[Tax-chick]

Depends if you're talking about the folks in the stalls, or the "groundlings".

I'm not aware of either of those socioeconomic groups' being coerced into attending Shakespeare performances, or any other theater.

I agree, though, that I've no interest in replicating Elizabethan education in Deo Vindice Christian School (where our model, Stonewall Jackson, certainly didn't know Ancient Egypt from a hole in the head)!

[AnAmericanMother]

The upper classes were, to some degree, moved to go there by "peer pressure". And religous issues entered into it, too - the more Puritan preachers regularly launched against "strolling players and vagabonds," so there was something of a reaction against that from the artsy types.

The groundlings just wanted to see the murders and the low comedy.