Sir William Davenant, the Court Masque, and the English Seventeen ...

The Globe was a wooden, unroofed, outdoor structure on the South Bank in the form of an amphitheatre. A platform, with various names including, “proscenium” or “scene” or “forestage” and backed by a tiring house facade with entrance doors, projected into the auditorium. The theatre held around 3,000 people, some of whom, the groundlings, paid the least and stood around the three sides of the platform; others paid more to sit in one of the three galleries. There were other outdoor theatres: the Rose and the Hope of a similar design, and the Fortune and the Red Bull, both of which are thought to have been rectangular. They were public in that anyone who had the entrance fee could attend.

The so-called private theatres were indoors, usually in converted halls and were consequently much smaller, holding, it is thought, around 500 spectators. The term arose because the Blackfriars theatre was called a private theatre on the title pages of the plays produced there, but this was a hangover from the time when it had been run for a children’s company. These indoor theatres were also theoretically open to all but charged more and attracted a wealthier audience than the open-air theatres and were patronised by many at court.³⁴ The auditorium at the Blackfriars consisted of a pit with benches facing the stage front, three galleries, divided into boxes, round the walls. The whole audience was seated. They could also pay to sit on stools on the stage itself. Like the outdoor stage, the Blackfriars had entrance doors at the rear of the stage and seem to have had some kind of balcony above these, where the musicians sat. Records from diaries and account books show that performances took place in the afternoon and the evening, but both would have been by candlelight, whereas the outdoor theatre performed in the daytime by natural light.

While the King’s Men was a commercial company and presented revivals of popular plays by professional dramatists like Shakespeare, Chapman, and Dekker, as well as new works by Jonson, Massinger, and Brome, they also showed many written by gentlemen from that audience like Davenant who felt they had a literary bent and were in favour with the king or queen. Carlell, Cavendish, and Suckling were other amateurs whose plays were shown by the King’s Men.