The Elizabethan theatre and attitudes towards it
A New Kind of Entertainment
Before Elizabeth’s reign, plays in England had mostly been performed by travelling troupes in inn yards, in the halls of great houses, or as religious pageants run by town guilds. By 1600 something very different was happening: purpose-built playhouses outside the city walls of London were drawing audiences of two or three thousand people, several afternoons a week, paying a penny each. The Elizabethan public theatre was new in scale, in business model and in cultural reach. It was also a flashpoint — loved at court, distrusted by the City of London authorities, and attacked outright by Puritan critics.
Elizabethan theatre boomed because of three connected factors: noble patronage that protected actors from vagrancy laws, the rise of a paying urban audience with disposable income, and Elizabeth’s personal taste for plays at court. The first purpose-built public playhouse, The Theatre, opened in 1576 in Shoreditch.
Patronage and the Companies
Acting was not legally a respectable profession. The 1572 Vagabonds Act listed unattached actors alongside sturdy beggars and threatened them with whipping unless they had a noble patron. The result was that every successful Elizabethan acting company was named after a great lord. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men — led by Richard Burbage, with William Shakespeare as a sharer — were patronised by the Lord Chamberlain at court. The Admiral’s Men, who performed at the Rose, were patronised by the Lord Admiral. Patronage gave companies legal cover, social respectability and access to court performances.
The companies themselves were small. A typical company had around twelve sharers (men who owned a stake in the business), a few hired men for smaller parts, and four or five boy apprentices who played all the female roles — women were not allowed on the public stage. Plays were performed in repertory: a different play each afternoon, six days a week, with new plays added constantly. Playwrights such as Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson wrote at speed for these companies.
Playhouses were polygonal wooden buildings, open to the sky in the middle, around three storeys high. Audiences stood in the central yard for one penny — these were the groundlings — or paid two pennies for a seat in the covered galleries, with cushions an extra penny on top. Performances ran in the afternoon because there was no artificial lighting. Special effects were limited but inventive: cannon fire, trapdoors, suspended thrones lowered from the ‘heavens’ above the stage, and pig’s blood for stabbings.
An Audience of Everyone
The most striking thing about an Elizabethan playhouse audience was its mix. Apprentices, dock workers and prostitutes rubbed shoulders with merchants, country gentry visiting London, courtiers and foreign visitors. Foreign visitors and ambassadors’ servants watched alongside soldiers and sailors. A penny was within reach of even a working Londoner: one Tudor commentator complained that apprentices were skipping work to stand at plays. This breadth of audience is one reason Shakespeare’s plays move between high poetry, sword fights, jokes about bodily functions and royal politics within a single scene — he was writing for a paying public that contained every social rank.
The cultural ambition of the plays grew quickly. Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (c.1592) and Tamburlaine (1587) brought blank verse and big philosophical themes to a popular audience. Shakespeare’s histories — Henry V (1599), the Henry VI trilogy, Richard III — turned recent English politics into a public conversation. By 1600, Elizabethan playwrights were producing work that historians of literature treat as the foundation of modern English drama.
Opposition: City of London and the Puritans
Not everyone approved. The City of London Corporation — the merchant council that ran the City inside its medieval walls — banned public playhouses from operating on its territory from 1574. The Corporation gave four reasons: playhouses spread plague by drawing crowds; they attracted pickpockets, prostitutes and brawlers; they pulled apprentices away from honest work; and they encouraged immorality. This is why almost every Elizabethan playhouse stood just outside the City’s jurisdiction — in Shoreditch to the north (The Theatre, the Curtain), or south of the river in Southwark (the Rose, the Swan), where the Corporation’s writ did not run.
Puritan critics went further. Puritans argued that the theatre was sinful in itself — it taught vanity, glorified violence, mixed the sexes (boys playing women), and tempted people from honest work and worship. The Puritan minister Philip Stubbes’s Anatomy of Abuses (1583) attacked plays as a training ground for vice and called for them to be shut. London preachers blamed plague outbreaks on God’s anger at the playhouses. During serious plague, the Privy Council itself ordered playhouses closed — in 1592–94, in 1603 and several times after — partly to control infection, partly to placate the City and the Puritans. When the Puritans came to power in the 1640s they would close the theatres entirely, for eighteen years.
Opposition to the theatre came from two main directions. The City of London Corporation banned playhouses from 1574 because they spread plague, drew pickpockets and pulled apprentices from work. Puritans went further and called the theatre sinful in itself. This is why playhouses were built in Shoreditch and Southwark, outside the City’s jurisdiction.
Theatre and the Court
Against this opposition the theatre had a powerful protector: Elizabeth herself. The Queen’s Men was an acting company set up in 1583 specifically to perform for her at court, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed at Whitehall and Greenwich during the winter season. Court patronage gave the theatre a status the Puritan press could not undo while the Queen lived.
A 1581 royal proclamation set up the Master of the Revels to license plays before performance — a system that protected the companies as much as it censored them, since a licensed play could not be banned by the City of London Corporation. The boom of the 1590s — the decade of Romeo and Juliet and Henry V, when several new playhouses were built south of the Thames — happened with the Queen’s active blessing.