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THE ELIZABETHAN THEATRE
intellectual pursuits and well disposed towards belles-lettres. He must have made a good spectator.'1
Another important group among Shakespeare's audience consisted of the apprentices. Some of the guilds insisted on certain property qualifications of the boy's parents and educational qualifications of the boy himself. 'Many of them', Professor Harbage instructs us, 'had about as much formal education as Shakespeare himself.'2 Neither the fact that the Elizabethan theatres were open only during day-time, nor their professional routine, prevented the apprentices from attending the plays. Generally speaking, the Shakespearian audience was strikingly youthful.
If we ask why so many people stayed away from the theatre, Professor Harbage suggests this as answer: 'Many people . . . did not care for plays. A dramatic and poetic age confers no universal taste for poetry and drama. Elizabethans could be Philistines, and thousands of them were.'3
Against the not inconsiderable number of scholars who have told us otherwise, Professor Harbage stresses the law-abiding character of the Shakespearian audience. 'It is probable that both the upper and lower classes behaved best when each was under the surveillance of the other, before the audience was split in two by the system of high-priced and low-priced theatres.'4 A Shakespearian audience was noisy before the play began; it listened intently while the play was acted.
The inner mood of any historical audience is most difficult to describe. The Elizabethans had no doctors who analysed their dreams. Yet the following sentences, written in 1580, might likewise apply to Robert Taylor or any other contemporary film beau: 'The wilines and craft of the stage is not yet so great, as is without on the scaffoldes. For that they which are euil disposed, no sooner heare anie thing spoken that maie serue their turne, but they applie it vnto them selues. Alas, saie they to their familiar by them, Gentlewoman, is it not pittie this passioned louer should be so martyred. And if he find her inclining to foolish pittie, as commonlie such women are, then he applies the matter to himselfe, and saies that he is likewise caried awaie with the liking of her; crauing that pittie to be extended upon him, as she seemed to showe toward the afflicted amorous stager . . . Credite me, there can be found no stronger engine to batter the honestie as wel of wedded wiues, as the chastitie of vnmarried maides and widowes, 1 Shakespeare's Audience, p. 80. 2 Ibid. p. 82.
3 Ibid. p. 83. * Ibid. p. 1 10.
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