30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (16 page)

In fact, the issue about who actually went to the theater in Shakespeare's day has been difficult to disentangle from the idealized image of rich and poor, elite and common rubbing shoulders as they enjoyed
Hamlet
. (Anthony Scolaker cited the play as a model for good writing which “should please all, like Prince Hamlet” in the early seventeenth century.
⁵
) Evidence about who went to the theater—we will come to the matter of how different segments of the audience might have been differentially addressed by the plays they went to see—is hard to evaluate, largely because much of it comes from partisans. When Stephen Gosson, for instance, in
The School of Abuse
, addresses “the Gentlewomen Citizens of London” “many of you which were wont to sport yourselves at theaters,” it is important to be aware of the extended title of the work: “
a plesaunt invective against Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters, and such like Caterpillers of a Commonwelth; setting up the Flagge of Defiance to their mischievous exercise
”: this is not a neutral account, and Gosson may well have been exaggerating the role of women in the nascent theater audiences for moral effect.
⁶
When the Lord Mayor and aldermen of London wrote to the Privy Council asking for its help in suppressing plays, they described playgoers as “the refuse sort of evil-disposed and ungodly people” including “divers apprentices and servants” and “masterless men,” and when Henry Crosse writes of “the common spectators and play-gadders” as “an unclean generation, and spawn of vipers: must not here be good rule, where is such a brood of hell-bred creatures? For a play is like a sink in a town, whereunto all the filth doth run, or a boil in the body, that draweth all the ill humors unto it,” the language of the complaints identifies their authors with proto-Puritan tendencies, rather than sociological description.
⁷
From a different perspective but with a similar conclusion, William Fennor address “Sweet Poesye,” “oft convict, condemned, and iudged to die / Without just trial, by a multitude / Whose Judgements are illiterate, and rude,” citing the response of the audience who “screwed their scurvy jaws and looked awry” at Ben Jonson's turgidly classical drama
Sejanus
(while “wits of gentry did applaud the same, / With Silver shouts of high loud sounding fame”).
⁸
Explaining the theatrical failure of his
The White Devil
to its readership, John Webster claims that it lacked “a full and understanding auditory” because the playgoers were “ignorant asses”—but he, too, might be thought a prejudicial witness.
⁹
Colorful as these descriptions are, none can tell us what audiences were actually like.

We do know something about the costs of playgoing. The cheapest admission to the outdoor theaters, a standing place in the yard, cost a penny, the modest equivalent of “a quart of the cheapest ale, one-third the cost of a small pipe-load of tobacco, and one-third the price of a meal in the cheapest ordinary [tavern].”
¹⁰
It is reasonable to assume that different theaters attracted a somewhat different clientele, and certainly the indoor theater of Blackfriars was a much more niche or boutique theater experience, with reduced capacity and increased prices. Whereas in the outdoor amphitheater playhouses like the Globe the cheapest admission got punters closest to the stage, at indoor theaters such as Blackfriars, such privileged proximity to the action cost one shilling and sixpence. The cheapest admission to Blackfriars was sixpence. But it does not seem that Shakespeare wrote plays specifically for that theater audience: his later plays seem to have been performed in both the King's Men venues, the Globe and Blackfriars, so while the audience composition might have been significantly different, the program of entertainment was not.

More significantly, perhaps, the indirect costs of playgoing were in the currency of time rather than money. In order to go to the theater, a patron had to be free from 2 p.m. on a weekday. When the Grocer and his wife, the appreciative and literal-minded theatergoers in Francis Beaumont's mock-romance
The Knight of the Burning Pestle
, attend the playhouse with their apprentice Rafe, it is not clear what has happened to their shop while they are away. That playgoing was, at least in part, a leisured pursuit is suggested by numerous references: the entry for “An excellent actor” in a popular book of urban stereotypes, Sir Thomas Overbury's
A Wife
(see Myth 29), claims that “he entertains us in the best leisure of our life, that is between meals, the most unfit time either for study or bodily exercise,” making it clear that that second-person “us” tacitly imagines a community who do not need to work for a living.
¹¹

