Audiences of the Renaissance and audiences today: discuss.

Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. Modern theatre derives mainly from ancient Greek theatre, from which it borrows technical terminology, themes, characters, and plot elements.

In English Renaissance, performances usually took place during the afternoon, with daylight, and were acted only by man and boys. The audiences were made by all sorts of people, reach and poor who had stand on the ground, theatres were designed as large wooden structures, circular or octagonal in shape, with three tiers of galleries surrounding a “pit” open to the sky. The stage was roofed, there was no scenery and the audience had to image the scene by listening to the language of the actors. There was no curtain and no intervals, so they were very quick.

Modern theatre audience is very different from English Renaissance audience: during the late 19th century, theatre quietened down and stopped being for everyone. The communal exhilaration that had been going for 2500 years (since the Greeks) was ended.

Moreover, people stop going to theatre, and so the majority of people who attend the theatre nowadays are high-earners in their 40s and 50s, because the rest of the country can't afford the luxury of what is live cinema (the normal cinema is cheaper).

In addition to that, “The Telegraph”, a British newspaper, affirms that Britain's theatre audiences have slumped by nine per cent over the past two years, and the number of theatergoers fell from 14.1 million in 2009 to 13 million last year, according to Arts Council England.

Furthermore, London theatres attracted slightly higher audience figures than venues outside the capital; away from London, total audiences have fallen by more than ten per cent over the two-year period.

In conclusion, theatre has lost importance and audience in past year, if compared to the English Renaissance theatre. Theatre decline was principally due to cinema's advent, that is cheaper, more spectacular, and easier to interpret. Another cause of theatre decline is the economic crisis that afflicts Europe and the world in general in last years.