Shakespeare

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.