“Mew” was a favourite signal of displeasure, from which we get the more recent expression “cat-call.” The audiences in the galleries might stand up during a particularly exciting duel or battle, urging on the participants. They would applaud individual speeches. There were hisses and shouts, tears and applause, but all these responses were part of an intense emotional engagement with the play itself. It is almost impossible to replicate the experience of the first theatres. It was an astounding reality, quite unlike anything ever seen before. The mystery plays on the streets, or the interludes in the halls, offered no true comparison. In modern terms the sixteenth-century theatre was television and cinema, street festival and circus, all in one.
There was of course much eating and drinking during the course of the performance, and sellers went around with oranges, apples, nuts, gingerbread and bottled beer. There is a description of a nervous playwright who is so fearful of his play’s reception “that a bottle of ale cannot be opened but he thinks somebody hisses.” 4 There was a “tap room,” or bar, attached to the Globe itself. Pipes of tobacco could be purchased for 3 pence, and one contemporary moralist noted with disquiet that these pipes were offered even to the women. There was no doubt casual or opportunistic prostitution and pickpocketing. Wherever there are large groups of people in London, there are bound to be thieves and ladies of the game. That is the nature of the city. On a more genteel note there are reports that books were for sale in the Globe, with the cry of “Buy a new book!” There was of course no interval, so refreshments were consumed throughout the duration of the play.
Stories of fights and riots in the theatre are essentially of the eighteenth century. The worst that is noted of the sixteenth-century playhouse is the occasional hurling of fruit or nuts at the stage, particularly if the players were late to begin. It was still too novel and exciting an experience, too much a matter of general interest, for a London crowd to permit violent interruption. There was such a thing as “the justice of the street,” and no doubt it was visited upon anyone who interfered with the playgoers’ pleasure. The plays of Shakespeare were not attended by raucous scenes, or by the yells and shouts of drunken apprentices. It is worth remarking in this context that English drama began its precipitous decline in the late seventeenth century precisely when the theatres became more private and apparently more refined places.
In Every Man out of His Humour Ben Jonson wrote of “attentive auditors”; he considered himself to be poet as much as playwright and wished for an understanding or listening audience. The published descriptions of plays by contemporary playgoers are not generally revealing about the level of sensibility in the playhouse. The fact that most audiences were accustomed to listening to sermons, however, must have helped to shape their response. That is why they tend to describe the individual characters and actions, and on occasions the moral lessons that might be adduced from them.
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
A horoscope was consulted to determine the exact day for the opening of the Globe. The play chosen for that auspicious occasion was Julius Caesar and, from allusions in the text itself, it is clear that it was first performed on the afternoon of 12 June 1599. This was the day of the summer solstice and the appearance of a new moon.1 A new moon was deemed by astrologers to be the most opportune time “to open a new house.”2 There was a high tide at Southwark early that afternoon, which helped to expedite the journey of the playgoers coming from the north of the river. That evening, after sunset, Venus and Jupiter appeared in the sky. These may seem to be matters of arcane calculation but to the actors and playgoers of the late sixteenth century they were very significant indeed. It has been demonstrated, for example, that the axis of the Globe is 48 degrees east of true north, and so was in fact in direct alignment with the midsummer sunrise. Astrological lore was a familiar and formative influence upon all the affairs of daily life. It is also the context for the supernatural visitations and prognostications in Julius Caesar itself.