---
title: "Why Shakespeare Drew Crowds"
author: GPT-6 Astra, Claude-5.5-Opus, Gemini-4 Argon, Claude-5.1-Fable, Gwern
description: "How much did Shakespeare's original audiences understand? Receipts, diaries, and performance history explain the popularity of difficult plays."
created: 2026-10-20
modified: 2026-10-20
status: draft
confidence: highly likely
css-extension: dropcaps-cheshire
...
Shakespeare's difficult plays attracted paying audiences that included apprentices and people unable to read.
Their popularity poses a problem for modern educated readers who need extensive notes to follow the same texts.
Box-office records, reprints, eyewitness recollections, and theatrical controversies reveal both commercial success and uneven comprehension.
The strongest evidence concerns what particular spectators followed, remembered, enjoyed, and rejected; it cannot yield an average percentage understood.
Substantial, selective understanding among attentive playgoers is very probable.
Contemporary language and culture, practiced acting, repeated information, and theatrical experience made the plays accessible, while comedy, music, spectacle, and sociability rewarded attention that fell short of complete interpretation.
The ticket bought the whole afternoon.
Footnotes make Shakespeare's popularity look improbable.
An educated reader opens _Hamlet_ or _Othello_ and finds the human predicament easier to follow than the sentences.
A son is called to avenge his murdered father; a husband is persuaded that his wife has betrayed him.
Yet a speech can demand repeated reading: an unfamiliar word sends the eye to a note, a compressed metaphor sends it back to the beginning, and a pun adds another meaning before the first is clear.
The annotations may explain the passage.
Now hear the play once, standing in a crowded London playhouse, without notes or an opportunity to stop the actor.
Around you are apprentices and people who cannot read.
They paid to be there.
Shakespeare's company needs them to come back.
How much did they understand?[^scope]
[^scope]: The evidence concerns chiefly London commercial theater during Shakespeare's working career, ≈1590--1614.
Court, private, university, and later performances are identified where they illuminate the comparison.
The last example after the 1642 theater closure is a satirical pamphlet of 1643; Restoration adaptations lie outside the question.
William Shakespeare lived from 1564 to 1616.
By the early 1590s he was an established London playwright; his last known plays, collaborations with John Fletcher, date to ≈1613--1614.
The evidence below follows his plays through that working career and into the decades after his death, when people continued performing, buying, and remembering them.
[Mowat & Werstine](https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/shakespeares-life-from-the-folger-shakespeare-editions/ "‘Shakespeare's Life’, Mowat & Werstine"); [Royal Shakespeare Company](https://www.rsc.org.uk/shakespeares-plays/histories-timeline/timeline "‘Timeline of Shakespeare's Plays’, Royal Shakespeare Company").
Historical distance explains part of the difficulty.
Words have changed meaning, pronunciation has altered, and familiar references now require footnotes.
But Shakespeare also compresses thoughts that remain difficult after the vocabulary is explained.
Did ordinary Elizabethans have more schooling or more practice listening to elaborate speech?
Did actors make the language intelligible, or perform shorter, simpler versions?
Did customers come for the jokes, fights, costumes, and music, tolerating the poetry between them?
Did censorship leave them few alternatives?
Or have we projected Shakespeare's later supremacy backward onto a less successful commercial career?
Traces of understandingA ticket purchase records a choice; a diary records a memory.
Neither supplies an audience-wide comprehension rate.
Box-office accounts, reprints, recollections, and complaints preserve different parts of the experience, and none supplies a representative audience survey.
The surviving witnesses are selected twice: first by their decision to attend, then by the circumstances that caused their reactions to be written down and preserved.
Educated men with notebooks are unusually visible.
Apprentices appear more readily when an employer or a magistrate has something to complain about.
Theater professionals leave defenses of their occupation, jokes about their customers, and explanations for productions that went wrong.
We can recover a range of experiences much more confidently than we can recover their proportions.
Andrew Gurr distinguishes the relatively firm reconstruction of material conditions from the reconstruction of spectators' minds.
[Gurr 2004](https://assets.cambridge.org/052183/5607/excerpt/0521835607_excerpt.htm "‘Playgoing in Shakespeare's London, Third Edition’, Gurr 2004").
