How did people first react when they seen Shakespeare's first play?

Answer 1

We don't know, because:

1. We don't know which of Shakespeare's plays was his first.
2. We don't know when most of his plays were performed for the first time.
3. We aren't even sure which theatrical companies performed his plays before 1594.
4. We do not know where any of his plays were performed before 1594.
5. We can only guess at how the audience reacted to any of his plays. There were no theatre critics back then. Nobody had a theatre blog where they talked about which plays they liked or didn't like. Some people (Thomas Platter, Simon Forman, John Manningham) wrote in their diaries that they had attended one of Shakespeare's plays, but they were more interested in describing what went on in the plays than how the audience liked them. The best way of knowing whether a play was popular was whether booksellers thought it would be commercially viable to publish a copy of the script.