I remember hearing a lecture years ago on the interaction of Shakespeare’s players and their audiences. The lecturer maintained that the actors and aristocratic audience had to be equals to touch each other ie. dance etc . In the case of Ariel singing to the audience: “Come upon these yellow sands /And then take hands”(Act 1 Scene 2 The Tempest) the players and audience supposedly danced.
Were any of the actors aristocrats/ nobility ? Did they get a special exemption when it involved physical interaction with their aristocratic audience? Was Shakespeare a nobleman? Could he have risen to become one in his day?
I’d challenge that. It may have been true for formal occasions, but going to the theater wasn’t considered a formal occasion - it was the equivalent of going to a pub, or a bordello. I can assure you that aristocrats touched as many commoners as they wanted to, when they wanted to.
Thanks Alessan. I agree. I haven’t found any evidence that supports the theory that Shakespeare’s troupe had any aristocrats/nobility among, let alone that nobility only physically interacted with nobility in a theater setting. Do we know other than being a successful rentier, whether Shakespeare had moved up in the social rankings to be classed as an aristocrat?
I really doubt any aristocrat would stoop so low as to work in show business. Shakespeare was solidly middle class, a member of the burgeoning bourgeoisie.
There’s no evidence at all that Shakespeare was ever ennobled. As Alessan points out, he died a prosperous upper-middle class property owner, but a commoner.
And the disdain of the landed gentry (never mind aristocracy) for those “in trade” lasted for centuries (well into the1980s, one Tory grandee was heard to dismiss one ambitious potential party leader as the kind of man “who had to buy his furniture”*).
Shakespeare’s background was definitely “trade”, and being elevated from a “strolling player” to theatrical entrepreneur to court player made him no more ennobled than the court musicians or painters or tailors.
*I’d have been tempted to say “I didn’t know you were a carpenter…?”
Shakespeare’s father John applied for a coat of arms, which was granted in 1596. This would have made him, and therefore William, members of the gentry. Not aristocracy, but apparently noble according to some definitions.
No, a nobleman IS aristocracy. Which Shakespeare wasn’t even close to.
Huh? Doesn’t everyone, even the very wealthy, buy furniture? (Unless you build your own.)
None of the actors or playwrights were nobleman; most were from backgrounds similar to Shakespeare–Christopher Marlowe’s father was a shoemaker; George Peele’s father was a clerk and bookkeeper. Marlowe and Robert Greene had University educations, but Shakespeare did not, nor did most dramatists.
Nobles could sit on stage in the Globe Theatre, so I suppose they could take hands and dance with the actors, but I’ve never heard that only nobles could dance with other nobles.
Shakespeare could have become a knight under James I, if he was willing to pay for it–the “30 pound knights” were much ridiculed in the Jacobean era.
Not if you’re living in the same chateau as the last eight generations of your family with furniture to match. That’s what is meant.
Got it. Personally I’d want more modern styles, but then I’m pretty far from landed gentry.
ETA: I’d think a lot of furniture would break after eight generations.
What!? No Oxfordians here? I mean Clifford Simak in his nove…err…scholarly treatise The Goblin Reservation clearly proves it!
Hurrah for old Bill Shakespeare;
He never wrote them plays;
He stayed at home, and chasing girls,
Sang dirty rondelays…
As I say, it depends on your definition. I’m going off Wikipedia, which says:
The largest portion of the British aristocracy has historically been the landed gentry, made up of baronets and the non-titled armigerous landowners whose families hailed from the medieval feudal class (referred to as gentlemen due to their income solely deriving from land ownership).
First of all: actors danced with each other, both after performances and sometimes during, if there was a scene that featured onstage dancing (like the one from The Tempest mentioned in the OP). I don’t know of any evidence that would suggest they danced with the audience.
But if they ever did so at a public, outdoor theater like the Globe, very few members of the audience would have been aristocrats. Certainly none of the ones in close enough physical proximity to the actors to dance with them would have been – the space nearest the stage would have been the pit, standing room only, the cheapest admission available – because contra a previous post, audiences didn’t sit on stage at the Globe.
Audiences could sit on stage at some of the indoor theaters, possibly including the Blackfriars, which Shakespeare’s company started using for their winter performances around 1608. Those were the expensive seats, so the people in them could plausibly have been of much higher social status than the actors. (Or not. Shakespeare was very much a gentleman, and a well-off one, by then, and most of the audience members at an indoor theater also fell into the general category of “moneyed gentry,” not nobility.) But again, we don’t know that audiences danced with actors at all.
That leaves private performances at court and in noble households. There, it’s plausible that it could have happened, and court masques typically did feature dancing by both aristocrats and by professional actors (who would have been hired for pretty much all the roles that were either insufficiently dignified for the nobility, or required actual talent). I don’t know, offhand, to what extent these groups would have danced together in ways that required physical touch, though, or whether there was really a social taboo against such touch (though, it should be noted, such performances would typically have taken place on festive occasions, which often featured a certain amount of temporary social leveling and inversion of hierarchies in early modern England).
And no, Shakespeare was not a nobleman, as others have said. His granddaughter did end her life as minor aristocracy, but that was after two generations of “marrying up” and accumulating familial wealth, as well as a civil war; it’s unlikely that Shakespeare himself could have done so, even if he’d lived longer.
At the start of Oliver’s Henry V, (1944) you can see a fair representation of the Elizabethan/Jacobean theatre. The groundlings, standing in the pit. The better sort, sitting or standing in the galleries. And the noblemen sitting on the stage where they could see the performance up close (when it rains you see the servant holding a cloak over his master’s head). Some aristocrats patronised the theatre, but they didnt act in it. Acting was still, and would remain for a long time, a disreputable profession/trade.
Septumius got banned. Not for that, though.
I am extremely skeptical of these two claims, and think they cast serious doubt on the historical knowledge of whoever was giving the lecture.
I’ve never heard of audience interaction of that kind, and given (as others have pointed out) the front of the audience was the “the pit” where the lowest-class attendees were crammed in to drink and debauch it seems pretty unfeasible (and wouldn’t involve atristocrats if it did happen)
And there is definitely no tradition in early modern Britain of non-aristocrats not being allowed to touch aristocracy. Not touching royality maybe, but that not the same thing at all (and no one was doing audience participation with any of the royals present, that would be unthinkable). Remember the aristocracy was pretty large with the ultra-rich “magnates” only making up a very small minority, most were not particularly well off or separated from the rest of society.
This was the time when the Crown was just beginning to raise prominent artists, poets, and scholars to the knighthood, but the theater was probably still disparaged too much for a playwright and former actor to be considered.
John Shakespeare, William’s father, was prominent in local politics and was granted a coat of arms about five years before his death, likely at the instigation of the playwright himself.
(From the Wilipedia article)
It was also a time when (pretty typically) the crown was super short of cash, so happy to handover a knighthood to some rich commoners for some revenue