Understanding who deceives whom, parsing a sentence, recognizing an allusion, and explaining a philosophical implication are different accomplishments.
Someone can follow a jealous husband's behavior without resolving every metaphor through which he expresses his jealousy.
Someone else can recognize a classical reference and still misconstrue the character who makes it.
David Crystal distinguishes difficult language from difficult thought: familiar words can carry a demanding argument, while unfamiliar words can acquire an approximate meaning from their surroundings.
[Crystal 2008](https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9781107299870_A23760704/preview-9781107299870_A23760704.pdf "‘“Think on My Words”: Exploring Shakespeare's Language’, Crystal 2008"), pp. 11--15.
An annotated edition accumulates explanations, parallels, ambiguities, and disagreements that no spectator could hold in mind simultaneously.
It makes the play look like an examination whose questions every original spectator must have answered.
But the ticket bought the whole afternoon.
The commercial requirement was enough pleasure to justify another ticket; exhaustive interpretation was optional.
Paying customersPhilip Henslowe's accounts record repeated performances of _harey vj_, usually identified with the collaborative play now called _1 Henry VI_, as well as performances of _Titus Andronicus_.
In 1592 Thomas Nashe described the dead English hero Talbot being revived onstage and moving "ten thousand spectators at least" to tears over successive performances.
Nashe's defense of the theater gives us patriotic advocacy rather than audited admissions, but the attraction he describes is specific: spectators grieving over enacted history.
[Henslowe 1592--1594](https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/henslowes-diary-including-first-recorded-performances-henry-vi-and-titus "‘Henslowe's Diary’, Henslowe 1592--1594"); [Nashe 1592](https://mason.gmu.edu/~rmatz/Nashe.html "‘Defense of Plays from Pierce Penniless’, Nashe 1592").
In 1604, _Hamlet_ could exemplify popular appeal.
The writer signing himself "An. Sc." compared an ideal prefatory letter to Shakespeare's mixture of comedy and tragedy: "Faith it should please all, like Prince Hamlet."
The comparison assumes that readers recognize _Hamlet_ as a crowd-pleaser.
Its ghost, madness, revenge, and jokes belonged to the same entertainment as its philosophical speeches.
[An. Sc. 1604](https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/anthony-scoloker-epistle-daiphantus-or-passions-love-1604 "‘Epistle to Daiphantus’, An. Sc. 1604").
Shakespeare's words sold on the page as well.
His plays began appearing in print in 1594, usually as small, separately published books called _quartos_.
About half had appeared by his death in 1616.
The famous **First Folio of 1623**, published 7 years after his death, was the first collected edition: 36 plays, of which 18 had never been printed before.
These included _Macbeth_, _Twelfth Night_, and _The Winter's Tale_.
A late first printing could thus preserve a play that audiences had enjoyed for years.
[Folger](https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeare-in-print/publishing-shakespeare/ "‘Publishing Shakespeare’, Folger"); [Shakespeare Birthplace Trust](https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/shakespedia/shakespeares-works/shakespeares-first-folio/ "‘Shakespeare's First Folio’, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust").
Lukas Erne counts 45 editions of Shakespeare's plays by 1616, the year of his death, against 23 for Thomas Heywood and 15 for Ben Jonson.
The count includes successive printings of the same play; each edition produced many individual copies.
Taking a longer window, Erne compares plays first published in 1583--1622: 17 of Shakespeare's 20 separately published titles were reprinted within 25 years, against fewer than half of professional plays overall.
This second measure follows demand after Shakespeare's death as well as during his lifetime.
Reprints measure book demand, a separate market that confirms sustained demand for the words themselves.
[Erne 2009](https://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:14882 "‘Shakespeare's Popularity in Print’, Erne 2009").
The demand followed a different ranking from modern prestige.
_Pericles_, written collaboratively with George Wilkins, reached 6 separate editions by 1635, nearly 2 decades after Shakespeare's death.
The anonymous romance _Mucedorus_, performed by Shakespeare's company, was even more frequently reprinted.
A repertory company offered a changing selection of entertainments, and customers bought performances by its actors rather than subscriptions to the collected works of a single author.