Indeed, most of the evidence of actual individuals going to the theater concerns people of higher status, but then these are the people whose letters and documents have been preserved. There are also hints of a wider social basis for audiences. Thanks to the work of Andrew Gurr, there is documentary evidence of a wide range of individuals who went to the theater during the period, although it is hard to be sure how typical these playgoers were of the huge number—Gurr estimates 50 million theater admissions between the opening of the first London theaters in the 1560s and their closure by the Puritans in 1642—who attended. Gurr's list of almost 200 names includes plaintiffs involved in various instances of disorder at theaters and identified as butchers, felt-makers, sailors, cordwainers, surgeons, apprentices, Catholic priests, and “a serving man in a blew coat”; noblemen including the Duke of Buckingham, and Sir William Cavendish; tourists including Thomas Platter and Johannes de Witt, who sketched the Swan Theatre in 1596; upper-class women including Mary Windsor, who went to the Globe in 1612, Lady Jane Mildmay, and Mrs Overall, wife of the Dean of St Paul's who, according to the biographer John Aubrey, had “the loveliest eyes that were ever seen, but wondrous wanton. When she came to Court, or to the Playhouse, the gallants would so flock about her.”
¹²

What did these varied audience members enjoy? A few playgoers reported on their experiences. Law student John Manningham approved of “a good practise in [
Twelfth Night
] to make the Steward believe his Lady widow was in love with him, by counterfeiting a letter as from his Lady, in general terms, telling him what she liked best in him, and prescribing his gesture in smiling, his apparel, &C., and then when he came to practise, making him believe they took him to be mad”—but has nothing to say about the staging of the twins.
¹³
The astrologer Simon Forman—in a document to be used cautiously as it may be in part a nineteenth-century forgery—enjoyed the choreography of the banquet scene in
Macbeth
with Banquo's ghost appearing and sitting in Macbeth's chair, and also the scene of Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking, but his only mention of the witches is that they were “three women, fairies or nymphs”; when he saw
The Winter's Tale
he noted the tricks of Autolycus, “the rogue that came in all tattered like a colt-pixie,” but does not comment on Hermione's statue returning to life in Act 5 (perhaps he left before the end of the play). At a performance of
Othello
in Oxford in 1610, Henry Jackson was moved by the ending: “the celebrated Desdemona, slain in our presence by her husband … entreated the pity of the spectators by her very countenance.”
¹⁴

These three comments by learned men press on the theme of this myth. Did Shakespeare write the coarse bits for the groundlings and the philosophy for the upper classes? Not according to Manningham, who has apparently most enjoyed a slapstick sequence of physical comedy in
Twelfth Night
, nor for Forman, who also recalls physical stage business from
Macbeth
and comedy from
The Winter's Tale
, nor for Jackson, whose response is of emotional empathy. None of these audience members identifies something learned as the source of their pleasure, and from this we may suggest that any easy equivalence between social status and aspects of audience enjoyment is false. Plays for university students in the period draw readily on scatological humor, as when, for example, the eponymous implement of
Gammer Gurton's Needle
(performed at Christ's College, Cambridge) is found in the seat of someone's breeches.

That aspects of Shakespeare's plays might fall out along status lines draws on Victorian notions of social refinement. For Robert Bridges at the beginning of the twentieth century, writing on “The Influence of the Audience on Shakespeare's Drama” (for Bridges, a regrettable one), “the foolish things in his plays were written to please the foolish, the filthy for the filthy, and the brutal for the brutal,” and he went on to warn that “to admire or tolerate such things” involves “degrading ourselves to the level of his audience, and learning contamination from these wretched beings who can never be forgiven their share in preventing the greatest poet and dramatist of the world from being the best artist.”
¹⁵
For Bridges, then, Shakespeare's audience was a deleterious influence, dragging the sublime poet into the crowd-pleasing brutalities of, for example, the murder of Macduff's children in
Macbeth
, or the on-stage blinding of Gloucester in
King Lear
. To be sure, these are savage episodes in their respective plays, but it is by no means clear that they are the gratuitous excrescences imagined by Bridges. The gouging out of Gloucester's eyes develops and literalizes the themes of blindness and insight in the play, for instance, and by showing this cruelty on stage Shakespeare amplifies the chilling diagnosis of the Duke of Albany: “humanity must perforce / Prey upon itself, like monsters of the deep” (
The History of King Lear
16.47–8; this line is not in the
Tragedy
). The episode is thus integral to the play's ethics of bleakness and its unflinching anticipation of the twentieth century's Theater of Cruelty.

