And then he suppes, and goes to bed againe.
Thus rounde he runs without variety:
Save that sometimes he comes not to the play
But falls into a whore-house by the way.6
At the end of the sixteenth century, so it has been estimated, there were weekly audiences of about 15,000 at the London theatres. By 1605 and throughout the whole of Shakespeare’s theatrical career, as many as two out of every fifteen of the capital’s population were going to the theatre every week.7
Notified by playbills, which were set up in prominent positions throughout the city and no doubt at the playhouse doors, and by announcements made after the epilogue of previous performances, the audience impatiently waited for the entertainment to begin, drinking ale, smoking tobacco, sampling the books which were hawked up and down between the seats, playing games of cards, eating fruit and sweetmeats, or, like the Citizen’s Wife in the Knight of the Burning Pestle, unwrapping liquorice, sugar-candy and green ginger, and sending their husbands out for more beer.
Before and after the play, and sometimes between the acts, a variety of other entertainments were also commonly provided. These were sometimes as spectacular as the performances at the Bear Garden in Southwark described by a German visitor in August 1584:
Dogs were made to fight singly with three bears, the second bear being larger than the first, and the third larger than the second. After this a horse was brought in and chased by the dogs, and at last a bull, who defended himself bravely. The next was, that a number of men and women came forward from a separate compartment, dancing, conversing and fighting with each other: also a man who threw some white bread among the crowd, that scrambled for it. Right over the middle of the place a rose was fixed, this rose being set on fire by a rocket: suddenly lots of apples and pears fell out of it down upon the people standing below. Whilst the people were scrambling for the apples, some rockets were made to fall down upon them out of the rose, which caused a great fright but amused the spectators. After this, rockets and other fireworks came flying out of all corners, and that was the end of the play.8
As well as fireworks, songs and dumb-shows, prize-fights, dances and the antics of clowns and female tumblers were frequently offered as attractions to accompany the play. Symons, the acrobat, was a leading player in one of England’s most distinguished companies which also employed a Turkish rope-dancer. After a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in 1599, a Swiss visitor was diverted by a lively dance performed by four members of the company, two of them dressed as women. There was no interval between the acts, but during the peformance ‘food and drink [were] carried round the audience’.9
There was much contemporary criticism of the rowdy behaviour of theatre audiences; but, in fact, though noisy enough before the play began they seem to have fallen into attentive silence once the performance started. And, while cutpurses, pickpockets and prostitutes were always on the lookout for likely victims or customers, so they were in all other places where crowds gathered. As Greene warned his readers, pickpockets were at work in ‘all places of resort and assemblies, therefore their chief walks [are] St Paul’s, Westminster, the Exchange, plays, bear-garden, running at tilt, the Lord Mayor’s day, and festival meetings, frays, shootings, or great fairs’. The theatre was evidently not a place of special risk or criminality. There is record only of a single stabbing at the Fortune theatre in 1613, but elsewhere in the county of Middlesex that year there were eleven murders, twelve cases of manslaughter, twenty-eight cases of assault and battery, and ten other cases of assault.10 Yet, in the words of M. C. Bradbrook, ‘while the crowd at common theatres probably did not contain a much higher proportion of ruffians than any other London crowd [and while] the record of grave disturbances at plays in the later sixteenth century is negligible, in relation to the number of performances given, it would inevitably be in an excitable mood’.11 Nor did audiences hesitate to condemn what they took to be displeasing performances, such as that given by a visiting French cast who were ‘hissed, hooted and pippin-pelted from the stage’.12
‘In the playhouses at London,’ wrote the author of Playes Confuted in Five Actions in 1579, ‘it is the fashion of youthes to go first into the yarde and to carry theire eye through every gallery, then, like unto ravens where they spye the carion, thither they flye, and presse as nere to ye fairest as they can.’