[Holmes 2022](https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/pericles-first-edition-0 "‘Pericles, First Edition’, Holmes 2022"); [Kirwan 2018](https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/node/619 "‘Mucedorus, Third Edition’, Kirwan 2018").
After the Essex rebellion in 1601, the actor Augustine Phillips explained that the company had initially resisted a request to revive an old play about Richard II's deposition and death, probably Shakespeare's.
They expected it to attract little attendance and agreed after being promised an additional 40 shillings.
Phillips was explaining the players' conduct to investigators: the extra payment made an otherwise unpromising revival worth staging.
[Phillips 1601](https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/node/341 "‘Examination of Augustine Phillips’, Phillips 1601").
Shakespeare had hits, a valuable name, and a durable repertory presence.
His rank among all contemporary dramatists remains unknown: performance records survive too unevenly for the comparison.
Commercial success is easier to establish than the supremacy familiar to us from the modern canon.
[Smith 2024](https://www.folger.edu/blogs/shakespeare-and-beyond/how-popular-was-shakespeare-in-his-day/ "‘How Popular Was Shakespeare in His Day?’, Smith 2024").
CompetitionIn July 1591 the Privy Council restricted Thursday performances because plays were damaging the bearbaiting business.
The authorities were trying to protect the bears' box office from the actors.
[Privy Council 1591](https://ereed.org/records/rosep-ridm91625448/ "‘Letter to the Lord Mayor and Justices of Middlesex and Surrey’, Privy Council 1591").
Henslowe and Edward Alleyn invested in animal baiting as well as drama.
The Hope's 1613 building contract provided for a venue that could accommodate both, with a removable stage.
Londoners could also choose other companies' plays, taverns, gambling, music, dancing, fairs, and public combat.
Theater shared customers, personnel, buildings, and neighborhoods with other pleasures.
[REED](https://ereed.org/collections/bghop/entertainment/ "‘Bear Gardens/Hope Playhouse: History of Entertainment’, REED"); [Kesson 2020](https://beforeshakespeare.com/2020/01/31/ruff-play-with-shakespeare-combat-gender-and-entertainment/ "‘Ruff Play with Shakespeare’, Kesson 2020").
Regulation made this market precarious.
Plays were licensed and censored; official hostility, disorder, and plague could interrupt performances.
Enforcement varied: restrictions issued in 1600 were followed in 1601 by complaints that daily playing continued in multiple places.
Royal patronage mattered in this environment because it brought authorization, protection, prestige, and engagements.
James I's 1603 patent explicitly authorized Shakespeare and his fellows to perform publicly and for royal pleasure.
[Privy Council 1600](https://ereed.org/records/swanp-rid9/ "‘Order Regarding the Restriction of Playhouses’, Privy Council 1600"); [Privy Council 1601](https://ereed.org/records/rosep-ridm91581784/ "‘Letters to the Justices and Lord Mayor’, Privy Council 1601"); [James I 1603](https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/enrollment-letters-patent-issued-under-signet-and-privy-seals-authorizing-kings "‘Letters Patent Authorizing the King's Men’, James I 1603").
Court patronage also paid cash.
An account names Shakespeare, William Kempe, and Richard Burbage in connection with £20 paid for 2 performances at court during Christmas 1594.
Public admission was a major source of income within a business that also served court and other patrons.
A company serving several constituencies could sustain plays with different attractions.
[Exchequer 1595](https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/exchequer-pipe-office-declared-accounts-listing-shakespeare-leading-player-lord "‘Declared Accounts Listing Shakespeare as a Leading Player’, Exchequer 1595"); [Dutton 2016](https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9780191083310_A30390130/preview-9780191083310_A30390130.pdf "‘Shakespeare, Court Dramatist’, Dutton 2016"), pp. 13--14.
The penny audienceThe Swiss visitor Thomas Platter described a simple progression in 1599: a penny to stand, another penny to sit, and a further penny for greater comfort and visibility.
His account also notices refreshments, attractive clothing, and the pleasure of being seen.
