The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London, 1576-1642

by Ann Jennalie Cook

Overview

Besides documenting the predominant presence of privileged patrons in the audience, the author discusses the shape of the privileged life, the place of the privileged in the social structure, the forces that drew so many of them to London, and the factors that made them such avid theatergoers.

Originally published in 1981.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691614953
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #862
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d)

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The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London, 1576-1642

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By Ann Jennalie Cook

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1981 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06454-3

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CHAPTER 1

A Prologue on Playgoers

Until someone perfects a time machine that can whisk a man back four centuries to enjoy an afternoon at a London theater, no one can be certain what kind of people patronized the astounding dramatic activity of the English Renaissance. Who were the people for whom Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, and their fellow dramatists wrote plays? Virtually everyone in London for sixty or seventy years must have known the answer to this question, but it is one of history's continuing ironies that what everyone knows rarely seems worth recording and so must be guessed at in later centuries.

And there are difficulties with any guess, however well informed. Speculation concerning those long-dead theatergoers must rest precariously upon such fragmentary data as remain undestroyed by the harsh effects of time. A wide assortment of sermons, official complaints, regulatory documents, diaries, letters, and foreign travelers' accounts, as well as passages from plays and other works of literature, all refer to the audiences. For in his own day, the Renaissance playgoer occasioned criticism, controversy, contempt, and curiosity. Reports of his nature varied widely. Was he ignorant or intelligent, riotous or refined, libertine or law abiding, plebeian or privileged? The answers depended always upon the nature of the report and the reporter. And so they still do. Modern accounts of the audience suffer from the bias of the writer fully as much as did the contemporary accounts.

As often as not, an interpretation reveals more about the interpreter's mind than it does about the mysteries of the past. Thus in 1907, Robert Bridges expressed his Victorian bias in a now ludicrous denunciation, blaming the "vulgar" Elizabethan playgoers for the "grossness" in Shakespeare "which we must swallow." Bridges sternly warned against "degrading ourselves to the level of his audience, and learning contamination from those wretched beings who can never be forgiven their share in preventing the greatest poet and dramatist of the world from being the best artist."

Some thirty-five years later, when Alfred Harbage published Shakespeare's Audience, "those wretched beings" seemed utterly transformed:

We may say in the present case, quite apart from Beaumont's satirical use of them as the spectators in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, that a grocer, his wife, and their young apprentice form as acceptable an epitome of Shakespeare's audience as any the facts will warrant us to choose. If Shakespeare did not write to please such a little cockney family as this, he did not write to please his audience. But if he did so write, then there must be some correspondence in quality between the plays and our sample three — the grocer, his wife, and their young apprentice.

Victorian prudery had been replaced by a sentimental faith in the common man.

Along with many other intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s, Harbage felt an unshakable confidence in the common sense and intuitive good taste of the masses. He described an audience at the public theaters that was heterogeneous but chiefly peopled by London's ordinary artisans and craftsmen. Writing to appeal to such folk, Shakespeare produced his masterpieces. The transfer of allegiance to a coterie audience at the private theaters, represented by the King's Men's move to Blackfriars, signaled the demise of great drama because henceforth the plays had to appeal to decadent elitist tastes. In both As They Liked It and Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions, Harbage delineated what he saw as a cleavage between the morality and the aesthetic worth of private and public drama, with the audience determining the nature of the plays in both cases. His lament that "the private theatres begat no second Shakespeare" assumed that the Theater and the Globe did beget the first Shakespeare.

Like most subsequent scholars, G. E. Bentley followed Herbage's lead. His massive and masterful Jacobean and Caroline Stage is filled with references to the aristocratic audiences at Blackfriars or the Phoenix and the vulgar audiences at the Fortune or Red Bull. With such a model in mind, Bentley doubted that the Venetian embassy could possibly have visited the Fortune in 1617. The well-dressed, well-behaved audience described by the Venetians sounded more like the Blackfriars. Could the translator have made a mistake? Bentley's assumptions also led him to question whether a troupe of French actors could really have been "hissed, hooted, and pippin-pelted from the stage" at Blackfriars in 1629:

I suspect an error in the accounts. In 1629 the French had played at the Red Bull and the Fortune as well as at the Blackfriars theatre; violence among the spectators was much more characteristic of Red Bull and Fortune audiences than of those at Blackfriars and the Phoenix. If the letter erroneously attributed conduct which took place at the Red Bull or the Fortune to the Blackfriars, then the various records would accord much better with Herbert's accounts of the 1629 visit, and with our knowledge of the differences between private-theatre audiences and public-theatre audiences in the reign of King Charles I.

Bentley was similarly amazed that the lowly Red Bull company could enjoy special courtly favor in 1634.

