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 th
e 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.
8 William Fennor, “The Description of a Poet,” in Fennors Descriptions (London, 1616).
9 John Webster, “To the Reader,” in John Webster: Three Plays, ed. David Gunby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 37.
10 Quoted in Arthur F. Kinney, Shakespeare by Stages: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), p. 85.
11 Blakemore Evans, Elizabethan-Jacobean Drama, p. 99.
12 Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London, 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 197–212, 4.
13 Quoted ibid., p. 225.
14 Forman's comments are included as appendices to the Oxford editions of the plays (Macbeth, ed. Nicholas Brooke, pp. 235–6; The Winter's Tale, ed. Stephen Orgel, p. 233). Jackson's note on Othello is in the Oxford edition, ed. Michael Neill, p. 9.
15 Robert Bridges, “The Influence of the Audience on Shakespeare's Drama,” in Collected Essays Papers &c. of Robert Bridges (Oxford, 1927), pp. 28–9.
16 Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London, p. 3.
Myth 14
Shakespeare was a Stratford playwright
Shakespeare is to Stratford-upon-Avon what Juliet is to Verona. Just as you can visit Juliet's balcony in Verona (see Myth 5), so you can visit the house in which Shakespeare was born, the houses in which his mother and grandmother were born, the school he probably attended, and the church in which he was baptized and buried. The difference is that Juliet is a fictional character and her balcony a product of the Veronese tourist industry. (The tourist industry is not entirely self-serving; here it caters to the desires of all those who wish a fictional character to have been real, the adult equivalent of children wanting their toys to come alive at night.) But Shakespeare really lived. He and his family have a tangible material presence in the parish and legal records of Stratford.
The medieval market town of Stratford (current population 25,000) has a thriving tourist trade thanks to its Renaissance playwright. There are six Shakespeare properties to visit plus a theater company dedicated in name and practice to staging his works. It is ironic to think that when an annual Shakespeare festival was first mooted in the nineteenth century, the initial response was an incredulous, “Who would want to visit a small Warwickshire market town?”1 Today the answer to that question is: 3 million people each year.
Shakespeare left Stratford sometime in the late 1580s. How frequently he returned to visit his wife and three children, whether he was able to attend the funeral of his son Hamnet in 1596 or that of his mother in 1608, is not documented. But he obviously continued to support his family; he was involved in Stratford investments or actions in 1598 (when his Stratford friend Richard Quiney wrote to him and visited him in London), in 1605 (when he bought a share in tithes) and 1611 (when he was one of seventy citizens petitioning parliament for the improvement of the roads); he invested in Stratford property in 1597 (New Place) and 1602 (107 acres in Old Town plus a cottage in Chapel Lane), retiring to Stratford (or commuting from Stratford) sometime from 1608 onwards (in a London court case in 1612 he gave his address as Stratford-upon-Avon).
Stratford, its inhabitants, and its language make appearances in Shakespeare's plays. One of his earliest plays, The Taming of the Shrew, opens with a drunken tinker, Christopher Sly, whose experiences are rooted in Warwickshire. In a dispute about his ancestry, he calls for support from a neighbor: “Ask Marian Hacket, the fat alewife of Wincot if she know me not” (Induction 2.20–1; Wincot is a village four miles outside Stratford). Later in his career, Shakespeare uses Warwickshire dialect. In Coriolanus (1608) a character admires the destructive capacities of Coriolanus' son. She describes the cat-and-mouse game the young boy played with a butterfly, catching it and letting it go, before finally tearing it to pieces with his teeth. “I warrant how he mammocked it” she says approvingly (1.3.67). “Mammock” is a Warwickshire noun meaning a torn remnant; Shakespeare converts it to a verb: to tear something to shreds.
The sixteenth century saw the expansion of the English language as humanist scholars, translating and editing classical texts, imported Greek and Latin words to the English language (see Myth 21). Sir Thomas More gave us Latin-derived words such as lunatic; Francis Bacon, a scientist, gave us skeleton and thermometer (both from Greek). Sir John Cheke, Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, was a lone voice of opposition to this influx among his classically minded contemporaries. Shakespeare simply made up words (he uses nouns as verbs) and imported them from Warwickshire. No one seems to have commented on this at the time and so his practice probably seemed reasonable during this period of linguistic innovation. Thus, “language rose like a tide on all sides until the ghost of Sir John Cheke relinquished its Canute-like efforts.”2
One of the most beautiful lyrics in Shakespeare is the funeral dirge for Fidele in Cymbeline. This lyric lists items in the natural and political worlds that must fade and die, or, in the poem's poetic euphemism, “come to dust.” The poem begins:
Fear no more the heat o'th'sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages,
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages.
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
(4.2.259–64)
“Chimney-sweepers,” with its Victorian associations, seems a curiously inept image in the elegy; for a long time it perplexed editors. It was the twentieth century before researchers discovered that “chimney sweeper” is Warwickshire dialect for “dandelion,” the weed whose mature flower (which resembles the chimney-sweeper's brush) is a
suitably fragile and evanescent symbol for this poem about transience.
In the same play Shakespeare pays tribute to a Stratford contemporary and friend, Richard Field. The disguised Innogen, asked to name her master, improvises a French name, “Richard du Champ.” The translated pun is multiply appropriate. Richard Field was a printer who specialized in foreign language books (see Myth 2). On many title pages he gave his name and print shop in a translated or transliterated form appropriate to the language of the book he was printing: in Spanish, French, Latin, and (pseudo-)Welsh. Thus, we find “Ricardo Campello” in Spanish texts. Field was two years older than Shakespeare and was the London printer of Shakespeare's first published works, the narrative poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). This book-ending of Shakespeare's career with Field (as printer at the start and punning reference at the end) suggests that the men maintained a friendship throughout.
But if Shakespeare was and remained a Stratford man with Stratford connections (at home and within London) he also had a professional life in London for two decades. What kind of affiliation did he have with the city?
It is notable that Shakespeare was never asked to write a city pageant. City pageants were allegorical tableaux sponsored by livery companies to celebrate the incoming Lord Mayor each year and, in 1604, the royal entry of the new king into London (James' entry had been delayed because of the outbreak of plague in 1603). This was the moment for the city to commission its heavyweight writers. George Peele, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Heywood all contributed to city pageants; Shakespeare never did (see Myth 17). The reasons for this are far from clear. Birth outside London did not disqualify someone (Heywood hailed from Lincolnshire), nor did the lack of a university education (Jonson did not attend university). Possibly membership of a livery company was an advantage (Jonson continued to pay his quarterly dues to the bricklayers' company even when he was rising to success as a playwright), but not all pageant writers were freemen of a livery company. So Shakespeare did not, as far as we know, have the literary links with London through celebrating it in an annual pageant that many of his contemporaries did.
30 Great Myths about Shakespeare Page 12