Shakespeare (59 page)

The play began at two o’clock in the winter, and three o’clock in the summer. Its average length was approximately two hours, some plays perhaps thirty or forty minutes longer. Since the length of
Hamlet
and of
Bartholomew Fair
is some four thousand lines, the actors in these and plays of similar length must have spoken very rapidly indeed. The average length of an Elizabethan play, lasting the conventional two hours, is 2,500 lines. Shakespeare’s plays average 2,671 lines; as always he stays close to accepted stage procedure. He was in every sense a professional.

The Globe has often been considered to be a summer theatre, but the records show that it was also used in the months of winter. Elizabethan audiences wrapped up more warmly than their modern counterparts, and were in any case hardier, so that the chilly temperatures would not have discouraged them. Playgoers were drawn from all classes, except from the vagrant and the very poorest who could scarcely earn or even beg enough to eat. It is a matter of common sense that there were more middling than lower people, to use a distinction of the period, and that it would be mainly “gentry” and their consorts who would have the leisure or opportunity to spend their afternoons in this fashion. Among this latter class would be included “all Martial men … all Students of Artes and Sciences, and by our English custome, all Innes
of Court men, professors of the Law.”
⁵
To this list must be appended courtiers and assorted noblemen; London merchants and their wives, as well as apprentices, may be added on the presumption that some of them were willing or able to break off their business for two or three hours. The important point is that the Globe was not filled only with the plebeians of sixteenth-century London, as is sometimes suggested, and there was thus no need for Shakespeare to write “down” to his audience.

There was of course one division, between those who paid a penny for the pit and those who paid a penny more for a seat in the galleries. In the galleries “each man sate downe without respecting of persons, for he that first comes is first seated.”
⁶
As a general rule the porters and carters and apprentices would have been content with their standing room in the pit; these were described as the “under-standers.” The pit itself was paved with ash and industrial “slag,” such as clinker, with a plentiful covering of hazelnut shells, and probably sloped downward towards the stage. The gentlemen and the richer Londoners (with their ladies) would have preferred the relative comfort of a wooden bench. Once they had paid for their token they could proceed either to the left or right in order to enter the galleries. Yet no doubt it was more random and haphazard than this neat formula would imply. It is possible, for example, that the groundlings did not necessarily stand at all. They may have been able to sit upon rushes strewn across the yard. Some of them, according to Thomas Dekker in
The Gull’s Hornbook
, brought with them a “tripos or three-footed stool.”
⁷

It has also been inferred that the “stinkards,” or lower classes of Londoners, congregated at suburban theatres such as the Red Bull and the Fortune; these theatres then become harbingers of the music halls of the East End in the late nineteenth century. But such segregation is very doubtful. When Stephen Gosson disparaged the playhouse audience for being a loose assemblage of “Tailers, Tinkers, Cordwayners, Saylers, olde Men, yong Men, Women, Boyes, Girles and such like”
⁸
it is clear that the “such like” included a very wide spectrum of humanity indeed. The Globe did truly encompass the human world, or at least that portion of it residing in late sixteenth-century London.

T
he playhouse crowd
was egalitarian in tendency. A gentleman took as much room as a student or a merchant, and was engaged in the same communal atmosphere. As one contemporary put it, “every lewd person thinks himself (for his penny) worthy of the chief and most commodious place.”
¹
It is a matter of disapproving comment, therefore, that the “lewd” are allowed within the same space as the gentle. Dekker makes the same point in
The Gull’s Hornbook
when he reports that “your Car-man and Tinker claime as strong a voice in their suffrage, and sit to giue iudgement on the plaies life and death, as well as the prowdest
Momus
among the tribe of
Critick.”
It could happen nowhere other than in the playhouse. The inevitable levelling tendencies of the city were here given their first and fullest expression. The theatre must also be associated with the great extension of literacy, and the efflorescence of male education, in the same period. All these things worked together to make Shakespeare’s plays what they were. His audience was eager, alert and excited by this new form of entertainment.

Shakespeare’s plays are often very demanding, as modern playgoers know, but sixteenth-century audiences were equally capable of picking up the intricacies of the rhetoric as well as the harmonies of the verse. Some of Shakespeare’s more recondite phrases would have passed over them, as they baffle even the most highly educated contemporary audience, but the Elizabethans
understood the plots and were able to appreciate the contemporary allusions. Of course scholars of a later age have detected in Shakespeare’s plays a subtlety of theme and intention that may well have escaped Elizabethan audiences. But it may be asked whether these are the inventions of the scholars rather than the dramatist. Shakespeare relied upon the audience and, with such devices as the soliloquy, extended the play towards it; the drama did not comprehend a completely independent world, but needed to be authenticated by the various responses of the crowd.

Some of those responses were very noisy indeed. In 1601 John Marston characterised hostile comments as “Mew, blirt, ha, ha, light Chatty stuff,”
²
while at the Fortune the noise was described as that “of Rabies, Apple-wives and Chimney-boyes” whose “shrill confused Ecchoes loud doe cry.”
³
Shakespeare himself evoked the behaviour of playgoers through the description of Casca in
Julius Caesar
, “If the tag-ragge people did not clap him, and hisse him, according as he pleas’d, and displeas’d them, as they vse to doe the Players in the Theatre, I am no true man” (334–7). Since
Julius Caesar
was played at the Globe, rather than the Theatre, he could not be accused of attacking this particular audience.

