ABSTRACT
It may be for all we know true that the basic mentality of the Elizabethan and early Stuart audiences is not essentially different from that of the majority audiences of today, and that in consequence we do not need to look very deeply into their composition. It is the knowing even that much which is difficult. Of course the returns on the labour of summarising and generalising about such intangibles are likely to be small. There was on average over that seventy years or so of London commercial theatre as many as a million visits to the playhouse a year. Any generalisation covering that number would have to be stretched thinly. 1