The modern Globe's reconstruction estimates roughly 10,000--20,000 theater visits a week across London around 1600---a substantial market, although visits include repeat customers and do not tell us how many different Londoners attended.
[Platter 1599](https://theatregoing.wordpress.com/2017/01/15/thomas-platters-travels-in-england/ "‘Thomas Platter's Travels in England’, Platter 1599"); [Shakespeare's Globe](https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/discover/shakespeares-world/audiences/ "‘Audiences’, Shakespeare's Globe").
Cheap admission still required leisure.
As Ann Jennalie Cook emphasized, a penny did not compensate a worker for an afternoon away from work.[^audience-history]
Yet artisans and apprentices appear in the evidence alongside gentlemen, law students, prosperous citizens, servants, and women of different social positions.
London also had a substantial literate working population.
[Clegg 2017](https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9781108122177_A30260683/preview-9781108122177_A30260683.pdf "‘Shakespeare's Reading Audiences’, Clegg 2017"), pp. 4--7.
[^audience-history]: Alfred Harbage emphasized a popular audience; Cook emphasized the money and leisure required to attend; Gurr reconstructed a more heterogeneous public.
The debate changes the weight assigned to different social groups without yielding a census of the Globe yard.
In November 1604, Bridewell recorded that Edward Nightingale, an inmate apprenticed to its hempmaster, had abandoned a working afternoon to attend a play.
The case also involved drunkenness and an assault on his master, which helps explain why this particular apprentice became visible to posterity.
We know why Nightingale left work; we do not know what he saw or understood.
[Salkeld 2005](https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/eth/article/download/7028/4022/11402 "‘New Allusions to London 'Shewes' and Playhouses, 1575--1605’, Salkeld 2005").
A **groundling** bought standing room in the yard; the label tells us the ticket, not the education.
Reading, writing, and listening were distinct skills.
Even the ability to sign a name, a common historical proxy for literacy, cannot be converted into a measure of comprehension.[^literacy]
[^literacy]: Mark Hailwood's reassessment shows how much the literate/illiterate division conceals, including the uncertain relation between signing and reading.
His sample concerns rural southwest England, not London playgoers; the methodological problem applies to both.
[Hailwood 2023](https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/340232923/Full_text_PDF_final_published_version_.pdf "‘Rethinking Literacy in Rural England, 1550--1700’, Hailwood 2023").
Playgoing supplied an education of its own.
A regular playgoer could learn the meaning of an aside, recognize a disguise that other characters failed to recognize, anticipate a comic reversal, or remember a performer's characteristic manner.
A regular customer acquired theatrical competence as well as selecting an entertainment he enjoyed.
A reluctant first-time reader starts without that familiarity.
What they rememberedIn 1611 the astrologer and healer Simon Forman recorded several Shakespeare performances.
His notes follow complex causal sequences: Leontes' jealousy, an attempted poisoning, an abandoned child's eventual recovery, and the deceptions surrounding supposed adultery in _Cymbeline_.
He also makes mistakes: in _Macbeth_, he assigns Macbeth a title that belongs to Malcolm in the surviving text.
His _Winter's Tale_ account leaves out the climax, in which Hermione appears to come to life from a statue, but remembers the swindler Autolycus in detail, ending:
> Beware of trusting feigned beggars or fawning felons.
Forman was a highly literate man, with some grammar-school and university education, writing for practical lessons in conduct.
His omissions therefore tell us about the notebook's priorities more securely than about everything he noticed in the theater.
His notebook preserves substantial understanding, imperfect recall, and practical advice about swindlers.
[Forman 1611](https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/formans-account-seeing-plays-globe-macbeth-cymbeline-winters-tale "‘Book of Plays’, Forman 1611").
The law student John Manningham, watching _Twelfth Night_ at Middle Temple in 1602, noticed similarities to earlier comedy, including Plautus, and delighted in the forged letter that persuaded Malvolio his mistress loved him.
His account remembers the instructions governing the steward's smiling, clothing, and behavior.
The man who recognized Plautus also enjoyed Malvolio's humiliation.
[Manningham 1602](https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/john-manninghams-diary-earliest-mention-twelfth-night-and-shakespeare-anecdote "‘Diary: Twelfth Night’, Manningham 1602").
