By the middle of the 16th century the population of London was growing so exponentially that during the period of Elizabeth's reign the population doubled at least twice. At the same time that London was growing, the Catholic and folk dramatic traditions were in the process of being suppressed (though they never were completely exterminated). The saturnalian spirit of the earlier Catholic/Native folk drama transferred itself to the professional drama of London, however, where its alliance with taverns and inns encouraged a similar free spirit. This new drama, though, was deeply resented by some, particularly a powerful segment of middle class Puritans and the London City Fathers (sometimes members of the puritan middle class themselves).
To the Puritans professional drama was idolatrous, ungodly and Popish. After all, the plays took place in inn yards (or in halls inside the inns), and a large share of the inkeeper's profit came from the sale of booze to the theater crowds. The Puritans objected to the drinking, the carousing, the crossdressing, and the competition with Sunday sermons.
Civic authorities apparently opposed plays because of the disruptions they caused. It was extremely difficult to maintain order in London. There was no city police force of any kind. There were local sherrifs and justices of the peace who apparently functioned reasonably well in the boonies, but there was no efficient peace-keeping force in the city of London itself. In addition to the usual sort of disruption of civic authority caused by rowdiness, the Elizabethan era was full of politicall intrigue as well, and plays were sometimes used a political weapons. The most famous example of this is when those men plotting the Essex Rebellion comissioned the Lord Chamberlain's Company to put on Shakespeare's Richard II the day before their plotted coup. After the coup had been defeated, Queen Elizabeth said, regarding the play of Richard II , the actual performance of which had not occurred, "I am Richard II, know ye not that?"
The first permanent theater, the Red Lion, was built east of London, in Stepney, in 1567 by John Brayne, brother-in-law of James Burbage, who with Brayne, built the Theater in 1576 (The Cambridge Companion To English Renaissance Drama 3). The shift from inn yard to open arena theaters occurred rapidly, however, only after certain events played out, beginning in 1572 with the "Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds" (see Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage 4: 269-271) requiring that an acting company have the patronage of a great noble:
All & every person and persons beynge whole and mightye in Body and able to labour, having not Land or Master, nor using any lawful Merchandise, Craft or Mystery whereby he or she might get his or her living, and can give no reckoning how he or she doth lawfully get his or her living; and all Fencers, BearWards, Common Players in Interludes and Minstrels, not belonging to any Baron of this Realm or towards any other honourable Personage of greater Degree... shall be taken adjudged and deemed Rogues, Vagabonds and Sturdy Beggars. (par. 5)Thus actors can only work if they can find a great noble (Baron or higher) to claim them as members of his household. James Burbage secured the protection of the Earl of Leicester. Hence his acting company became known as "Leicester's Men," literally servants in the Earl of Leicester's household (see letter in Chambers, Elizabethan Stage 2: 86).
The documents printed in Chambers' Elizabethan Stage attest quite clearly to a continued state of tension between the Puritans and the London City Council on the one side and the theaters on the other. [A photocopy of this section of Chambers' book is on reserve for this course in the library.] Queen Elizabeth and her Privy Council attempted to arbitrate the dispute. As the crisis between the players and their detractors intensified, though, the Queen herself openly sided with the players, and on May 10, 1574, she issued to James Burbage and the Earl of Leicester's company a royal patent (an official document) granting them a license to act in the city of London and in the suburbs, except during the time of common prayer or of plague in London (Text of document in Chambers ES 2: 87).