Suggesting, as Bridges does, that Shakespeare wrote his plays in spite of his audiences cannot account for his ongoing success. As Andrew Gurr puts it, because the audience “are the most inconstant, elusive, unfixed element of the Shakespearean performance text, their contribution is presented as an easy means of explaining away features of the dramaturgy which seem incongruous to modern audiences.”
¹⁶
Shakespeare wrote for, not against, the range of Londoners who came to the Globe and later to Blackfriars, and, unlike fellow dramatists including Webster and Jonson, he does not address them extensively in prefatory or introductory material (when he does, the tone is courteous, even flattering: the language of “gentles all” [1.0.8] of the Prologue to
Henry V
, or the “gentle breath” of the Epilogue to
The Tempest
[l. 11] elevates the audience's social status). Shakespeare has not left us any critical or theoretical material on his dramatic practice other than the plays themselves: perhaps, then, the discussion on theater in
Hamlet
can stand in.

A group of traveling players has come to Elsinore, and Hamlet is keen to coach them in a performance that will help confirm the Ghost's message and reveal the King's guilt. He tells the actors to refrain from excessive gesture and ranting, suggesting—presumably to the outraged delight of the Globe's own audience—that these are practices “to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise” (3.2.10–13). Overdone, non-naturalistic playing style may “make the unskilful laugh” but it must “make the judicious grieve; the censure of the which one must in your allowance o'erweigh a whole theatre of others” (3.2.26–8). Clowns must not extemporise, another weakness of “barren spectators” (3.2.41). Hamlet recalls a play concerning the mythological story of Dido and Aeneas and the stirring story of the sack of Troy: the play “pleased not the million. 'Twas caviare to the general” (2.2.439–40). But presumably, performed amid the standing audience in the yard of the Globe, these comments are archly theatrical rather than straightforward. Hamlet delivers the remembered opening of the speech on the “rugged Pyrrhus” (2.2.453–67), and it is only Polonius, the foolish university-educated counselor, who judges it “too long” (2.2.501); we might imagine the Globe playgoers rather caught up in the emphatic and compelling rendition, just as they enjoy the player-Prince's strictures about the degraded acting styles likely to please the “groundlings.” Like those other apparent witnesses to the question of the audience for Shakespeare's plays,
Hamlet
, too, is partial. All we know for sure is that
Hamlet
—a play so complex it continues to generate one scholarly article or book of new published criticism every week, 400 years after it was performed—was written for and deeply engaged by the theater, and by a sure sense of its heterogeneous audiences.

Notes

¹
 Alfred Harbage,
Shakespeare's Audience
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), p. 90.

²
 Ibid., p. 166.

³
 Ralph Berry,
On Directing Shakespeare: Interviews with Contemporary Directors
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989), p. 57.

⁴
 Ann Jennalie Cook,
The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London, 1576–1642
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 8.

⁵
 Anthony Scolaker,
Diaphantus
(London: 1604). Duncan-Jones cites as evidence of the play's popularity the high incidence of the name “Hamlet” for boys in the first decade of the seventeenth century:
Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his Life
, Arden (London: Thomson Learning, 2001), p. 180.

⁶
 Stephen Gosson,
The School of Abuse
(London, 1579), sig. F2.

⁷
 G. Blakemore Evans (ed.),
Elizabethan-Jacobean Drama
(London: A. & C. Black, 1987), p. 5; Tanya Pollard,
Shakespeare's Theater: A Sourcebook
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), pp. 192–3.