Henry Jackson's account of _Othello_ at Oxford in 1610 describes speech and bodily acting working together to produce tears, especially around Desdemona's death.
He also records a difference in judgment: religious mockery in Jonson's _The Alchemist_ offended him while other spectators applauded.
[Jackson 1610](https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/excerpts-henry-jacksons-letter-recording-performance-othello-oxford "‘Letter Recording a Performance of Othello at Oxford’, Jackson 1610").
Forman, Manningham, and Jackson were unusually literate spectators.
Their reactions show what understanding looked like, while leaving the rest of the yard less visible.
Enthusiasm could also become apprenticeship: Richard Norwood recalled attending the Fortune in 1612 and becoming interested enough to start writing his own play.
His later religious autobiography casts this attraction as temptation; it preserves a consumer learning to imitate what he enjoyed.
[Lost Plays Database](https://lostplays.folger.edu/Unfinished_play_by_Richard_Norwood "‘Unfinished Play by Richard Norwood’, Lost Plays Database").
Meaning in performanceAn actor supplies information that a printed sentence leaves implicit.
Tone can make an apparent compliment threatening.
A pause can separate an aside from words intended for another character.
A glance can identify the target of an insult.
A visible object can establish what a pronoun refers to, while another actor's reaction makes the force of a remark clear.
The audience receives these signals together.
The solitary reader must reconstruct many of them from dialogue and sparse directions, as the Folger language guides emphasize.
[Mowat & Werstine](https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/hamlet/reading-shakespeares-language-hamlet/ "‘Reading Shakespeare's Language: Hamlet’, Mowat & Werstine").
Performance has its own cost: the listener cannot pause indefinitely over a difficult clause.
But dramatic information often arrives more than once and through more than one channel.
A plan is explained, attempted, witnessed, and reported.
An audience may know a deception before its victim does.
An actor can show the emotional result of words whose full implications have passed too quickly.
Theater's conventions of exposition and repetition allow spectators to recover information as the event proceeds.
[Lopez 2003](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/theatrical-convention-and-audience-response-in-early-modern-drama/290870DA65ADA3ED0D6BCA643E3DD2D6/listing "‘Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama’, Lopez 2003").
Sometimes the recovery occurs within a few words.
After murdering Duncan, Macbeth looks at his bloody hands and imagines them turning the ocean red:
...this my hand will rather \
The multitudinous seas incarnadine, \
Making the green one red.
_Incarnadine_ is immediately glossed in ordinary words.
The blood, the hands, the fear, and the restatement reinforce one another.
A spectator who cannot define the verb can still apprehend the image; a spectator who knows the verb can enjoy the shift in register as well.
*Missing a word need not mean losing the scene.*
[Shakespeare, _Macbeth_ 2.2](https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/macbeth/read/2/2/ "‘Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 2’, William Shakespeare").
Contemporary listeners already knew much of what fills a modern edition's notes.
An everyday idiom, a familiar insult, a biblical phrase, a commercial practice, or a popular tune could carry an association without explanation.
Ballads circulated across print, singing, and conversation; knowing a story or phrase did not require possessing its source in a private library.
[Dankert 2021](https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/three-chords-and-the-truth/ "‘Three Chords and the Truth’, Dankert 2021"); [Clegg 2017](https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9781108122177_A30260683/preview-9781108122177_A30260683.pdf "‘Shakespeare's Reading Audiences’, Clegg 2017"), pp. 3--4.
Unequal knowledge could itself become the joke.
In the Latin lesson in _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, the school exercise gives Mistress Quickly opportunities for obscene mishearing.
People with Latin can recognize the lesson and the errors; others can enjoy the misinterpretations and the exchanges they provoke.
The same scene rewards knowing Latin, hearing obscenity, and recognizing someone else's misunderstanding.
[Shakespeare, _Merry Wives_ 4.1](https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/the-merry-wives-of-windsor/read/4/1/ "‘The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 4, Scene 1’, William Shakespeare").
Reconstructed pronunciation recovers specific jokes.
David and Ben Crystal demonstrate the audible relation between _hour_ and _whore_, which modern pronunciation obscures.
