In this fact sheet, students will learn about who went to the theatre, how much they paid and more, providing a good background for understanding Shakespeare's audience. A printable version of this Fact Sheet is available in the downloads section below. Audiences By 1600 London theatres, like the Globe, could take up to 3000 people for the most popular plays. With several theatres offering plays most afternoons, this meant between 10,000 and 20,000 people a week going to London theatres. That’s a lot of people! So who were they? Who came to the theatres? The answer is ‘just about everyone in London society’ – generally more men than women, but all sorts of people. One visitor, in 1617, described the crowd around the stage as ‘a gang of porters and carters’. Others talked of servants and apprentices spending all their spare time there. But wealthier people were in the audience too. In 1607, the Venetian ambassador bought all the most expensive seats for a performance of Shakespeare’s Pericles. Even royalty loved watching a play. They didn’t go to public theatres, but companies of actors were summoned to perform at the courts of Elizabeth I and James I. Theatres had to compete for audiences against other London entertainment. These included cock-fighting and bear-baiting which were enjoyed by both the poor and the wealthy. In 1591, London theatres were banned from performing on Thursdays because ‘the players do recite their plays to the hurt of bear-baiting, maintained for Her Majesty’s pleasure’. How much did it cost? In open air theatres the cheapest price was only 1 penny which bought you a place amongst the ‘groundlings’ standing in the ‘yard’ around the stage. (There were 240 pennies in £1.) For another penny, you could have a bench seat in the lower galleries which surrounded the yard. Or for a penny or so more, you could sit more comfortably on a cushion. The most expensive seats would have been in the ‘Lord’s Rooms’. Admission to the indoor theatres started at 6 pence. One penny was only the price of a loaf of bread. Compare that to today’s prices. The low cost was one reason the theatre was so popular. Today, the place where you buy your theatre tickets is called the Box Office. In Shakespeare’s day, as people came into the theatre or climbed the steps to their seats, audiences had to put their money in a box. So the place where audiences pay became known as the box office. What did they get for their money? The groundlings were very close to the action on stage. They could buy food and drink during the performance – pippins (apples), oranges, nuts, gingerbread and ale. But there were no toilets and the floor they stood on was probably just sand, ash or covered in nutshells. Some visitors complained that the pit smelled of garlic and beer and no good citizen would show his face there. So paying more got the wealthy a seat under cover, and perhaps a cushioned seat. How did the audience behave? Some of the audience went to the theatre to be seen and admired, dressed in their best clothes. But these people were not necessarily well behaved. Most didn’t sit and watch in silence like today. They clapped the heroes and booed the villains, and cheered the special effects. Pickpockets sometimes joined the audience and in 1612, magistrates banned music at the end of plays at the Fortune, saying the crowd had caused ‘tumults and outrages’ with their dances. We have very few accounts of how the audience behaved, and most of them are about ‘bad’ behaviour. This probably tells us more about what was ‘news’ than how audiences behaved all the time. What effect did the audience have on the success of a play? With such large audiences, plays only had short runs and then had to be replaced. Between 1560 and 1640 about 3,000 new plays were written. To attract the crowds, these plays often re-told famous stories from the past, and they used violence, music and humour to keep people’s attention. This was vital because, if audiences didn’t like a play, they made their feelings known. At the Swan in 1602, the audience damaged the chairs, stools, curtains and walls. And, in 1629, a visiting French company were hissed and ‘pippin-pelted’ from the stage. This was probably because the company used women actors, but could just have been because they were French. Since it was so involved in the performance of a play, the audience was vital to its success. A woodcut of Bearbaiting, made around 1620. The first commercial opera in Venice was set up in 1637, after which at one point the city had six opera houses. This ushered in a period in which they throve until the decline in opera and theatre with the advent of television. Recently there has been a revival due to tourism and events such as the International Theatre Festival of the Biennale di Venezia.[1] All the main Venetian theatres were owned by important patrician families, combining business with pleasure in a city of crowded and competitive theatrical culture. When most opera in Europe was still being put on by courts, "economic prospects and a desire for exhibitionistic display", as well a decline in their traditional overseas trading, attracted the best Venetian families to invest in the theatre during the 17th century.[2] Europe's first dedicated public and commercial opera house was the Teatro Tron from 1637. The Grimani, with whom the Vendramin often inter-married, were dominant, owning what is now called the Teatro Malibran, then called the Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo, as well as the Teatro San Benedetto and other houses. The Veniers owned La Fenice, still the main opera house.
On the mainland
Media related to Theatres in Venice at Wikimedia Commons |
In Venetian opera houses the cheapest and least desirable seating was located in the
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