The Lord Mayor of London and the strongly puritanical aldermen, however, set about to nullify that patent by the Act of Common Council, Dec. 6, 1574: The plays, the Act said, caused
sundry great disorders and inconveniences... to this city by the inordinate haunting of great multitudes of people, specially youth, to plays, interludes, and shows, namely occasion of frays and quarrels, evil practices of incontinancy in great inns having chambers and secret places adjoining to their open stages and galleries, inveigling and alluring of maids, specially orphans and good citizens' children under age, to privy and unmeet contracts, the publishing of unchaste, uncomely, and unshamefast speeches and doings, withholding of the Queen's Majesty's subjects from divine service on Sundays and holidays, at which times such plays were chiefly used, unthrifty waste of money of the poor and fond persons, sundry robberies by picking and cutting of persons, uttering of popular, busy and seditious matters, and many other corruptions of youth and other enormities, besides that also sundry slaughters and maimings of the Queen's subjects have happened by ruines of scaffolds, frames and stages, and by engines, weapons, and powder used in the plays.The Common Council of London went on to decree that
no inkeeper, tavernkeeper, nor other person whatsoever within the liberties of this city shall openly show or play, nor cause or suffer to be openly showed or played, within the house, yard, or any other place... any play, interlude, comedy, tragedy, matter, or show, which shall not be first perused and allowed.... (Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage 4: 273-276)The Common Council order did not prohibit plays, but it struck at the relationship between the inkeepers and the players. The result was the erection of the second permanent playhouse just outside city jurisdiction but close enough to attract London holiday crowds. James Burbage, certainly encouraged by the patent granted his acting company by Elizabeth, in 1576 built the Theatre. (Shakespeare and Marlowe were 12.)
Burbage's theater soon had rivals. The Curtain (1577), like the Theater, was built to the north of the city limits. "Within a few years a fourth playhouse was built in Newington, well to the south of the Thames, and then a fifth with the erection of the Rose on Bankside in 1587. By this date it seems that performances were being offered daily.... There had been arenas for bull- and bear-baiting south of the River Thames for many years, and the Beargarden there remained in business until 1613. So when the Rose was also built on Bankside in 1587, there were plenty of 'watermen' to ferry spectators over the river.... With the erection of the Swan on Bankside in 1595, this area became a major focus of theatrical activity" (Cambridge Companion 3).
These theaters systematized the players' irregular calling. James Burbage died in 1597, and after his death the Lord Chamberlain's men failed in securing a new lease for the Theatre. Thus Shakespeare's company found itself without any permanent home. On Dec. 28, 1598, with the the landlord away in the country, "a determinded party gathered at the Theatre under cover of darkness. While Widow Burbage looked on approvingly, her sons Cuthbert and Richard, along with... their chief carpenter Peter Street, and ten or twelve workmen, proceeded to dismantle the Theatre: an action specifically permitted them by a covenant of the expired lease. The timber from the dismantled Theatre these riotous men then ferried across the river to Bankside, where they erected a new playhouse more splendid than any London had yet seen. This they called the Globe" (Shoenbaum, Compact... Life 207-208).
There was another sort of theater, also built on the outskirts of London, just across the Thames, alluded to earlier as the Beargarden. Taken from the journal of Paul Hentzner: "Without the city are some Theatres, where English actors represent almost every day tragedies and comedies to very numerous audiences; these are concluded with excellent music, variety of dances, and the excessive applause of those that are present." But Hentzner's personal tastes seem to have run to less sohpisticated fare than stage plays, for he dwells on the Beargarden:
There is still another place, built in the form of a theatre, which serves for the baiting of bulls and bears; they are fastened behind and then worried by great English bulldogs, but not without great risque to the dogs, from the horns of the one, and the teeth of the other; and it sometimes happens they are killed upon the spot; fresh ones are immediately supplied in the places of those that are wounded, or tired. To this entertainment, there often follows that of whipping a blinded bear, which is performed by five or six men, standing circularly with whips, which they exercise upon him without any mercy, as he cannot escape from them because of his chain; he defends himself with all his force and skill, throwing down all who come within his reach, and are not active enough to get out of it, and tearing the whips out of their hands, and breaking them. At these spectacles, and every where else, the English are constantly smoaking tobacco.... In these theatres, fruits, such as apples, pears and nuts, according to the season, are carried about to be sold, as well as ale and wine. (Qtd. from S. Schoenbaum, Compact Documentary Life129-130)Like the earlier popular drama which influenced it, the Elizabethan drama performed some of the functions of saturnalian (or carnival) ritual. Certainly the very close association between the drama and various forms of popular entertainment (bear and bullbaiting, fencing, juggling, clowning, dance, song and feasting) suggests a general connection with carnival. A visit to a theater must have been a festive, holiday occasion.
