Shakespeare's dramas and a whisper

[Tom]

Hi

I want to ask a lot of questions with this post, but would try to be patient and ask one by one.

How did Shakespeare cater to such a large number of audience at that time without any electricity? If some character had to whisper, how did they? I mean, how did the audience hear them or see their facial expressions, which is sine qua non of dialogues delivery.

Tom

P.S. Should it be see or saw? Could you please tell me the number of the audience at that time?

[Conchita]

No microphones and a noisy audience at that!

http://shakespeare.about.com/blgroundlings.htm

The Globe Theatre could hold from 1,500 to 3,000 people (including the outdoors audience). “Because conversations were going on and food and drink were being consumed, the audience were obviously not always attending to what was happening on-stage. The power of an actor would be shown by his ability to command the attention of the audience.” http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/asguru/english/08shakespeare/42theatre/shaketheatre10.shtml

(Except for the food and drink, this reminds me of some of my younger classes!)

Actors didn’t really whisper – they did (and still do nowadays) stage whispers, which means they spoke in a deliberately loud voice, so as to be heard by the audience, while the other actor, or rather, their character, was not supposed to hear anything (something that used to puzzle me as a little girl!).

PS: ‘See’ is right in your sentence. Tom, since ‘audience’ is a singular (group) noun, instead of ‘a large number of audience’, it should be ‘a large audience’, and, instead of ‘the number of the audience’, you can say ‘the number of people in the audience’.