Directors realise that audiences are not likely to have much grip on Shakespeare’s King John

Directors realise that audiences are not likely to have much grip on Shakespeare’s King John. They hardly know what to expect, except perhaps something about Magna Carta, which doesn’t figure in the play at all. Perhaps Shakespeare had never heard of it. In any case, he presents King John as a patriot, misguided, certainly, when he connives at the torture of his nephew little Prince Arthur, but standing out to his last breath against France. In the high Victorian theatre the actor playing the king used to sweep the crown from his head during his death scene and even hurl it into the wings, partly to indicate magnificent failure, and partly to keep some attention for himself. By that time the audience had already seen little Arthur die and his mother Constance run mad, their handkerchiefs were soaked, they had no more tears to shed. King John himself was left ranting on, against unfair competition.

P. Fitzgerald, At Freddie’s (1982), 89

Not precisely disagreeable, it suggested a church vestry where old clothes hang and flowers moulder in the sink, but respect is called for just the same

Everyone who knew the Temple School will remember the distinctive smell of Freddie’s office. Not precisely disagreeable, it suggested a church vestry where old clothes hang and flowers moulder in the sink, but respect is called for just the same. It was not a place for seeing clearly. Light, in the morning, entered at an angle, through a quantity of dust. When the desk lamp was switched on at length the circle of light, although it repelled outsiders, was weak.

P. Fitzgerald, At Freddie’s (1982), 4

Of the many remarkable things about Hamlet perhaps the most extraordinary is its length

Of the many remarkable things about Hamlet perhaps the most extraordinary is its length. At roughly 4,000 lines, the Second Quarto – the closest thing we have to what Shakespeare wrote in late 1599 – could not have been performed uncut at the Globe. Nor could his revised version of the play, a couple of hundred lines shorter, which eventually appeared in the First Folio. Though the Elizabethan stage dispensed with time-consuming intermissions and changes in scenery, these versions of Hamlet would still have taken four hours to perform; even at top speed, actors couldn’t rattle off much more than a thousand lines of verse in an hour. With outdoor performances at the Globe beginning at two in the afternoon and the sun setting in late winter and early autumn around five o’clock, an uncut Hamlet staged in February or October would have left the actors stumbling about in the fading light by the Gravedigger scene; the fencing match, fought in the dark, could have been lethal.

J. Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), 339

Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists were writing for the most experienced playgoers in history

In 1600, in an England of four million, London and its immediate environs held a population of roughly two hundred thousand. If, on any given day, two plays were staged in playhouses that held as many as two to three thousand spectators each, it’s likely that with theatres even half-full, as many as three thousand or so Londoners were attending a play. Over the course of a week – conservatively assuming five days of performances each week – fifteen thousand Londoners paid to see a play. Obviously, some never went at all, or rarely, while others – including young and generally well-to-do law students at the Inns of Court – made up for that, seeing dozens of plays a year; but on average, it’s likely that over a third of London’s adult population saw a play every month. Which meant that Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists were writing for the most experienced playgoers in history.

J. Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), 9-10