The characteristics of the Elizabethan arena theaters are traceable to the makeshifts of the innyards in which the actors had been accustomed to play. You might refer to my memeographed handout of early theaters. There are further images on the internet as well. See in particular the drawing by Hodges which is linked to the Hilda Spear essay.
The Auditorium:
There was a rather narrow main entrance where a man at the doorway held a box into which people dropped a penny or two for a new play. For sixpence one could enter through the stage door at the rear and sit on the stage or in the adjoining boxes.
The corridor from the main entrance leads into the yard. Here one could stay without further payment. Probably held about 600 persons.
To enter the gallery entrances cost another penny. This allowed one to mount to the rather undesirable third gallery. With yet another payment one could enter the lower galleries. Here sat the "so-called" "stinkards."
Perhaps there were gentlemen's Rooms or boxes located in the two lower galleries. None in the third.
Sometimes the nobility sat in the tiringhouse balcony, but this was often reserved for theatrical use. This is on the second level.
The total capacity of the Globe was perhaps about 2000-3000 closelypacked spectators.
The platform stage: Thought to have been rather large (41 feet wide; 29 feet deep probably a tapering stage. But how much of this stage was taken up by spectators? Recent estimates make it a smaller area. The Rose, currently being excavated, is smaller.
Note the paling and rails in the Adams model. These are said to have helped prevent the groundlings from climbing up on the stage. Helped conceal some of the props in the substage. Evidence only sketchy that such railings existed.
The stage posts were used as trees and as a means of hiding from others on the platform. Also used as posts.
There were possibly several platform traps on the main stage, though this is open to dispute.
The "Hell" was possibly excavated, perhaps to a depth of eight feet.
The tiringhouse has 3 main levels, each of which is curtained.
Level one is the study:
Second level: The balcony.
A direct throwback to the inns? Used to represent the battlements of a castle or a walled city, or the upper story of a house.
Importance of the stage in relation to theater conventions:
In the traditional 19th century theater one of the basic conventions is the tacit understanding that the players may live out their stage lives as if no audience were present. Audience and actors are separated by footlights and an orchestra pit, and the players do not take the audience directly into their confidence.
On the Elizabethan stage there is a greater intimacy between audience and actors. Actors utter asides and soliloquys to the audience, not to themselves. Audiences often "talk back" to the actors. The absence of a front curtain means that scenes must open with entrances and close with exits. If there are dead people on the stage they have to be carried off. The drama tends to be fluid, then, rather than static. Shakespeare, himself, did not divide his plays into acts or even scenes (These came about later). Thus a tableau effect is difficult to form because the action never really stops. Language sometimes made up for the absence of painted scenery.
The costumes were elaborate and expensive.
Boys were used to play women's roles. The implications of this are in dispute. Some recent scholars goes so far as to argue that this was an important erotic attraction of the theaters. Others argue that crossdressed boys were taken quite in stride by the audience.
The plays were performed in daylight. Hence they were not "illusionistic." Nor were they "realistic." In part because of the proximity of the actors to the audience, in part because of the nonillusionistic nature of the natural lighting, and in part because boys played the roles of women, the audience must always have been aware of the dramatic characters as actors.
Who went to the plays? Does it matter? How might the audience have influenced the plays? One old traditional view is that the playhouses were full of low class rascals and plotters of sedition. This idea is supported by Chambers writing in 1923.
