What was the lifestyle like for actors in Shakespeare's time?

Answer 1

They would travel alot

i bet ur in yr9 at kcahs.... ive been looking for this answer for ages

and on their travels they would make up lines and bore friends, dress in drag, trash inns, drink heavily,

Answer 2

This is like asking "What is the lifestyle of actors today?" The most famous actors are rich and comfortable, but most of them are not rich and famous and are waiting tables and doing the occasional dinner theatre hoping for a break to come along.

Same thing back then. If you were Ned Alleyn, or Richard Burbage, or William Shakespeare, you could live comfortably and become quite well-to-do, as both Shakespeare and Alleyn did (Burbage was unfortunately not as successful a money manager, but did not want for anything). It was another story altogether if you wanted to be an actor but could not get into the big London companies: The Admiral's, The Lord Chamberlain's and Worcester's. Then you would join a lesser company (like the Earl of Oxford's) and go on tour or play the innyard theatres, barely making enough to survive. If you were not able to get into a company sponsored by a nobleman, things were even worse: always at risk of being arrested, on the run and performing in small country venues while supplementing your meagre income from acting with petty theft and anything else that came along.

Answer 3

Because they didnt have none of the stuff we have got now like lighting and stuff like that they had act like it was there because they had no props so they spoke thoughts and act diffrently to now.

Answer 4

There are not many professional actors in Shakespeare's plays. The actors in Hamlet are the only ones, and they are peripheral so we do not get much of a sense of what their life was like. Clearly they might have to go touring around the country, and had to rely on the places they went to provide them with accommodation and food. Hamlet asks Polonius to see the actors "well bestowed", and they have a short discussion on how well they were to be bestowed--clearly this was not in the actors' control.

Other actors in Shakespeare's plays are amateurs, like the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night's Dream, or the worthies in Love's Labour's Lost, or magical, like the masquers in The Tempest.

Of course, if you want to know what life was like for the actors who performed Shakespeare's plays (and those of Marlowe and Jonson and all the others) in Shakespeare' day, then you should have asked, "What was an actor's life like in Shakespeare's time?"

Answer 5

Memorize scripts very quickly. They often would have only a few days to get up a new play. They performed a different play every day and a new one every two weeks.

Answer 6

They went to the theatre to watch plays.