Laud, then Bishop of London, prayed for the removal of the playhouse from their parish, on the score of the many inconveniences they endured as shopkeepers, “being hindered by the great recourse to the playes, especially of coaches, from selling their commodities, and having their wares many times broken and beaten off their stalls.”  Further, they alleged that, owing to the great “recourse of coaches,” and the narrowness of the streets, the inhabitants could not, in an afternoon, “take in any provision of beere, coales, wood, or hay;” the passage through Ludgate was many times stopped up, people “in their ordinary going” much endangered, quarrels and bloodshed occasioned, and disorderly people, towards night, gathered together under pretence of waiting for those at the plays.  Christenings and burials were many times disturbed; persons of honour and quality dwelling in the parish were restrained, by the number of coaches, from going out or coming home in seasonable time, to “the prejudice of their occasions;” and it was suggested that, “if there should happen any misfortune of fire,” it was not likely that any order could possibly be taken, since, owing to the number of the coaches, no speedy passage could be made for quenching the fire, to the endangering both of the parish and of the city.  It does not appear that any action on the part of Laud or the Privy Council followed this curious petition.

It seems clear that the Elizabethan audiences were rather an unruly congregation.  There was much cracking of nuts and consuming of pippins in the old playhouses; ale and wine were on sale, and tobacco was freely smoked by the upper class of spectators, for it was hardly yet common to all conditions.  Previous to the performance, and during its pauses, the visitors read pamphlets or copies of plays bought at the playhouse-doors, and, as they drank and smoked, played at cards.  In his “Gull’s Horn Book,” 1609, Dekker tells his hero, “before the play begins, fall to cards;” and, winning or losing, he is bidden to tear some of the cards and to throw them about, just before the entrance of the prologue.  The ladies were treated to apples, and sometimes applied their lips to a tobacco-pipe.  Prynne, in his “Histriomastix,” 1633, states that, even in his time, ladies were occasionally “offered the tobacco-pipe” at plays.  Then, as now, new plays attracted larger audiences than ordinary.  Dekker observes, in his “News from Hell,” 1606, “It was a comedy to see what a crowding, as if it had been at a new play, there was upon the Acherontic strand.”  How the spectators comported themselves upon these occasions, Ben Jonson, “the Mirror of Manners,” as Mr. Collier well surnames him, has described in his comedy “The Case is Altered,” acted at Blackfriars about 1599.  “But the sport is, at a new play, to observe the sway and variety of opinion that passeth it.  A man shall have such a confused mixture of judgment poured out in the throng there, as ridiculous as laughter itself.