[P]lays were not only the occasions for frays and riots, but also brought bad characters together, and were suspected of affording secret opportunities for the hatching of sedition. It must be borne in mind that, so far as the external abuses of theaters go, the complaints of their bitterest enemies are fairly well supported by independent evidence. The presence of improper persons in the theatres is amply testified to by the satirists, and by references in the plays themselves. Intrigues and other nefarious transactions were carried on there; and careful mothers . . . anxiously entreated their sons to choose more salutary neighbourhoods for their lodgings. Some serious disturbances of the peace of which the the theatres were the centres will require attention in the next chapter, while law-court and other records preserve the memory of both grave crimes and minor misdemeanours of which they were the scenes. Like the bawdy-houses, they appear to have been at the mercy of the traditional rowdiness of the prentices on Shrove Tuesday. (E.K. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage 1: 264-65)Henry Crosse, Virtue's Commonwealth, or The Highway to Honour (1603) also addresses the question of audience:
Now the common haunters [of the theater] are for the most part of the lewdest persons in the land, apt for pilfery, perjury, forgery, or other rogueries, the very scum, rascality, and baggage of the people, thieves, cutpurses, shifters, cozeners; briefly an unclean gereration and spawn of vipers. Must not here be a good rule, where is such a sink in a town, whereunto all the filth doth run, or a bile in the body that draweth all the ill humours unto it.Alfred Harbage (Shakespearae's Audience, 1941) contends that the largest percentage of the audience were craftsmen who "had chosen playgoing in preference to boozing and animal baiting" (61). This audience, Harbage claims, was overwhelmingly "law-abiding," quiet and attentive, a regular melting pot of social humanity, dominated by the solid middle class, not the rabble (95, 111, 113). Harbage virtually dismisses the Puritan and London City Council descriptions of the popular outdoor theaters, maintaining that "the plays we read are precisely the ones to which the terms of opprobrium attached" but that "the texts themselves triumphantly deny" such descriptions (8). Robert Weimann (Shakespeare and the Native Tradition, 1978) contends with Harbage that these theaters were indeed "maintained" by the pennies of the "common people" (171) but that such an audience was considerably more carnival-like than Harbage allows. Ann Jennalie Cook (The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London, 1981), while recognizing that the lower classes did attend the outdoor theaters, and may even "have dominated the very cheapest places in the pit" (184), nevertheless contends that these theaters were economically dependent upon the patronage of the "privileged" class. Cook does not dismiss evidence of disruptive audience behavior. A "privileged" audience, she maintains, would not necessarily have been more restrained and genteel than a lower class audience. To the contrary, she argues that "the Puritans' association of playgoing with 'ydlenes, vnthriftines, whordom, wantonnes, drunkennes, and what not' also pointed to their awareness of the theater as one of several pursuits requiring money and leisure" (244, citing Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses). Harbage denies altogether the likelihood of such a carnival atmosphere in the Elizabethan popular theater, imagining, rather, a theater dominated by a crowd of middle class craftsmen and their families, a sort of "silent moral majority." Weimann and Cook, though they disagree on the social makeup of the audiences in these theaters, nevertheless agree that such theaters did possess to some significant degree a carnival aspect. Unlike Weimann, however, Cook does not explore the ideological implications of such an aspect. Rather than try to reduce Tudor and Stuart theater audiences to some sort of majority profile, Andrew Gurr (Playgoing in Shakespeare's London, 1987) underlines the wealth of variety among theaters and playgoers and the changing patterns of playgoing. According to Gurr, Globe audiences, up until the time of Will Kemp's departure in 1599, contained an "all-inclusive social range from gallants to grooms and from citizens' wives to whores" (153).
Conventional wisdom insists that the playwrite had to concoct something for everyone, but that what he concocted for the "groundlings" is of secondary significance. The groundlings, then, are conventionally thought to have been quick to accept the fun of the fools and fights but not too patient with dullness or subtlety. Who were these so-called groundlings? Vagabonds and masterless men, prostitutes, cutpurses, apprentices, sailors (London was a busy seaport). Do they matter? Traditional scholarship often discounts these people as incapable of appreciating (even understanding) the lofty nature of Shakespeare's "genius."