By contrast, connections between the Court and the players have posed no problem for a scholar like Glynne Wickham. In his view, the Court audience and setting always represented both the norm and the aim for the acting companies, "notwithstanding notable and extensive sallies into less sophisticated places of public recreation." He too contrasted the "small, private playhouse for an aristocratic audience" with the "vulgar public gamehouse" but, unlike Harbage, did not see any pernicious effects.

All the prevailing ideas about the audience appeared in a curious series of letters published in the Times Literary Supplement of 1974, hotly debating whether the Globe was indeed "the playhouse for which Shakespeare composed most of his mature plays." Most of the plays were originally commissioned for the Court, not for "ordinary people," said one writer, and thus should be freed from "the Globe stigma." Not so, replied an objector, for the supposedly '"gawkish groundlings' were more experienced playgoers than their counterparts today, and their interest in Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson should hardly reduce these authors in our estimation." Astonished at such a claim for the groundlings, yet another writer quoted from the Lord Mayor and from Shakespeare himself to prove that "the shouting varletry" were rowdy illiterates, incapable of understanding the Bard's divine language. On the contrary, came the next reply in the debate, Shakespearean drama was originally "a popular art," whose "style is not so dauntingly elevated as to have bewildered the groundlings or prevented their trustworthy appreciation of Shakespeare."

Several confusions are operating simultaneously in these current visions of the audience, and amid the confusions, the real issues get lost. First, there is the equation of superiority with social rank. The snobbery that presumes courtiers more worthy of Shakespeare is paralleled by the reverse snobbery that presumes commoners more worthy of him. The primary concern, of course, should be to find out as exactly as possible just who did come to see the plays, not who was worthy or unworthy of seeing them.

A second confusion results from the use of the playgoers as an explanation for the plays. Heterogeneous spectators — or aristocratic spectators, depending upon the point of view — produce great drama, while the opposite sort of audience produces lascivious decadence or drum-and-trumpet trash — again, depending upon the point of view. Here it is essential to distinguish between approving a play and authoring a play. In a competitive business, every dramatist hoped for success, but public taste did not dictate his poetry nor even the true merit of his creation, as Jonson and Webster testified when their work went unappreciated.

Finally, there is a myopic preoccupation with plays and playgoers that divorces the spectators from the wider social milieu of their day and turns them into stereotypes. Thus the groundling becomes either an illiterate boor or a sensible artisan, while the patrician becomes either a discerning connoisseur or a jaded profligate. To arrive at any reliable assessment of the theater's patrons, however partial, one must sift through the inevitable distortions of bias and distance, seeking to relate each scrap of information about the playgoers to the wider context of the dramatic enterprise, the city of London, and the society of Renaissance England. Only then does it become possible to exchange the strictures of stereotype for valid generalizations. It also becomes possible to separate the confusion between attendance and authorship and to set aside arguments over superiority and inferiority.

Admittedly, it is impossible to achieve a full understanding of the many thousands who attended plays between 1576, when the first playhouse was built in Finsbury Fields, and 1642, when the Puritans closed all the theaters. The direct evidence is oblique, incomplete, and highly colored by the writers' varying intents. The indirect evidence, taken from demography, sociology, economics, literature, history, and a vast assortment of contemporary documents, is correspondingly difficult to interpret with certainty. Nevertheless, when all the testimony is considered, it clearly indicates the dominance of one sort of playgoer over all the others: he was the privileged playgoer.

The claim that the privileged playgoer dominated theater audiences does not mean that playhouses were filled exclusively with the privileged. Such was certainly not the case. Anyone with the price of admission could spend an afternoon seeing a play. At various times, especially on holidays, many among the masses enjoyed dramatic entertainment, and on any given day ordinary people made their way into the theaters. The real issue posed is whether or not acting companies relied principally upon the support of common folk. Were the theaters truly "dependent on large plebeian audiences," as one recent critic has claimed? And were the dramatists self-consciously "addressing a cross-section of society," especially at the large public playhouses? This present study, while not denying the presence of plebeians among the audiences, indicates that they probably attended in smaller numbers and with less frequency than has been supposed. Moreover, far from reflecting a cross-section of society, the spectators came chiefly from the upper levels of the social order.

That social order poses a special problem for a twentieth-century person. Inevitably, he imposes his concepts of a class structure upon a Renaissance world that was structured in a rather different way. The very term "privileged" is a deliberate attempt to avoid the narrow connotations of a term like "upper class." By comparison with the rest of society, the privileged were a minority — even in some senses an elite. But within their ranks, they exhibited a tremendous variety in wealth, power, status, and accomplishment, far more even than the present-day upper class. Many who would now be assigned to the middle class then proudly claimed to be gentlemen, a distinction that set them off quite firmly from the commonality. Thus the group called the privileged, though limited in size, was not at all limited in degree, for it ranged from the threadbare scholar or the prospering landholder, newly risen from the yeomanry, all the way up to nobility and royalty itself.

