October 2, 2012 | Theatre,

The Life & Times of a Groundling

By Corrie Glanville

In nearly every depiction of Elizabethan England from Shakespeare in Love to the more recent film Anonymous, the audience of the famed Globe Theatre has been portrayed as a brawling, heaving, unwashed rabble who came to be known as “groundlings.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a groundling is “a frequenter of the ‘ground’ or pit of a theatre; hence, a spectator (reader, etc.) of average or inferior tastes, an uncritical or unrefined person.”

The ‘pit’ refers to the open air yard of the Globe Theatre, built in 1599, where one could pay a penny to stand and watch the show; a seat cost two pennies, and the best seats, three pennies. The other popular open air playhouse of the time was The Rose Theatre and on an average day, 2,000 to 3,000 people attended the Rose and The Globe to see the latest plays.

But the theatres were not the only ones making money off the groundlings; the Globe was surrounded by lively market stalls selling food, drink and various goods. (No, Broadway theatre lobbies were not the first ones to hawk merchandise.) Young people especially enjoyed the bustling atmosphere, which invariably provoked grumbling that apprentices were avoiding work to go to the Globe. Above the theatre was a flag pole that would often employ color-coded advertising; a black flag would denote tragedy, a white one meant comedy and a red one, a history. When the play was about to begin, a trumpet would call the audience to find their places.

Despite their enthusiasm for the action on stage, the groundlings had an unfortunate reputation for being somewhat smelly. Satirist and playwright John Marston, a contemporary of Shakespeare, commented on the odor in the pit when he came too close: “choked with the stench of garlic … pasted to the balmy jacket of a beer- brewer.”  Even Hamlet references the antics of the groundlings when he is instructing the Players:

O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious
periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to
very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who
for the most part are capable of nothing but
inexplicable dumbshows and noise.
(Hamlet, 3.2)

However, while there is a popular notion of the pit being host to gambling, fighting, drinking and even prostitution, other scholars have argued that this is a colorful exaggeration. In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare,  John H. Astington makes the case that while thieves and prostitutes did frequent the Globe, they did not attend with as much regularity as has been suggested. And the supposition that the Globe played to an entirely mixed audience is less likely since the very poor had no money to pay even a penny for a ticket and the very rich would expect the players to come to them.

As for the rowdy behavior of the groundlings, Astington argues that while the audience’s approval or disapproval would have been more openly expressed than it is now, one should not view the groundlings as mere caricatures. The fact is that anyone who was willing to pay an entire day’s wages to attend a play at the Globe took their theatre seriously.

Likewise, Shakespeare was astute enough to meet the demands of his audience, those standing in the pit as well as those in the better seats, in order to compete with rival acting companies.  It is testimony to the enthusiasm of the groundlings that Shakespeare’s plays continued to be performed after his death and survived the Puritan ban of all theatre in 1642.

Nowadays, the pit in the new Globe, rebuilt in 1996, is a bit more comfortable with no garbage or gambling, but one can still experience the thrill of being a groundling while watching the very same Shakespeare plays that have entertained audiences for over 400 years.