A lost sound can turn apparent philosophical reflection into bawdry.[^pronunciation]
[Crystal & Crystal 2014](https://www.folger.edu/podcasts/shakespeare-unlimited/original-pronunciation/ "‘Pronouncing English as Shakespeare Did’, Crystal & Crystal 2014").
[^pronunciation]: Original pronunciation is an evidence-based approximation.
The Great Vowel Shift had already begun well before Shakespeare; it was not one change occurring entirely between his audiences and ours.
[Harvard's Chaucer Website](https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/great-vowel-shift "‘The Great Vowel Shift’, Harvard's Chaucer Website").
Even novel expressions can be intelligible on first hearing.
Jonathan Hope gives examples of English building unfamiliar forms out of familiar materials: a compound such as _bed-swerver_, a prefix in _unaccommodated_, or the conversion of a noun into a verb.
One need not have encountered a formation in a dictionary to infer something of its meaning.
Recognizing familiar parts in an unexpected combination supplies both a clue and a pleasure.
[Hope 2010](https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/18818/6/strathprints018818.pdf "‘Language’, Hope 2010"), preprint, pp. 2--4.
Sermons gave Londoners opportunities to practice following elaborate speech.
Some hearers took notes, remembered arguments, and discussed what they heard.
Arnold Hunt's history of preaching takes this competence seriously while also describing conversation, uneven audibility, and failures of attention.
This experience probably helped some playgoers follow a sustained argument.
[Hunt 2010](https://assets.cambridge.org/97805218/96764/excerpt/9780521896764_excerpt.pdf "‘The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590--1640’, Hunt 2010"), introduction.
Difficult then, tooRobert Cawdrey's _Table Alphabeticall_ of 1604 explained difficult English words encountered in reading and hearing.
Its preface complained about affected learned language, including speakers whose English was so artificial that their own mothers would not understand them.
English could defeat an English listener while Shakespeare's English was still contemporary.
[Cawdrey 1604](https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/iemls/work/etexts/caw1604w_removed.htm "‘A Table Alphabeticall’, Cawdrey 1604"), preliminary matter.
Shakespeare made differences in theatrical taste part of the entertainment.
Hamlet dismisses the groundlings as capable of "nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise", and remembers a favorite play as "caviary to the general"---too refined for common taste.
Yet when a player delivers a speech about the fall of Troy, it is the courtier Polonius who interrupts: "This is too long."
Hamlet replies that he wants "a jig or a tale of bawdry".
The scene puts an enthusiastic, learned spectator beside an impatient one, both high-ranking.
The audience could recognize the dispute, perhaps enjoying the prince's fastidiousness as well as the counselor's impatience.
[Shakespeare, _Hamlet_ 2.2](https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/hamlet/read/2/2/ "‘Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2’, William Shakespeare"); [_Hamlet_ 3.2](https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/hamlet/read/3/2/ "‘Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2’, William Shakespeare").
Some passages resist all these aids.
In _The Winter's Tale_, the jealous Leontes says: "Affection, thy intention stabs the center."
The words look familiar; their relationship does not.
The Folger editors still describe the principal terms as disputed.
A dictionary and 4 centuries of commentary have not made the sentence easy.
[Mowat & Werstine](https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/the-winters-tale/reading-shakespeares-language-the-winters-tale/ "‘Reading Shakespeare's Language: The Winter's Tale’, Mowat & Werstine").
Historical knowledge can restore meanings and associations, but the line also compresses the relations among its ideas.
Frank Kermode made Shakespeare's increasing linguistic difficulty a central critical problem, particularly in the plays around and after 1600.
The difficulty can arise from the thought being attempted and from the character's manner of thinking, as well as from vocabulary.
[Kermode 2000](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374527747/shakespeareslanguage/ "‘Shakespeare's Language’, Kermode 2000").
Leontes' verbal instability plausibly helps the audience recognize a mind in the grip of jealousy.
An actor can communicate that disturbance without making every clause paraphrasable.[^leontes]
The audience's uncertainty about what he means can become part of its understanding of what is happening to him.
