Nothing is what it seems?
The thing is, there’s hardly a soul in London that believes the Government’s story about barrels of gunpowder under the Parliament house.
'Fair is foul and foul is fair'
Most of us believe it’s yet another piece of government propaganda from the reviled Chief Minister Robert Cecil - the usual half-truths and inventions put about to condemn the Catholics and to bully the Parliament into passing more taxes.
But here we are at the Globe. We pay our penny to the woman on the door. Squeeze in among the crowd of working men and apprentices. Actually, look around - there are more women here than men.
So what’ll the King’s Men make of all the gunpowder rumours going round London?
Well, we’ll soon know. The play is called The Tragedy of Macbeth.
The modern Globe theatre
Shakespeare’s plays as a window on his time
The best guess is that Shakespeare was writing in the years between 1589 and 1614, decades which have to rate among the most extraordinary in English history.
From the initial thunderclap explosion, watching Macbeth in 1606 was an electrifying experience in which an audience of poor Londoners was actively challenged to make up its own mind about the propaganda the king’s government was churning out. It’s current affairs we’re watching on stage.
The historian Peter Lake has written that the true drama in Shakespearean theatre was what was going on ‘between the ears’ of people in the audience. Shakespeare doesn’t preach a political creed. But he does re-ask the questions of the time in such a way that his audience are forced to think hard. For us, as historians, it offers an invaluable glimpse into what might have been going on between the ears of a very wide slice of contemporary society.
Watch Macbeth today and it is a relentlessly grim tale about a Scottish regicide. Watch Macbeth in London in 1606 and suddenly you are seeing references everywhere to the government’s brutal tale about a Catholic plot, which hardly anyone believed. And in particular to Robert Cecil, the King’s widely despised chief minister. Had he not been completely taken over by evil?
Jan Joris Van Vliet’s etching depicts a typical turner’s shop in 1630s Holland
Who watched Shakespeare’s plays?
In 2004 the historian Andrew Gurr found a mass of evidence that apprentices were very willing to miss an afternoon’s work to go to a play. So too were house servants and people working in every other kind of poor occupation
Thomas Dekker, one of Shakespeare’s contemporary playwrights, exclaims ‘the place is so free in entertainment… that your Stinkard has the selfe-same libertie to be there in his Tobacco-Fumes, which your sweet Courtier hath: and that your Car-man [that’s a carter] and Tinker claime as strong a voice … to giue iudgment on the plaies life and death, as well as the prowdest… Critick.’
In her 2018 PhD thesis from York University Claire Benson takes us on an extraordinary journey through London’s streets, meeting some of the poorest people who worked there – the basket-carrying porters, the carmen who transported larger loads in carts, and the watermen who ferried people and goods along and across the Thames. She discovered that they were highly organised, running their own trade associations, with their own rules and codes, and more than able to stand up for themselves in the face of the London authorities.
Benson found that wages recorded for these very poor occupations in 1621 were running at about 2 pence an hour. They will not have been significantly lower in 1606. So paying one penny for the privilege of standing in the space in front of the stage – among the so-called ‘groundlings’ – was very much within range for all but the very, very poorest of London’s population. It was the equivalent of a loaf of bread – or when food was short and prices high, the price of an egg.
In fact, historian AL Beier found that, in the early 17th century, even beggars on the street could expect to collect about six pence every day.
Fishwife (1673) by Adriaen van Ostade
Majority of the audience were working women
More strikingly, Gurr found that a majority of theatre audiences in Shakespeare’s time were working women. For anyone familiar with realities of society around 1600 that’s not so surprising.
Claire Benson found that London women were not only seamstresses, milliners or lace-makers, but also blacksmiths, shipwrights, wood-sellers and silversmiths. There were even women bricklayers, butchers and gunsmiths. Over the (admittedly longer) period 1573-1723 Benson found women in more than 70 occupations. Many worked 7-year apprenticeships.
Foreigners visiting London in Shakespeare’s time recorded their surprise at finding women drinking in the taverns and playing sports with men in the streets.
Blue light dramas of their day
Historians Michael Questier and Peter Lake have shown that Macbeth draws some of its inspiration from Elizabethan murder literature – the true crime trash books of the day. The struggles of God and Satan, temptation and remorse, and the conviction that, in the end, ‘murder will out’, these are the stock-in-trade of this kind of popular pamphlet. So too is a dash of mayhem and plenty of spilled blood. That makes complete sense if the Globe’s audience was mostly poor folk who lapped up the blue-light dramas of their day.
#119 'Fair is foul, and foul is fair' - Ep 1 Shakespeare and the Groundlings
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