Shakespeare

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

Action is eloquence, and the eyes of th’ignorant

More learned then the eares …

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.

CHAPTER 66 Sweete Smoke of Rhetorike