Quote:
Originally Posted by Carl Copeland
I’ve always wondered how Shakespeare’s plays were understood by their early audiences. His contemporaries naturally would have understood his language better than we do and would have gotten jokes and topical references that need annotating for us. But the language is often so complex and richly layered that I suspect they missed a lot, especially with spectators milling about, commenting on the action, booing at villains, chomping on applies and swilling ale. And I suspect the plays’ dramatic and poetic subtlety—their greatness—was recognized by scholars of a later time.
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It's a great question, and one that's been mulled over by critics for a good long while. One important thing to keep in mind (which is often forgotten or not known) is that performances featured heavy editing of the playtext. What would happen is that a playwright would frequently have far more material than was typically performed. Case in point:
Hamlet. There were several quarto editions of the play produced (read: printed) during Shakespeare's lifetime, and they're all different. The first quarto edition is a whopping 1600 lines shorter than the 4000-line
Hamlet we are most accustomed to. It's widely (and understandably) considered far inferior to the version found in the 1623 folio, but in truth, the much shorter version makes a lot more sense in performance. As best we can tell, playgoers did
not stick around for four hours to watch a play. Instead, scripts were cut to optimal size for performances, and sometimes they might vary from one day to the next (e.g. an actor is sick? Guess we need to cut his role, or maybe have Bob double up!).
Much has been made of the "two hours' traffic of our stage" line from
Romeo and Juliet, and around a decade ago, one enterprising independent scholar (whose name escapes me) did some impressive research on how early modernists counted time. In short, the bell would toll on the hour, and any time between the first and second hour would be considered "an hour," and any time between the second and third hour would be considered "two hours" and so on. So something that was 2.5 hours
in fact might have functionally been called "two hours."
But I digress. What the "how the audience understood" question boils down to is likely a combination of the text being "dumbed down" a bit for performance, a reliance on spectacle (costumes, sound effects, basic pyro), and memorable performances. Content would have mattered to many, but the commons could still appreciate the plays for other reasons. A scholar named Lukas Erne has an excellent book titled
Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist that gets into the high likelihood that Shakespeare
did view his plays as having literary merit. You don't write 3500-plus-line behemoths like
Hamlet,
Coriolanus, and
Richard III if you don't care about 1000 of those lines.
As to in-jokes, there are indeed many...and some that the audience would be aware of. I always find the Arden Shakespeare editions of the plays to be the best by a wide margin, as the critical apparatus is usually huge and informative, catching many such instances. Not all editors are created equal, of course, but the critical continuum of Shakespeare studies is impressive, and you can't turn a page without seeing at least
one footnote of interest (and often dozens).