Shakespeare: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd Chapter 64

See How the Giddy Multitude Doe Point

Everyone knew when the playhouse was open.  A flag was flown from the roof and a trumpet was blown to alert those in the vicinity.  Playbills advertising the forthcoming entertainment had been pasted onto to walls and posts, as well as the doors of the Globe itself.  These “bills” gave the time and place, title and company.  The play began with three flourishes from the small orchestra, designed in part still the ever-restless audience.  Then there came upon the stage the “prologue,” attired in a long black velvet cloak, false beard and a wreath of bay leaves.  It was he who introduced the play and pleaded for the audience’s attention.

At the end of the play, the next drama was announced to the audience.  Then there were prayers for the monarch when all the actors knelt upon the stage.  And then there came a jog.  Its name suggests a merry folk dance but its origin goes deeper.  The stage jig was a comic afterpiece accompanied by dancing in which some or all the players joined.  Its principal exponents were, of course, the comedians in the company who, will Kempe, gained a reputation for their impromptu dancing and sang ribald or personal songs.

Shakespeare’s comedies generally end with a wedding rather than with a marriage, and the couples are in a sense unconsummated and the jig may have been depicted in the jig.  It was a jig that Shakespeare would have joined.  The crowd could also demand the performance of a favourite jig.

It is not at all clear when the performance of jigs was discontinued at the Globe.  It is sometimes conjectured that Will Kempe’s departure from the Lord Chamberlain Men in 1599 was the signal of their demise.  Thomas Platter, an audience member, refers to a jig at the end of a performance of Julius Caesar at the Globe in that year he was apparently chronicling one of its last appearances.  But at the close of Twelfth Night, a clown is left on stage with a song.  It may seem inappropriate after the last scenes of King Lear or Othello but there is somehow a dramatic rightness about ending any play with a song and a dance.  It suggests that the drama is an aspect of human joy and perhaps the oldest form of human activity or human game.

The experience of the play has in fact been described as that of a ritual, in which the stage represents a heightened reality, not unlike the gestures and movements of a Catholic priest at the altar.  It is almost commonplace to suggest that Elizabethan drama, emerging to full life after the reformation of religion under the Anglican supremacy of Henry and Elizabeth, served as a substitute for the rituals of the old English faith.  The Globe announced itself to be the cosmos in miniature, like the operations of a Mass.  It is well known that ecclesiastical vestments were sold to the players when their sacredness fell out of use.  A company of Catholic players performed King Lear in the households of Yorkshire recusants.  Shakespearian tragedy has some deep affinity with the experience of Catholic worship and the sacrifice of Mass.  The stage may have been inclined to ritual but it also became an arena for the presentation of human character and of individual striving.

The play at two o’clock in the winter and three in the summer.  Its average length was approximately two hours, and some plays perhaps thirty or forty minutes longer.  Since the length of Hamlet and of Bartholomew Fair is some four thousand lines but the average length of an Elizabethan play was about two hours.  Shakespeare’s plays average two thousand six hundred and seventy-one lines, staying close to accepted stage procedure.  He was in every sense of a professional.

The globe has often been considered to be a summer theatre, but the records show that it was also used in the months of winter.  Elizabethan audiences wrapped up more warmly than their modern counterparts so that the chill weather would not have discouraged them.  Playgoers were drawn from all classes, except from the vagrant and the very poorest who could scarcely earn enough to eat.

There was of course one division, between those who paid a penny for the pit and those who paid a penny more for a seat in the galleries.  In the galleries “each man sate down without respecting of persons, for he that first comes is first seated.”  As a general rule, the porters and carters and apprentices would have been content with their standing room in the pit.  The pit itself was paved with ash and industrial “slag,” with a plentiful covering of hazelnut shells, and probably sloped downwards towards the stage.  The gentlemen and the richer Londoners (with their ladies) would have preferred the relative comfort of a wooden bench.  Once they paid for their ticket they could either go left or right in order to enter the galleries.  Yet no doubt it was more random and haphazard than this neat formula would imply.

It has also been inferred that the lower classes of Londoners congregated at suburban theatres such as the Red bull and the Fortune that became harbingers of music halls of the East London in the late nineteenth century.  The Globe did truly encompass the human world, or at least that portion of it residing in late sixteenth century London.