Thanks to wealth or birth, to education or achievement, privileged Englishmen followed a life considerably different from the rest of their countrymen. The circumstances of that life and in particular the necessity for disproportionately large numbers of the privileged to be in London, supplied the dramatic companies with a loyal, lucrative audience. It was, moreover, an audience that did not have to be lured into playgoing. The privileged had long fostered the drama as schoolboys, as patrons, and even as playwrights themselves. They enjoyed exclusive performances at Court and in their own mansions. Always regarded as the chief clientele of the small private theaters, the privileged probably dominated the huge public theater audiences as well. Others also came, but only when they had money and leisure — rare luxuries for most Londoners but commonplace commodities for the privileged. The entertainment on the stage, the peripheral pleasures available in a large gathering of one's peers and near-peers, and the entrenchment of playgoing as an habitual element of existence guaranteed largely privileged audiences in the theaters.

What follows is an analysis of the privileged life, of the forces that concentrated so many of the privileged in London, of their playgoing while there, of the profits derived from their attendance, and of their plebeian counterparts. Admittedly, the analysis reverses the process used to arrive at the conclusion that the privileged were the chief patrons of the playhouses. The research itself actually began with a consideration of the commoners, those sensible citizens whom Harbage had always seen as the mainstay of Shakespeare's audience. When it became impossible to square either the life style of such folk or the direct evidence with Harbage's conclusions, a fresh look at all the specific references to the playgoers seemed justified. These references alone pointed overwhelmingly to the privileged as the principal theatergoers. But questions still remained unanswered. Was it possible that London sheltered sufficient numbers of the privileged for them to have predominated even in huge playhouses like the Globe? Was the privileged style of life compatible with intensive playgoing? Such questions necessitated extensive research into social, demographic, and economic history. The result has been a much wider way of looking at the audience, for their presence in the theater stemmed directly from their presence in London and indirectly from their special position in the social structure.

Thus for the first time, the playgoer can be seen not merely as a disembodied figure important only when he appears in a theater but rather as part of a total milieu existing in both England as a whole and, more significantly, in the unique society of London. The rise of a commercially profitable theater and the patrons who fostered that rise cannot, finally, be separated from the social setting. Both the theaters and the theatergoers were phenomena of their own time. It is to be hoped that a detailed analysis of the life of the affluent patrons will shed considerable light upon all playgoers, upon various customs associated with playgoing, and upon the plays as well. It is also to be hoped that this analysis does not simply transform an audience once seen as louts or sturdy artisans into an audience of fine gentlemen, in a kind of upward mobility of misperception. Instead, when all factors are carefully considered, it should become reasonably clear that the privileged were indeed the chief patrons of the performances. In that world now vanished it could not have been otherwise.

CHAPTER 2

The Privileged

A privileged man was a fortunate man in Renaissance England. Elevated to the upper levels of society, he enjoyed the rewards derived from his gentle blood, his fine education, his wealth, his titles, or his personal achievement. Theology might declare all men equal in the eyes of God, but custom decreed the privileged superior in the eyes of man. Silks, jewels, preferment, estates, learning, power — all belonged to the favored few. Their voices murmured of poetry or politics, travel or trivia. Their bearing bespoke their breeding quite as clearly as their clothes or their coaches. They commanded the armies, made the laws, controlled the markets, preserved the universities. In all their prerogatives and pleasures — including the theater — the privileged Englishman clearly stood apart from his fellow Englishmen, no matter how much they shared in a common humanity.