You shall see suche heaving, and shooing, such ytching and shouldring, too sitte by women [this author continued in another book], such care for their Cappes, that no chippes light in them: Such pillowes to their backes, that they take no hurte: Such masking in their eares, I know not what: Such giving them Pippins to pass the time: Such tickling, such toying, such winking … that it is a right Comedie.13
In the country the audiences were even livelier:
The people which were in the Roome were exceeding Joviall, and merry before the Play began, Young men and Maids dancing together, and so merry and frolick were many of the Spectators, that the Players would hardly get Liberty that they themselves might Act.14
Before the building of the first public theatre in London, plays had generally been performed in the courtyards of inns, and were still occasionally presented in them – notably in those of the Bull, the Bell, the Cross Keys and the Belsavage – long after the theatres had been established. The inns had the advantage of ready supplies of hot food and drink and of other entertainments such as those provided by prostitutes and exhibitions of dwarfs, freaks and monsters in private rooms. But they could not compete with the more convenient seating arrangements and the dramatic special effects which the public theatres could provide.
The first of these theatres, known simply as The Theatre, was opened in 1576 at Shoreditch, just outside the jurisdiction of the City, by James Burbage, a member of the Earl of Leicester’s Company of Players, and his rich brother-in-law, John Brayne. The next year another theatre was built in Shoreditch. This was the Curtain and was probably financed by an actors’ syndicate. These two theatres were followed by several others, built on the south bank of the river, much to the pleasure and profit of the watermen. Among them were the Swan which, according to a Dutch visitor, had a seating capacity of 3000 and was ‘built of a concrete of flint stones … supported by wooden columns painted in such exact imitation of marble that it might deceive even the most cunning’; the Rose, where Edward Alleyn, son-in-law of its builder, Philip Henslowe, made his reputation as an actor; the Hope, also built by Philip Henslowe; and the Globe, a round wooden theatre erected by Henslowe’s rivals, Richard Burbage and his brother, Cuthbert. Shakespeare was both a player and a shareholder here; and on the stage, where stools were placed for privileged persons, several of his plays were first performed. But shortly before his death, two cannon, fired during a performance of Henry VIII, set the thatched roof of the galleries alight and the theatre was destroyed. No one was hurt except a man who had ‘his breeches on fire that would perhaps have broyled him if he had not with the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottle ale’. It was shortly rebuilt, however; and was for long a prominent feature of the waterfront at Bankside.15
None of these theatres survived; but from a drawing made by a foreign tourist of the Swan in about 1596 an idea can be formed of their design. The platform-stage, supported on stout columns, jutted out into the unroofed courtyard where the standing spectators surrounded it on three sides. Above the spectators were the circular roofed galleries where the rest of the audience sat. Behind the platform-stage was a wall with doors or curtained doorways giving access backstage and providing exits and entrances for the actors. Above the door was a musicians’ gallery; and above that the tower which housed the machinery and from which the flag flew when the theatre was open.16
The machinery, and the trapdoors in the stage, were vital parts of the theatre, since Elizabethan audiences relished shocks and surprises as much as they did trumpets, thunder and savage realism in bloody scenes of torture and death which were made all the
more horrible by the use of animals’ entrails. They loved to see devils springing up suddenly from hell, and wrathful gods descending from the heavens. They were, as Paul Hentzner discovered, ‘vastly fond of great noises that fill the ear, such as the firing of cannon, drums, and the ringing of bells’. When a battle scene was being enacted at the Globe the noise of the guns, the shouts and the clash of arms could be heard on the far bank of the river. The din of London Bridge and Billingsgate are singled out by Morose in Ben Jonson’s The Silent Woman as among the worst of the discordant rackets he would be prepared to undergo for her. ‘Nay,’ he adds, ‘I would sit out a play that were nothing but fights at sea, drum, trumpet and target.’17
