The golden age of theater lasted only about the length of a good human lifetime

From Shakespeare The World as Stage by Bill Bryson.  Chapter 4 page 78.

The golden age of theater lasted only about the length of a good human lifetime, but what a wondrously prolific and successful period it was. Between the opening of the Red Lion in 1567 and the closing of all the theaters by the Puritans seventy-five years later, London’s playhouses are thought to have attracted fifty million paying customers, something like ten times the entire country’s population in Shakespeare’s day.