In the playhouses, the cheapest tickets were sold for a mere penny, and allowed the
spectator entry to the very front of the theatre. This area at the bottom of the stage was
called the pit, and it was where the “groundlings” or “penny knaves” stood to watch the
performance. In the summertime these audience members became known as the “stinkards”,
due to the unfortunate olfactory combination of the extremely poor hygiene of the time and
the warmer weather. Excavation of the original site of the Globe has provided us with the
interesting discovery that the “groundlings” would munch on hazelnuts or oranges during
the plays. Perhaps this was their equivalent to eating popcorn at the cinema. They would
shout out at the actors and throw things if they didn’t like the performance! Very rich nobles
could watch the play from a chair set on the side of the stage itself, giving them a bird’s eye
view of the action.
Popular playwrights of this era who are still well-known household names today were
Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and, of course, William Shakespeare. Many people at the
time even considered Christopher Marlowe to be Shakespeare’s superior in the dramatic
craft. However, this talented rival came to an untimely end when he was killed at a relatively
young age in a tavern 4ight.
Companies would typically perform between 30 and 40 new plays every year. The
Admiral’s Men, Shakespeare’s rival theatre company, performed every afternoon for six days
a week, 40 weeks of the year. With such intensive schedules the profession was hard work.
Although there was a pro4it to be made for those with shares in a company, actors or
“hirelings” engaged on a weekly basis were not paid quite as much. The young boys who took
on the female roles were paid even less. The profession was only open to men in England,
although women were acting in other European countries at the time. Women were not
allowed to perform in public theatres in England until 1660.
Theatre companies were wildly popular. Plays were written proli4ically and performed to
full houses, except during those periods in 1603 and 1608 when the spread of the Bubonic
Plague was so unmanageable that the theatres were forced to temporarily close. Unlike
nowadays, the same play was never performed for two days in a row. There was a repertory
system whereby companies would put on a different play every day. Actors might spend the
morning rehearsing and then they would perform in the afternoon. Overall, there wasn’t a lot
of time allocated for rehearsing. The actors didn’t even have their own copies of the play;
they would write out their own parts to learn by heart along with ‘cues’ that let them know
when to start saying their lines.
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