There were "gallants" among the audience. These would be among those whom Ann Jennalie Cook defines as privileged. Stephen Gosson (Plays Confuted in Five Actions , 1582) describes their demeanor: "The fashion of youths [is] to go first into the yard and to carry their eye through every gallery, then like unto ravens where they spy the carrion thither they fly, and press as near to the fairest as they can." Thomas Dekker, (who wrote The Shoemaker's Holiday) also wrote a tongue-in-cheek manual for such gallants, The Gull's HornBook (1609). It's a sort of manual on how not to be a nerd. He advises the gallant to sit on the stage:
By sitting on the stage, you have a signd patent to engrosse the whole commodity of Censure; may lawfully presume to be a Girder; and stand at the helms to steere the passage of scenes.... By sitting on the stage, you may... at the very next door aske whose play it is... If you know now ye author, you may raile against him; and peradventure so behave yourself, that you may enforce the author to know you. By siting on the stage, if you be a knight, you may happily get you a mistress; if a mere Fleet-street gentleman, a wife.... By sitting on the stage, you may, with small cost, purchase the dear acquaintance of the boys; have a good stool for sixpence...; get your match lighted; examine the playsuit' lace.... And to conclude; whether you be a fool, or a justice of peace; a cuckold, or a captain, a Lord Mayor's son, or a dawcock; a knave or an under-sheriff; of what stamp soever you be; current or counterfeit; the stage, like time, will bring you to most perfect light, and lay you open. Neither are you to be hunted from thence; though the scarecrows in the yard hoot at you, hiss at you, spit at you, yea, throw dirt even in your teeth: 'tis most gentlemanlike patience to endure all this, and to laugh at the silly animals." (Gull's Hornbook, ed. R.B. Mckerrow, 50-52)There were also true gentlemen and some nobility, though these latter were more likely perhaps to attend the "private" indoor theaters, which cost about six times as much, or to attend a private showing at Court or possibly even in a nobleman's private hall.
The jig: Following the performance of the main play, the company's clown would come out onto the stage to dance, sing, and perform improvisationally. These jigs were tremendously popular. Following are some of my notes on the jig from David Wiles. I do not agree totally with Wiles' assumption of an "increasingly orderly" Elizabethan popular drama, but his description of the jig is instructive, especially when one considers the extent to which, in the main humanist tradition of criticism, it has been ignored:
Within the authorial script, the clown [in 1590s] was generally given a self-contained sub-plot and a smaller proportion of available stage time than the Vice used to receive. But after the scripted play was over, the clown was allowed the freedom of the stage, freedom for improvisation, rhyming and dancing. The old balance between order and carnivalesque inversion was maintained, but in a new way. As plays grew increasingly orderly, in respect of their writing, performance and reception, the traditional enactment of misrule was displaced onto the postlude. Tarlton had established the custom of taking over the stage at the end in order to sing and exchange extemporal verses with the audience. As the relationship between player and spectator grew more impersonal, as a hunger for narrative was stimulated, Tarlton's techniques were superseded. A contained dramatic action, the jig, became the central event in the postlude" (Wiles, Shakespeare's Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse 43)Jig's origins in seasonal rituals which attached themselves to the morris dance: "The early morris men used to dance in honour of an elected Summer King or May Lady, but by the end of the century [16th?] the ritual framework had vanished, and the fool replaced the Summer King as leader of the dance. Within the dance, older wooing games were subsumed in the fool's wooing of the man-woman, the burlesque descendant of the May Queen known as the 'Maid Marian'.... "The morris dance was the centre-piece of Elizabethan folk culture. It symbolized the sense of community that everyone supposed to have existed in some past golden age. It was at the same time associated with anti-authoritarian summer festivals in which the boundary between game and rebellion was ill defined (44).