Elizabethan Audiences and the Open Stage: Recovering Lost Conventions

Abstract

To try to formulate the assumptions that an Elizabethan audience would bring to the theatre is to wrestle with shadows. Scholars like Alfred Harbage and, more recently, Ann Jennalie Cook have discussed the age, education, economic status, and tastes of spectators at the Globe or Blackfriars,1 but notably missing are comments from the playgoers themselves on how they viewed what they saw. Ironically, the critiques provided by figures hostile to the popular drama (Gosson, Sidney, Jonson) are well known, but the few available comments from friendly witnesses (for example, Heywood's Apology for Actors) tell us little about playhouse practice and audience assumptions. Granted, the historian can draw upon a wealth of evidence that survives in the many extant plays from the age of Shakespeare, but our interpretation of this evidence inevitably is clouded by modern spectacles compacted of assumptions drawn, often unconsciously, from our own theatrical experience. Perhaps most disturbing is that we have no way of knowing how much we do not know. When a word unknown to modern scholars survives in a Shakespearian play (for example, the 'prenzie' Angelo, Caliban's 'scamels'), the critic or actor at least is aware of a gap in our knowledge (or a textual crux) and can consult learned notes in editions and journals. But, as any historian knows, basic assumptions in any age often are so widely shared or so obvious that no one thinks to write them down. If a passage that now makes little sense to us originally drew its meaning from a playhouse convention that has perished with the acting tradition (leaving not a rack behind), who would be the wiser today? None the less, if the modern investigator proceeds carefully, he can infer a good deal about Elizabethan playhouse procedures and audience expectations from the extant plays, hence the focus of this essay. Let me start with the