Such performances were rarely staged in the so-called private theatres which were established in Blackfriars and elsewhere at the turn of the century. The first Blackfriars theatre was opened in 1578 by Richard Farrant, the Master of the Children of the Chapel at Windsor who, in order to evade the prohibition of public theatres in the area by the Court of Common Council, called it a private theatre where his choir could practise ‘for the better trayning to do her Majestic service’. James Burbage, Richard’s father, a carpenter and part-time actor, bought the building in 1596, and improved it with galleries to hold 600 or 700 people. The next year it was leased to one of Farrant’s successors as Master of the Windsor boys and to Nathaniel Gyles, Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal. The boy actors were extremely popular and rivalled the adult companies, much to the annoyance of Shakespeare who more than once refers to child actors disparagingly in his plays, making Rosencrantz in Hamlet refer to ‘an aery of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question, and are most tyrannically clapp’d for’t: these are now the fashion, and so berattle the common stages, – so they call them, – that many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills, and dare scarce come thither’.18
At the beginning of the seventeenth century Richard Burbage took six of his fellow-actors into partnership to run the Blackfriars theatre which thereafter became so popular that the local residents protested against the number of playgoers and their coaches blocking the nearby streets. It was a fashionable audience, for the seats here and at the other private theatres were much more expensive than those at the public theatres, rising as high as 2s 6d. Also, the buildings were smaller and, since they were roofed, plays could be performed in the wettest weather and in the dark by candlelight. 19
With the advent of the private theatres, the well-to-do did not, however, abandon the public theatres which continued to attract playgoers of all classes and were particularly popular with foreign ambassadors and their suites: the French ambassador was seen at the Globe, the Venetian at the Curtain, and the Spanish ambassador at the Fortune, another large theatre with a seating capacity of over 2000.
The player’s life was not an easy one. There were celebrated actors who, largely through having a financial investment in a theatre, made large sums of money. Edward Alleyn retired before he was forty, rich enough to buy the manor of Dulwich for £10,000, to build the College of God’s Gift, and to spend £1700 a year upon its maintenance and that of his own household. And Richard Burbage bequeathed his wife and children land worth £300 as well as valuable shares in both the Blackfriars and Globe theatres. But Richard Tarleton, the ugly comic actor who was renowned for his improvisations and was as celebrated in his day as either Alleyn or Burbage, was a poor man, and so were most of his less famous fellow-players. In the days when plays had been performed in inn-yards most of the profits went to the owners or tenants of the building; and so they did when the first theatres were built. The admission fees were divided between the players and the ‘housekeeper’; but when all the actors in a company had received their share and paid their expenses, they did not consider themselves well rewarded for their work. As a writer put it in 1609, ‘Hee shall be glad to play three houres for two pence to the basest stinkard in London, whose breth is stronger than garlicke, and able to poison all the twelve penny roomes.’20
The rare provident actor was, nevertheless, able to do quite well for himself. The ‘hired men’, that is to say those who played the smallest parts, were paid 10s a week by Philip Henslowe, though they received only 5s a week when they were on tour. They were likely to profit by additional payments, a special reward for playing well at court, perhaps, or fees for private engagements in the evenings when the public theatres were closed. They were also likely to receive compensation when the theatres were shut because of the plague. Moreover, they often had shares in the extensive wardrobe of their respective companies, and in the plays which were written for them. Indeed, their shares in a play were sometimes worth more than the fees the dramatists received for writing them: a play was commonly sold outright for £5 or £6 in Philip Henslowe’s time, while no more than £2 or £3 was paid for amending an old play for revival. In 1599 Thomas Dekker earned £35; but he had written at least three successful plays that year and collaborated on several others.21
When a play was completed, the stage manager would add the cues for alarms and noises, prepare a ‘plot’ – an outline of the story with a list of entrances and exits – and an inventory of the properties required. There was never much in the way of scenery, but a list of properties possessed by Alleyn’s company includes such items as stairs, steeples, a beacon, a tree, a snake, two mossy banks and two coffins, various ‘dead limbs’, a tree of golden apples, a cauldron and a dragon. The costumes were always of the most lavish and colourful kind, so resplendent in fact that foreign visitors who could not understand a word of the play derived entertainment in gazing at ‘the very costly dresses of the actors’, many of them the discarded but by no means threadbare clothes of lords and ladies.
