ABSTRACT

In the film Shakespeare in Love (1998), an early modern audience watches a performance of Romeo and Juliet. At the tragic climax of this inset performance, almost all of the spectators – men, women, even the antitheatrical preacher who has been swept into the theatre by mistake – are openly in tears. Just as the previous chapter considered audience laughter, so this chapter poses an apparently narrow and straightforward question: is this scene of Shakespeare in Love historically accurate? Is it true that audience members wept in the early modern theatre, and can we say anything about which members did so, to what extent, how often, and under what circumstances?