[^leontes]: David Laird challenges Stephen Orgel's suggestion that some passages in _The Winter's Tale_ communicated confusion to their first audiences much as they do now.
Stephen Greenblatt asks whether finding a coherent interpretation would disprove a deliberately tortured effect; Laird distinguishes that effect from abandoning coherent interpretation.
The disagreement concerns possible dramatic meanings, not recovered measurements of audience comprehension.
[Laird 1994--1995](https://www.connotations.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/laird00412.pdf "‘Competing Discourses in The Winter's Tale’, Laird 1994–1995"); [Greenblatt & Laird 1995--1996](https://www.connotations.de/article/stephen-greenblatt-and-david-laird-competing-discourses-in-the-winters-tale-two-letters/ "‘“Competing Discourses in The Winter's Tale”: Two Letters’, Greenblatt & Laird 1995–1996").
An audience can hear the confidence of a boast, the threat in a ceremonious greeting, or the mounting panic in an elaborate speech.
A striking phrase can be remembered before its implications are worked out.
Eloquence can impress, unsettle, or amuse through its excess.
After the 1642 theater closure, a satirical pamphlet imagined poets charming audiences "into admiration, though not into understanding".
[Anonymous 1643](https://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/actors1.html "‘The Actors Remonstrance’, Anonymous 1643").
Which Shakespeare?The printed texts preserve different versions and need not reproduce a particular performance.
_Hamlet_ survives in a short first quarto (1603), a much longer second quarto (1604--1605), and a Folio version (1623) that both adds to and subtracts from the second quarto.
The first 2 appeared during Shakespeare's lifetime; the third is posthumous.
A modern edition combining the longer witnesses reproduces neither early text exactly.
[Mowat & Werstine](https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/hamlet/an-introduction-to-this-text/ "‘An Introduction to This Text: Hamlet’, Mowat & Werstine").
Companies probably cut and revised long plays, but the surviving differences leave several histories possible.[^stage-texts]
[^stage-texts]: Lukas Erne argues for abridged performances alongside expansive reading texts; Richard Dutton emphasizes court performance and revision.
Terri Bourus argues that the short first _Hamlet_ quarto preserves an earlier play, rather than simply a cut-down version of the longer text.
The competing accounts leave the Globe's performed text uncertain.
[Erne 2013](https://assets.cambridge.org/97811070/29651/frontmatter/9781107029651_frontmatter.pdf "‘Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, Second Edition’, Erne 2013"), preface; [Dutton 2016](https://academic.oup.com/book/12650 "‘Shakespeare, Court Dramatist’, Dutton 2016"); [Bourus 2022](https://www.berghahnbooks.com/downloads/intros/BourusShakespeare_intro.pdf "‘Introduction: Shakespeare and the First Hamlet’, Bourus 2022").
The famous 2-hour promise is no stopwatch.
Tiffany Stern points out that substantially different-length versions of _Romeo and Juliet_ both promise 2 hours, while other contemporary descriptions allow longer performances.
The promise could reassure an audience without measuring the afternoon.
Abridgment probably reduced some demands on spectators, but difficult language survives in short plays as well as long ones.
[Stern 2015](https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/1566/01_Stern_1817.pdf "‘Time for Shakespeare: Hourglasses, Sundials, Clocks, and Early Modern Theatre’, Stern 2015"), pp. 1--3.
The whole afternoonCostumes, swordplay, music, dancing, comic business, frightening appearances, and violent action made the event sensuous and varied.
The relatively sparse scenery of the open stage coexisted with vivid bodies, clothes, props, and effects.
Speech and spectacle often cooperated: a visible bloody hand could make a metaphor more powerful, while words made an otherwise simple object significant.
[Folger](https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/shakespeares-theater-from-the-folger-shakespeare-editions/ "‘Shakespeare's Theater’, Folger").
Stern's research describes ballads, jigs, and improvised musical exchanges with spectators as typical concluding entertainments before 1612, with the practice continuing at some theaters afterward.
The deaths could be followed by dancing.
Some patrons were especially attracted to the concluding entertainment.
Others enjoyed both the tragedy and the afterpiece.
[Stern 2022](https://pure-oai.bham.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/184821896/cgac023.pdf "‘Ballads and Product Placement in the Time of Shakespeare’, Stern 2022").
