Write about Elizabethan audience? Elizabethan stage and audience

 

ELIZABETHAN AUDIENCE

“The drama’s rules the drama’s patrons give.”   In other words, the audience, which is the real ‘patron’ of the drama, goes a long way in determining the form and spirit of drama.  In order to enter into the spirit of Shakespeare’s dramatic art, it is essential, therefore, to understand the nature and characteristics of the audience for which Shakespeare wrote his dramas.

     The Elizabethan audience for which Shakespeare wrote his plays was of a most heterogeneous kind.   It comprised two distinct classes of people whom we may conveniently characterize as the ‘vulgar’ and the ‘refined’. To the former class belonged all sorts of vulgar and uncultured people like sailors, soldiers, thieves, pickpockets, cheats and immoral men and women.  The other part of the audiences comprised educated men and women, respectable businessmen and public officers, critics and scholars, and at times, members of royal families.  Shakespeare and all other contemporary playwrights had to cater to the tastes of both the classes.

    It was the class of ‘the vulgar’ which formed the bulk of the audience in public theatres.  They generally stood in the pit round the stage or sat in the gallery above.  They were the most noisy persons of whom even the actors were afraid.  Brands gives a very lively description of this class of audience in the following words “The frequenters of the pit with their coarse boisterousness, were the terror of the actors.  They all had to stand, coal-heavers and bricklayers, dock-labourers, serving men and idlers.  Refreshment-sellers moved about among them, supplying them with sausages and with apples and nuts.  They ate and drank, drew corks, smoked tobacco, fought with each other, and often when they were out of humour threw fragments of food and even stones at the actors.  Now and then they would come to loggerheads with fine gentlemen on the stage, so that the performance had to be interrupted and the theatre closed.  The sanitary arrangements were of the most primitive description, and the groundings resisted all attempts at reformation the part of the management.  When the evil smells became intolerable, juniper berries were burnt by way of refreshing the atmosphere.”

     The refined gentry usually sat on chairs close to the stage and sometimes upon the stage itself.  There were special boxes for very high officials and public men.  Ladies usually came with silken masks drawn over their faces.  Foppish and very fashionable ladies generally occupied the first row.  But the Elizabethan theatre was usually a scene of most boisterous actions and obscene remarks; and therefore, highly respectable ladies did not usually visit ‘public’ theatres.  There were ‘private’ theatres to cater to the demand of this class of the Elizabethan audience.

      The Elizabethan audience, in general, revelled in boisterous scenes of murders, bloodshed, vengeance, oppressions, and atrocities.  They patronized what we call melodramatic plays.  This explains the recurrence of too many melodramatic scenes in Shakespeare’s tragedies. The ingratitude of Macbeth, the frailty of Hamlet’s mother, the suspicious nature of Othello, the inhumanity of Regan and Goneril and so many other scenes of murder, bloodshed and battles, were not repulsive to most of the Elizabethan audience.  The Elizabethans rather delighted in them.  They highly appreciated Marlowe’s Tamberlaine which is nothing but a long succession of inhuman murders and battles. 

      Thus theatres were very much in vogue in the Elizabethan England.  For the spectators, in general, theatres were not merely places of amusement and entertainment but also of social gathering and instruction.  The theatres served the purpose of newspapers, magazines and journals.  The Elizabethan dramas, being the mirror of the age, exhibited to the public what was going on in England and abroad.  What Francis Bacon said of ‘Studies’ he might well have said of the dramas of his age, as serving “for delight, for ornament and for ability.”

          Thus so far we have seen about the Elizabethan audience.