Free The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England by Ian Mortimer Page B

experience, you will find many people chatting away during the performance. Some speeches, however, do command universal attention and silence. At other points the report of a cannon or the sound of rolling thunder from above will make you jump. The latter effect is made by rolling cannonballs around the gallery roof.
    As you sit there watching a performance of a Shakespeare, Jonson or Marlowe play, the crowd will fade into the background. Instead you will be struck by the diction. There are words and phrases that you will not find funny, but which will make the crowd roar with laughter. Your familiarity with the meanings of Shakespeare’s words will rise and fall as you see and hear the actors’ deliveries and notice the audience’s reaction. That is the strange music of being so familiar with something that is not of your own time. What you are listening to in that auditorium is the genuine voice, something of which you have heard only distant echoes. Not every actor is perfect in his delivery – Shakespeare himself makes that quite clear in his Hamlet – but what you are hearing is the voice of the men for whom Shakespeare wrote his greatest speeches. Modern thespians will follow the rhythms or the meanings of these words, but even the most brilliant will not always be able to follow both rhythm and meaning at once. If they follow the pattern of the verse they risk confusing the audience, who are less familiar with the sense of the words; if they pause to emphasise the meanings, they lose the rhythm of the verse. Here, on the Elizabethan stage, you have a harmony of performance and understanding that will never again quite be matched in respect of any of these great writers.
    It has been a long time in development, but Elizabeth’s reign sees the advent of a dramatic culture which has meaning for us in the modern world. Unlike their predecessors, the late Elizabethan playwrights are keen to explore the human condition. At the same time they have an awareness of the changing world that sets them wholly apart from the Middle Ages. Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson knowfull well how novel their art is. Not for them the time-worn traditions of miracle plays, or the humility of writing only to please the wealthy. A great cultural wave is breaking here, on the Bankside shore of a Brave New World, sending up the spume of Marlowe’s vitriolic atheism and Shakespeare’s poetic and philosophical meditations amid the spray of madrigals and airs, scientific and geographic discoveries, a sense of history and Renaissance ideas. At a time of great discoveries, these wordsmiths are the spokesmen for the mass of newly educated townsmen who have never really known before what it is to have a voice. And Shakespeare above all others meets the challenge of the age by holding up a mirror to mankind and showing people what they really are – and not what they think they are in the eyes of God. This is something truly original and one of the reasons the rabble in the theatre yard does fall quiet, and strains to hear the words of the great soliloquies and speeches; and, in so doing, becomes a little more like us.

Envoi
    In Peter Erondell’s dialogue book, The French Garden , a young girl listens to a caged bird singing. ‘I wish to God I had one of them,’ she exclaims. Her teacher replies: ‘What, Mistress, would you be so cruel as to deprive him of his liberty? O dear liberty! God grant me always the keys of the fields: I would like it better than to be in bondage in the fairest wainscoted or tapestried chamber.’ 1 It is a strikingly sympathetic and modern outlook – so different from the attitudes of the keepers of the cockpit birds, bloodied for a bet, and the bears licking their paws in cages in Southwark. The complete contrast suggests that society is at odds with itself, riddled with inconsistencies, full of both cruelty and sympathy. But as you struggle to make sense of it you realise that, not only can you not reconcile such