WEEK 3 - SHAKESPEARE’S LONDON AND ELIZABETHAN AUDIENCES

What was London like in Elizabethan times and who were the people attending the theater?

Audience Members

Most of the poorer audience members, referred to as groundlings, would pay one penny (which was almost an entire day's wage) to stand in front of the stage, while the richer patrons would sit in the covered galleries, paying as much as half a crown each for their seats. In 1599, Thomas Platter, a Swiss doctor visiting London from Basel, reported the cost of admission in his diary: "There are separate galleries and there one stands more comfortably and moreover can sit, but one pays more for it. Thus anyone who remains on the level standing pays only one English penny: but if he wants to sit, he is let in at a farther door, and there he gives another penny. If he desires to sit on a cushion in the most comfortable place of all, where he not only sees everything well, but can also be seen then he gives yet another English penny at another door. And in the pauses of the comedy food and drink are carried round amongst the people and one can thus refresh himself at his own cost." (Diary of Thomas Platter).

Shakespeare's audience would have been composed of tanners, butchers, iron-workers, millers, seamen from the ships docked in the Thames, glovers, servants, shopkeepers, wig-makers, bakers, and countless other tradesmen and their families.Shakespeare's audience was far more boisterous than are patrons of the theater today. They were loud and hot-tempered and as interested in the happenings off stage as on. One of Shakespeare's contemporaries noted that "you will see such heaving and shoving, such itching and shouldering to sit by the women, such care for their garments that they be not trod on such toying, such smiling, such winking, such manning them home ... that it is a right comedy to mark their behavior" (Stephen Gosson, The School of Abuse, 1579). 

London in Elizabethan Times

London wasn’t just big; it was also growing fast, mostly due to migrants from the countryside and from Europe. Between 1550 and 1600 it is estimated the city grew from around 50,000 residents to over 200,000. Inside the city’s old medieval walls, every available space was being built on. Outside, the suburbs grew steadily into the countryside.