week 3

What was London like in Elizabethan times and who were the people attending the theatre?

people who would watch the theatre was just about everyone in London society – generally more men than women, but all sorts of people, servants and apprentices spending all their spare time there. But wealthier people were in the audience too and Even royalty loved watching a play at the globe. Most of the poorer audience members, referred to as groundlings, would pay one penny (which was almost an entire day's wage) to stand in front of the stage, while the richer patrons would sit in the covered galleries, paying as much as half a crown each for their seats. Shakespeare's audience was far more boisterous than are patrons of the theatre today. They were loud and hot-tempered and as interested in the happenings off stage as on. One of Shakespeare's contemporaries noted that "you will see such heaving and shoving, such itching and shouldering to sit by the women.