Satirical expectations: Shakespeare’s Inns of Court audiences

Abstract

This article considers the relationship between two plays and their late 1590s audiences. After establishing the influence of the men of the Inns of Court as an audience “segment” in this period, it argues that both Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Marston’s What You Will respond to some of the shared experiences and interests of this group. Both plays were performed during the Poetomachia, the stage aftermath of the 1599 Bishops’ Ban on Juvenalian satire, and the Innsmen’s famous connection with the satiric genre is influential on playhouse production at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. After Jonson’s Every Man Out of his Humour (for which he adopted the epithet “satirical comedy”) the plays of the War of the Theatres engaged in the fashion for satire, but I argue that both Marston and Shakespeare responded in more than simply generic terms to wider issues which engaged an audience segment of Innsmen. Thus in their focus on an aspirant man’s appearance, on the connection between performance on and off stage, on the role of education and on the place of women, both Twelfth Night and What You Will show the importance of this segment to the late Elizabethan playhouse repertoire.