Exploring Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon

City Breaks

This episode concludes a Stratford-upon-Avon mini-series by exploring the town's rich theatrical heritage and modern performance landscape. The host traces Shakespeare's early exposure to travelling

Key takeaways

• Elizabethan theatre featured all-male casts, penny groundling admission, and raucous audience interactions, as vividly described in Bernard Cornwell's Fools and Mortals.
• David Garrick's 1769 Shakespeare Jubilee launched Stratford's tourism industry despite being ruined by heavy wind and rain.

Main topics

• Elizabethan theatre history and conventions
• Royal Shakespeare Company venues (RST, Swan, Other Place)

Notable quotes

"The first playgoers began arriving before one o'clock."

Conclusion

Listeners receive a practical and historical guide to Stratford's thea

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:13) Hello there, or in Shakespearean English, a thousand greetings, gentle traveller, thou art right welcome. That was AI's suggestion when I asked it how to say hello and welcome in Shakespearean English. And the reason I did that is because you are indeed welcome to the last in the Stratford-on-Avon miniseries that we've been doing here at City Breaks. After Stratford generally and Shakespeare Stratford, what else to end with but... something on the theme of exploring theatre in Stratford. Because, you know, we've seen the house and the church and all of that, but really, the play's the thing. I believe those words may have been penned by the great man himself. And let's face it, he wrote over a million words of text, all sorts of themes and characters and plots and all that wonderful language, in 38 different plays, comedies, histories, tragedies. all of which I believe have been staged at some point in time in Stratford-on-Avon, and how fitting, I thought, to finish the series with theatre. So I'm going to have a little look at theatre of a sort, as it was back in Shakespeare's day, a quick run-through through the history of Shakespearean theatre in Stratford, and then a look at all the places in the town that you can visit if you want to know more. So that will be three different theatres and a museum. all, I think, grouped together under the umbrella heading the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. So, here goes then. A little history. Drama was thriving in Stratford when Shakespeare was a child, so we're talking the 1560s and 70s, because travelling acting companies visited the town. Before they were granted a licence to perform in town, they had to be vetted by the bailiff, the alderman, the common council, as I believe it was known. and there was even a point when John Shakespeare, so William's dad, was in charge of this vetting process. It took place usually in the Guildhall, so very difficult to imagine that Shakespeare wouldn't have had a look at at least some of the occasions. We know, for example, that when he was aged between about nine and twelve, the most famous theatre company in England arrived in Stratford, more than once, Lord Leicester's Men, they were called. and quite an illustrious company, able to charge apparently three times what ordinary companies could charge in order to watch their plays. They weren't the only players in town. Records show that at least 15 other companies visited Stratford during the years when Shakespeare was young. So the question is, did he watch, and did he find inspiration there? I think the official answer is maybe. My answer is, surely, surely he did. I also read something interesting in one of the guidebooks I came across. Quote, The company sometimes recruited local boys and young men to act in walk-on roles and perhaps assist backstage. If this happened in Stratford, William Shakespeare would probably have been a keen participant. Yes, indeed, and if you go on a tour round the Guildhall, they will show you a room upstairs which used to be called the Agreeing Room. so the room in which actors, before they did their performance, would meet to agree on exactly how they were going to perform in the space. I think it's the corruption of that word that gives us today's green room. And while we're on the subject of etymology, there was also, in theatres of the day, a tiring room, the room where the actors got changed into their costumes, taken from the word attire, presumably. Anyway, so he probably saw real actors at work. We know too that he probably watched court cases in the Guildhall, again, especially when his father was a magistrate. So maybe that gave him some ideas for high drama. And we know that his teachers, or some of them anyway, encouraged the boys in the school that he almost certainly attended to act out texts from Roman literature in their lessons. That must have filled young Shakespeare's mind with lots of ideas and characters and stories. And you can trace them sometimes. Pyramus and Thisbe, for example, that little interlude in Midsummer Night's Dream, that comes straight from the Latin author Ovid. And we can perhaps also imagine that maybe they read Cicero, and that from that Shakespeare picked up lots of ideas about the power of great oratory and how to write a really good speech. I found it interesting to note that Shakespeare's childhood was exactly the moment when theatre, as an actual building in which to perform plays, became a thing. Up until then, plays had been performed mainly in court-yards or perhaps in the grounds of a big house, where the lord or the earl in charge was a sponsor for theatre. But the very first theatre that opened in London opened in 1567, when Shakespeare was three. That was the Red Lion Theatre in Whitechapel, by the way. So, as he grew up, this would have been becoming a development, something he no doubt noticed and was keen to latch on to. And, of course, we know that a bit later in life, when he went to London, he founded, firstly, a theatre company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and also, a bit after that, the theatre, the Globe Theatre, which he was a co-founder and shareholder. Just as a mini-digression, Elizabethan theatre was, of course, vastly different from theatre today. All the parts were played by men, for a start. Very little emphasis on scenery. I don't think they even had a curtain. Many of the audience came and stood, the groundlings as they were known, who could get in, for example, to the Globe Theatre on the South Bank in London for a penny each, or they could pay a bit more to sit up in the gallery, built one level up around the stage and the space for the groundlings. The performances were pretty different too. Lots of music, dancing, tumbling, wrestling, fights and duels. And we're not talking hushed, respectful audiences. We're talking raucous outbreaks, where people felt quite entitled to shout things out at the actors, or to buy snacks from passing vendors circulating amongst them, perhaps to overdo the alcohol and lose their inhibitions. I found a nice description of theatre in London in Shakespeare's day from Bernard Cornwall's book, Fools and Mortals. Here, then, is a quotation from that. The first playgoers began arriving before one o'clock. They came across Finsbury Fields, a trickle at first, but the trickle swelled, as men, women, apprentices, tradesmen and gentry all came from the cripple gate. Others walked up from the bishop's gate and turned down the narrow path that led by the horse pond to the playhouse, where one-eyed Jeremiah stood at the entrance, with a locked box that had a slit in its lid, and where two men, both armed with swords, cudgels and scowls, guarded the old soldier and his box. Every playgoer had to drop a penny through the slot. Three whores from the Dolphin Tavern were selling hazelnuts just outside the theatre. Blind Michael, who was guarded by a huge deaf and dumb son, was selling oysters and Pitchfork Harry sold bottles of ale. The crowd, as always, was in a merry mood. They greeted old friends, chatted and laughed as the yard filled. Richer folk went to the smaller door. paid tuppence and climbed the stairs to the galleries, where, for yet another penny, they could hire a cushion to soften the oak benches. Stratford, in Shakespeare's day of course, was quite the rural backwater, and it didn't happen immediately after his death that things took off. We know that really the first occasion when Stratford tried to make much of its connections to the great playwright was 1769. when the famous actor David Garrick organised a three-day extravaganza known as the Shakespeare Jubilee. All sorts took place, horse racing, a masked