shakespeare The World as Stage by Bill Bryson.  Chapter 5 page 115.

Yet curiously English was still struggling to gain respectability. Latin was still the language of official documents and of serious works of literature and learning. Thomas More’s Utopia, Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, and Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica were all in Latin. The Bodleian Library in Oxford in 1605 possessed almost six thousand books. Of these, just thirty-six were in English. Attachment to Latin was such that in 1568 when one Thomas Smith produced the first textbook on the English language, he wrote it in Latin.

Thanks in no small measure to the work of Shakespeare and his fellows, English was at last rising to preeminence in the country of its creation. “It is telling,” observes Stanley Wells, “that William Shakespeare’s birth is recorded in Latin but that he dies in English, as ‘William Shakespeare, gentleman.’”