People ate, talked, displayed themselves, noticed one another, and attended with varying intensity.
Callan Davies's work on selective participation shows why remembered fragments can matter independently of a complete plot.
An afternoon might be valuable for a favorite performer, an astonishing passage, a comic routine, or an encounter with friends.
[Davies 2018](https://beforeshakespeare.com/2018/04/06/losing-the-plot-audiences-scraps-of-performance-and-selective-participation/ "‘Losing the Plot: Audiences, Scraps of Performance, and Selective Participation’, Davies 2018").
The right to hissJonson's _Sejanus_ encountered substantial hostility at the Globe.
Francis Osborne later remembered hissing it as a boy and coming to admire it afterward.
The surviving accounts allow several explanations for its troubled reception, including learned verbosity and politically contentious interpretation.
[Cain](https://hcmc.uvic.ca/eol/cambridge/benjonson/essays/stage_history_Sejanus/ "‘Sejanus His Fall: Stage History’, Cain").
Francis Beaumont's _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_ made theatrical taste its subject.
Its fictional grocer and his wife interrupt a performance to demand a heroic part for their apprentice.
The joke asks an audience to understand the theatrical preferences being parodied.
When Walter Burre published the play in 1613, he explained its earlier rejection as a failure to recognize its irony.
Burre's explanation was publicity for a rejected play, but it identifies a failure more specific than mere boredom: in his account, the audience had missed the joke.
[Burre 1613](https://emed.folger.edu/sites/default/files/folger_encodings/pdf/EMED-KBP-reg-3.pdf "‘Epistle to The Knight of the Burning Pestle’, Burre 1613"), sigs. A2r--A2v.
Successful plays sustained attention through changing attractions.
A clear quarrel could lead into a difficult speech; an exchange of jokes could establish relationships needed for later tragedy; a recognizable desire could carry a spectator through an unfamiliar analogy.
The same person could enjoy an insult, admire its phrasing, miss an allusion, and understand its consequences.
Formal education would affect some of those experiences, theatrical practice others, and attention all of them.
Coming backLeonard Digges's praise, written before his death in 1635 and published in 1640, describes the attraction of the _Henry IV_ characters:
let but Falstaff come, \
Hal, Poins, the rest you scarce shall have a roome \
All is so pester'd.
Digges's partisan praise describes attachment to characters whom spectators wanted to meet again.
Falstaff's personality comes through his words, spoken by an actor: language, character, and performance are parts of the same attraction.
[Gaby 2019](https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/1H4_CriticalSurvey/index.html "‘Henry IV, Part 1: Critical Reception’, Gaby 2019").
Difficulty can contribute to that attraction.
A speech partly understood can still make its speaker excessive, unpredictable, or worth remembering.
It can leave the impression of a mind that exceeds our grasp.
Return to the apprentice listening to _Hamlet_ or _Othello_.
Some parts of the play would probably have been easier for him than for a modern educated reader: contemporary idioms, familiar situations, recognizable performance conventions, and references circulating through ordinary life.
Some parts would have depended on his particular education and experience.
Some might have remained obscure even if he listened carefully.
The actor, the action, and later dialogue could often help him recover the thread.
At other moments he might enjoy the sound, watch another performer, laugh at a joke, or wait for something that interested him more.
Substantial, selective understanding among many attentive playgoers is very probable; the degree varied between people, plays, and moments.
Recollections show spectators making sense of intricate actions; complaints and difficult passages show where comprehension could fail.
Customers had alternatives, exercised judgment, and returned.
Their choices establish the value of the experience; their scattered recollections show something of how they made sense of it.
Shakespeare's colleagues recommended another encounter.
In the 1623 First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell advised their readers:
> Read him, therefore; and again, and again.
Friends could help readers find their way, and the transaction remained commercial: "Do so, but buy it first".
[Heminges & Condell 1623](https://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/firstfolio.html "‘To the Great Variety of Readers’, Heminges & Condell 1623").
A paying audience could encounter more than it immediately understood and still have good reason to return.
The pleasure could be immediate even when the understanding remained unfinished.