CHAPTER 64
Everyone knew when the playhouse was open. A flag was flown from the roof, announcing the news, and a trumpet was blown to alert those in the vicinity. Playbills advertising the forthcoming entertainment had already been pasted onto walls and posts, as well as the doors of the Globe itself. These “bills” gave the time and place, title and company, as well as sensationalist details to attract the public— “the pittiefull murther … the extreame crueltie … the most deserved death” and so on. The play itself began with three “flourishes” from the small orchestra, designed in part to 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, after the epilogue had been concluded, the next and forthcoming drama was announced to the audience. There then followed the prayers for the monarch, when all the actors knelt upon the stage. And then there came the jig. Its name suggests a merry folk dance, but its provenance goes wider. The stage jig was a comic afterpiece accompanied by dancing, lasting for approximately twenty minutes, in which some or all of the players joined. Its principal exponents were of course the comedians in the company who, like Will Kempe, gained a reputation for their extempore dancing; they turned like a “gig,” or top, and sang ribald or personal songs.
The jigs often included folk dances and ballads as well as what are euphemistically termed “figure dances” by the comedians and boys. They were characterised and criticised for their bawdiness, described variously as “a nasty bawdy Iigge” and “obscaene and light Iigges.”1
Shakespeare’s comedies generally end with a wedding rather than with a marriage (the auspices are rarely favourable), and the couples are in a sense unconsummated; that consummation may have been depicted in the jig. And it was a jig in which Shakespeare himself would have joined. In many instances it seems to have been the most popular part of the afternoon’s entertainment, “called for” by the impatient audience at the end of the play. The crowd could also demand the performance of a favourite jig such as “master Kemps Newe jigge of the kitchen stuffe woman” or “a ballad of Cuttinge George and his hostis.”2
It is not at all clear when, or even whether, the performance of jigs was discontinued at the Globe. It is sometimes conjectured that Will Kempe’s departure from the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1599 was the signal for their demise. When a playgoer, Thomas Platter, 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, written and performed in 1601, a clown is left on stage with a song. Where there is a song, there is a dance. There is in fact no real evidence to suggest that the jig came to a sudden or inglorious end in the Bankside theatre. Why remove one of the most popular entertainments that the theatre could provide? Ben Jonson may have complained about the jig but Jonson was not an enthusiast for populist theatre in any of its forms. It certainly flourished in the theatres of the northern London suburbs for many years. It seems unlikely that the “southern” theatres, catering for a similar audience, would discontinue the practice. The jig served a great purpose, not unlike that of the satyr plays which were performed at the end of the dramatic trilogies in fifth-century BC Athens. It was part of the dramatic celebration. It may seem inappropriate after the last scenes ofKing 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. The original meaning of “mimesis,” the word for mimicry or imitation, is “expression in dance.” It is 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 the 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. It fulfilled the audience’s appetite for significant action and iconic form. The Globe announced itself to be a cosmos in miniature, like the operations of the Mass. It is well known that ecclesiastical vestments were sold to the players, when their sacred-ness fell out of use, and that Puritan moralists denounced Roman Catholicism as “Mimic superstition.”3 A company of Catholic travelling players performed King Lear in the households of Yorkshire recusants. Shakespearian tragedy, in particular, has some deep affinity with the experience of Catholic worship and the sacrifice of the Mass. Simon Callow, the English actor, has suggested in a modern context that “Catholicism (and its English variant) is another great manufactory of actors …”4 So there is a connection. But the historical argument can be taken too far. The stage may have been inclined to ritual but, throughout the period of Shakespeare’s career, it also became an arena for the presentation of human character and of individual striving.
The play began at two o’clock in the winter, and three o’clock in the summer. Its average length was approximately two hours, some plays perhaps thirty or forty minutes longer. Since the length of Hamlet and of Bartholomew Fair is some four thousand lines, the actors in these and plays of similar length must have spoken very rapidly indeed. The average length of an Elizabethan play, lasting the conventional two hours, is 2,500 lines. Shakespeare’s plays average 2,671 lines; as always he stays close to accepted stage procedure. He was in every sense 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, and were in any case hardier, so that the chilly temperatures would not have discouraged them. Playgoers were drawn from all classes, except from the vagrant and the very poorest who could scarcely earn or even beg enough to eat. It is a matter of common sense that there were more middling than lower people, to use a distinction of the period, and that it would be mainly “gentry” and their consorts who would have the leisure or opportunity to spend their afternoons in this fashion. Among this latter class would be included “all Martial men … all Students of Artes and Sciences, and by our English custome, all Innes of Court men, professors of the Law.”5 To this list must be appended courtiers and assorted noblemen; London merchants and their wives, as well as apprentices, may be added on the presumption that some of them were willing or able to break off their business for two or three hours. The important point is that the Globe was not filled only with the plebeians of sixteenth-century London, as is sometimes suggested, and there was thus no need for Shakespeare to write “down” to his audience.
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 downe without respecting of persons, for he that first comes is first seated.”6 As a general rule the porters and carters and apprentices would have been content with their standing room in the pit; these were described as the “under-standers.” The pit itself was paved with ash and industrial “slag,” such as clinker, with a plentiful covering of hazelnut shells, and probably sloped downward towards the stage. The gentlemen and the richer Londoners (with their ladies) would have preferred the relative comfort of a wooden bench. Once they had paid for their token they could proceed either to the 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 is possible, for example, that the groundlings did not necessarily stand at all. They may have been able to sit upon rushes strewn across the yard. Some of them, according to Thomas Dekker in The Gull’s Hornbook, brought with them a “tripos or three-footed stool.”7
It has also been inferred that the “stinkards,” or lower classes of Londoners, congregated at suburban theatres such as the Red Bull and the Fortune; these theatres then become harbingers of the music halls of the East End in the late nineteenth century. But such segregation is very doubtful. When Stephen Gosson disparaged the playhouse audience for being a loose assemblage of “Tailers, Tinkers, Cordwayners, Saylers, olde Men, yong Men, Women, Boyes, Girles and such like”8 it is clear that the “such like” included a very wide spectrum of humanity indeed. The Globe did truly encompass the human world, or at least that portion of it residing in late sixteenth-century London.