Shakespeare

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.

CHAPTER 65 And Here We Wander in Illusions

The 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.