British accent please
Welcome to Shakespeare'sGlobe theatre. You've chosen to listen to this audioguide to discover this incredible building. You will learn about theatre in Shakespeare's time, and as you will see, it was pretty different from contemporary theatre.
For a long time, theatre was considered as a vulgar form of entertainment, much less respectable than reading for example, because only the nobility could read.Most people didn't go to school, so they didn't learn to read and obviously, cinema and TV didn't exist. So everyone watched plays.
At the beginning, theatre was itinerant, which means that theatrical troupes went from village to village and performed in the street, in front of a small audience. But watching plays became very popular during Queen Elizabeth's reign: around 20,000 people a week were watching plays in London.
So they didn't have a choice, they had to build fixed theatres, like the Globe theatre in London.