Before the play could be produced it had to be passed by the Lord Chamberlain whose office would return it with offensive lines touching upon political, religious or moral matters crossed out or with notes such as ‘mend this’ written in the margins. The actor was, therefore, trained to find ways round the censorship with gestures and inflections of voice; he was also required to master a large number of parts in a short time, the women’s parts being allocated to boys, who were generally apprenticed to a senior player before their voices broke, though parts such as the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet or Mistress Quickly in The Merry Wives of Windsor were played by the comedians of the company. One company, the Admiral’s Men, put on fifty-five new plays in the three years from June 1594 and no less than sixty-two in 1599–1600.22
But while the prompter could always be relied upon to help an actor who had forgotten his lines, there were other hazards of an actor’s life from which there was no protection. On his appearance in a play which offended the authorities he was likely to be arrested and imprisoned, the fate of several actors in a ‘lewd plaie that was plaied in one of the plaiehowses on the Bancke Side’ in 1597.23 His company would be dissolved upon the death of its patron until his heir took the players over or another patron could be found. And his theatre would usually be closed in Lent, during outbreaks of plague, periods of national mourning and after damage by fire: when the Fortune was burned down ‘by negligence of a candle’, and plague broke out soon after it was rebuilt, the company that performed there disintegrated. The Phoenix, a playhouse in Drury Lane close to the bawdy houses which were frequently the target of rioting youths, was partially demolished in 1616 on Shrove Tuesday, the apprentices’ traditional holiday.
The Prentizes on Shrove Tewsday last to the nomber of 3 or 4000 committed extreame insoslencies [wrote Edward Sherburne]. Part of this nomber, taking their course for Wapping, did there pull downe to the ground 4 houses, spoiled all the goods therein, defaced many others; & a Justice of the Peace coming to appease them … had his head broken with a brick bat. The’ other part, making for Drury Lane, they beset [the Phoenix] round, broke in, wounded divers of the players, broke open their trunckes, & whatt appareil, bookes or other things they found, they burnt & cutt in peeces; & not content herewith, gott on the t
op of the house, & untiled it, & had not the Justices of Peace & Sherife levied an aide, & hindred their purpose, they would have laid that house likewise even with the ground. In this skyrmishe one prentise was slaine, being shott through the head with a pistoll, & many others of their fellowes were sore hurt, & such of them as are taken his Majestie hath commanded shal be executed for example sake.24
The players and all their works were also constantly attacked by preachers and moralists; in Puritan tracts and pamphlets; by tradesmen and retailers, ‘Vintners, Alewives and Victuallers’ who surmised ‘if there were no Playes, they should have all the companie that resort to them’; by employers who maintained that the theatre enticed servants out of their masters’ houses on afternoons when they ought to be working; and by the City fathers who lamented that more wholesome practices such as archery were being neglected. It was complained that, although it had long been agreed that no plays would be performed during divine service either on Sundays or on Saints’ Days, audiences crowded round the theatre doors on those days long before they opened, and that ‘the play-houses were already full, while the bells were still ringing’ in the empty churches. Actors were condemned as crocodiles, wolves, vipers, drones, wasps, caterpillars, mites and maggots and were likened to thieves and whores. All manner of calamities were ascribed to the public’s love of plays both in London and in the country where permanent companies were also established and where, to advertise forthcoming attractions, the players marched through the streets in gaudy clothes, beating drums and playing trumpets. In 1580 an earthquake and three years later the collapse of scaffolding, resulting in the death of eight people, were attributed to ‘God’s wrath against plays’. Affrays in Whit Week 1584 outside the Theatre and the Curtain provided an excuse for the City corporation to persuade the Privy Council to suppress both houses for a time; and disturbances in Southwark in 1591 led to the banning of all plays there between 23 June and the following Michaelmas.25
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