“Mew” was a favourite signal of displeasure, from which we get the more recent expression “cat-call.” The audiences in the galleries might stand up during a particularly exciting duel or battle, urging on the participants. They would applaud individual speeches. There were hisses and shouts, tears and applause, but all these responses were part of an intense emotional engagement with the play itself. It is almost impossible to replicate the experience of the first theatres. It was an astounding reality, quite unlike anything ever seen before. The mystery plays on the streets, or the interludes in the halls, offered no true comparison. In modern terms the sixteenth-century theatre was television and cinema, street festival and circus, all in one.

There was of course much eating and drinking during the course of the performance, and sellers went around with oranges, apples, nuts, gingerbread and bottled beer. There is a description of a nervous playwright who is so fearful of his play’s reception “that a bottle of ale cannot be opened but he thinks somebody hisses.”
⁴
There was a “tap room,” or bar, attached to the Globe itself. Pipes of tobacco could be purchased for 3 pence, and one contemporary moralist noted with disquiet that these pipes were offered even to the women. There was no doubt casual or opportunistic prostitution and
pickpocketing. Wherever there are large groups of people in London, there are bound to be thieves and ladies of the game. That is the nature of the city. On a more genteel note there are reports that books were for sale in the Globe, with the cry of “Buy a new book!” There was of course no interval, so refreshments were consumed throughout the duration of the play.

Stories of fights and riots in the theatre are essentially of the eighteenth century. The worst that is noted of the sixteenth-century playhouse is the occasional hurling of fruit or nuts at the stage, particularly if the players were late to begin. It was still too novel and exciting an experience, too much a matter of general interest, for a London crowd to permit violent interruption. There was such a thing as “the justice of the street,” and no doubt it was visited upon anyone who interfered with the playgoers’ pleasure. The plays of Shakespeare were not attended by raucous scenes, or by the yells and shouts of drunken apprentices. It is worth remarking in this context that English drama began its precipitous decline in the late seventeenth century precisely when the theatres became more private and apparently more refined places.

In
Every Man out of His Humour
Ben Jonson wrote of “attentive auditors”; he considered himself to be poet as much as playwright and wished for an understanding or listening audience. The published descriptions of plays by contemporary playgoers are not generally revealing about the level of sensibility in the playhouse. The fact that most audiences were accustomed to listening to sermons, however, must have helped to shape their response. That is why they tend to describe the individual characters and actions, and on occasions the moral lessons that might be adduced from them.

There were, however, some very attentive playgoers who would bring with them “table-books,” in which they would note down significant passages. It should be remembered that poetry was still considered to be a matter of speech rather than of writing. So any alert Elizabethan would have been highly sensitive to the range and nuance of the spoken word. There would have been little or no difficulty, for example, in following some of Shakespeare’s more complex speeches. If there had been any problems of comprehension, he would not have written them in the way he did.

But there was a significant part of the audience derided by Jonson in
A Staple of News
as “Nut-crackers, that only come for sight.” It is as well to remember the Elizabethan addiction to spectacle and to display. There is also Volumnia’s advice to Coriolanus (1859–60) that

There has been much speculation about the relative importance of sight and hearing in the Elizabethan theatre, with the usual assumption that the more intelligent members of the audience listened while the others watched. Volumnia’s words are those of a patrician, who may well have been hissed by the audience, and cannot be taken for Shakespeare’s own thoughts on the matter. Indeed it is clear enough that in his later plays Shakespeare actually augmented the spectacle in his drama. He knew very well that it was an essential element of stage illusion, and an important contribution to the excitement and satisfaction of the playgoers. He never lost his desire to impress and to entertain. He never shared Jonson’s low opinion of the popular theatre. Indeed he was in large part responsible for creating that theatre.

It seems likely, however, that there was no real distinction between sight and hearing as agents of understanding. The whole point of the drama is that it represented a mingling of both, a synaesthetic experience which in the words of one playgoer combined
“Ingeniousness
of the Speech” with “the
Gracefulness
of the
Action
.”
⁵
The life of the drama consisted in character and movement.

The finances of the Globe were carefully reckoned before the venture began, and Peter Streete would have been asked to accommodate the largest possible audience. For the first performance of the new play, on the day of the Globe’s opening, prices were doubled. But the general run of performances was at fixed prices. It has been calculated that between 1580 and 1642 playgoers made fifty million separate visits to the London theatres; the Globe became a thriving business from which all parties might do well. In any one year there would have been £1,500 to share among all the actors, giving them an approximate annual income of £70. In addition it has been estimated that the house-keepers at the Globe earned between them £280 per annum. On Shakespeare’s death his one share in the Globe had an income of £25, therefore, while his share in the Blackfriars playhouse earned him £90.

There has been much speculation about Shakespeare’s own income, deriving money as he did from his writing, his acting, his position as a “sharer” and his new status as “house-keeper” or part owner of the Globe. There have been differing estimates, perhaps set off by a notebook entry by John Ward
in the early 1660s that the dramatist “had an allowance so large” that he “spent att the Rate of a 10001. a year as I have heard.’”
⁶
This is surely a wild exaggeration. From the reckoning of all the sources of income, we reach a more likely figure of approximately £250 per annum. This was during a period when the average wage for a schoolmaster was £20, and for a journeyman labourer £8. In his will Shakespeare left bequests to the value of £350 and an estate worth £1,200. He was not spectacularly rich, as some have suggested, but he was very affluent.