Audience

Think about how a modern audience might respond to the play as compared to an Elizabethan audience. In the Elizabethan era, the theatre was a space where established social conventions might be rejected, for example, in Twelfth Night, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, a knight of the realm, is mocked and held up to ridicule. The Elizabethan Sumptuary Statutes of 1574 decreed the types of clothes that people of different classes could wear, but the theatre openly flouted these laws by dressing young boys as women or by dressing commoner actors like aristocrats and monarchs.