THE SHAPE OF SOCIETY

Thanks to the recent flow of research in social, political, and economic history, a huge accumulation of information concerning the upper levels of Tudor and Stuart society is now readily available. Yet in order to interpret such information properly, one must first perceive the relationship of the privileged minority at the top of the social scale to the vast majority beneath. The customary image of the English social structure as a pyramid, descending from monarch to pauper, is somewhat misleading. To twentieth-century minds, the pyramid suggests a gradual, even sloping in the ranks of society, including a substantial middle level. Recent efforts to describe Renaissance England as a narrow skyscraper set upon an immense base, or as a series of towers built atop a great, low hill, perhaps more accurately portray the reality of the past. The vast majority of people lived at the lower levels, within quite narrow ranges of social mobility. A small minority, some 5 to 10 percent, occupied the upper levels of society, where the range of mobility was enormous. So too was the diversity of life style. It would be a mistake to assume that the privileged were a uniform or homogeneous group. In actuality, they displayed a far greater variety of income, occupation, education, and outward appearance than did the rest of society, as the skyscraper image clearly suggests. The possibilities for the masses were severely limited; the possibilities for the privileged, virtually unlimited. Thus it is essential from the outset to understand that the upper echelons of society, though relatively small, embraced a tremendously varied set of people.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London, 1576-1642 by Ann Jennalie Cook. Copyright © 1981 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. 1
• Contents, pg. 5
• Preface, pg. 7
• Introduction, pg. 8
• Edward Nelson, pg. 12
• Andrei Okounkov, pg. 14
• Michael Artin, pg. 16
• John Horton Conway, pg. 18
• Friedrich E. Hirzebruch, pg. 20
• János Kollár, pg. 22
• Richard Ewen Borcherds, pg. 24
• David Mumford, pg. 26
• Bryan John Birch, pg. 28
• Sir Michael Francis Atiyah, pg. 30
• Isadore Manual Singer, pg. 32
• Mikhael Leonidovich Gromov, pg. 34
• Kevin David Corlette, pg. 36
• Sun-Yung Alice Chang, pg. 38
• Shing-Tung Yau, pg. 40
• John Forbes Nash, Jr., pg. 42
• Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck, pg. 44
• James Harris Simons, pg. 46
• Phillip Griffiths, pg. 48
• Gang Tian, pg. 50
• Heisuke Hironaka, pg. 52
• Eriko Hironaka, pg. 54
• John Willard Milnor, pg. 56
• Joan S. Birman, pg. 58
• Frances Kirwan, pg. 60
• Robion Kirby, pg. 62
• Burt Totaro, pg. 64
• Simon Donaldson, pg. 66
• Henri Cartan, pg. 68
• Robert D. Macpherson, pg. 70
• Michael Freedman, pg. 72
• Margaret Dusa Mcduff, pg. 74
• William Paul Thurston, pg. 76
• Bertram Kostant, pg. 78
• John N. Mather, pg. 80
• Maryam Mirzakhani, pg. 82
• Curtis Mcmullen, pg. 84
• Dennis Parnell Sullivan, pg. 86
• Stephen Smale, pg. 88
• Marina Ratner, pg. 90
• Yakov Grigorevich Sinai, pg. 92
• Benoit Mandelbrot, pg. 94
• George Olat Okunbo Okikiolu, pg. 96
• Kate Adeb Ola Okikiolu, pg. 98
• William Timothy Gowers, pg. 100
• Lennart Axel Edvard Carleson, pg. 102
• Terence Chi-Shen Tao, pg. 104
• Robert Clifford Gunning, pg. 106
• Elias Menachem Stein, pg. 108
• Joseph John Kohn, pg. 110
• Charles Louis Fefferman, pg. 112
• Robert Fefferman, pg. 114
• Yum-Tong Siu, pg. 116
• Louis Nirenberg, pg. 118
• William Browder, pg. 120
• Felix E. Browder, pg. 122
• Andrew Browder, pg. 124
• Cathleen Synge Morawetz, pg. 126
• Peter David Lax, pg. 128
• Alain Connes, pg. 130
• Israel Moiseevich Gelfand, pg. 132
• Vaughan Frederick Randal Jones, pg. 134
• Sathamangalam Rangaiyengar Srinivasa Varadhan, pg. 136
• Marie-France Vigneras, pg. 138
• Michèle Vergne, pg. 140
• Robert Phelan Langlands, pg. 142
• Jean-Pierre Serre, pg. 144
• Adebisi Agboola, pg. 146
• Marcus Du Sautoy, pg. 148
• Peter Clive Sarnak, pg. 150
• Gerd Faltings, pg. 152
• Enrico Bombieri, pg. 154
• Viscount Pierre Deligne, pg. 156
• Noam D. Elkies, pg. 158
• Benedict H. Gross, pg. 160
• Don Zagier, pg. 162
• Barry Mazur, pg. 164
• Sir Andrew John Wiles, pg. 166
• Manjul Bhargava, pg. 168
• John T. Tate, pg. 170
• Nicholas Michael Katz, pg. 172
• Kenneth Ribet, pg. 174
• Persi Warren Diaconis, pg. 176
• Paul Malliavin, pg. 178
• William Alfred Massey, pg. 180
• Harold William Kuhn, pg. 182
• Avi Wigderson, pg. 184
• Arlie Petters, pg. 186
• Ingrid Chantal Da Ubechies, pg. 188
• Sir Roger Penrose, pg. 190
• Robert Endre Tarjan, pg. 192
• Davi D Harold Blac Kwell, pg. 194
• Afterword, pg. 197
• List of Mathematicians, pg. 198
• Acknowledgments, pg. 200