Plays, at least as written, were of strikingly variable lengths

From Shakespeare The World as Stage by Bill Bryson.  Chapter 4 page 77.  

Plays, at least as written, were of strikingly variable lengths. Even going at a fair clip and without intermissions, Hamlet would run for nearly four and a half hours. Richard III, Coriolanus, and Troilus and Cressida were only slightly shorter. Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair would have taken no less than five hours to perform, unless judiciously cut, as it almost certainly was. (Shakespeare and Jonson were notoriously copious. Of the twenty-nine plays of three thousand lines or more that still exist from the period 1590–1616, twenty-two are by Jonson or Shakespeare.)