It was in Shakespeare's day that the nobility and groundlings together resorted to the playhouse, constituting themselves at once the patrons and pupils of the drama.
The stage was a projecting platform surrounded on three sides by the groundlings who had paid threepence for the privilege of standing in the pit; and around this pit, or yard, were built boxes for the city madams and the gentlemen of means.
At the same time the platform receded, and the groundlings no longer stood about it on the sides.
Neither can these groundlingshave formed the majority of the 'public' audience or have been omnipotent in their theatre, when it was possible for dramatists (Shakespeare included) to say such rude things of them to their faces.
The audience was not composed mainly of groundlings; and even the groundlings in that age had drama in their blood.
Here was the curtain (more strictly, the curtains) through which the actors peeped at the audience before the play began, and at which the groundlingshurled apples and other missiles to hasten their coming or signify disapproval of them.
I need hardly notice an audacious sally, which has been turned to account in the House of Commons, and has split the ears of the groundlings in different parts of England.
And because he knew its quality, he never offered it to either the groundlings or the gallery.
In the fo’castle there is a constant demand for the very class of song which was finding so much favour at the hands of the groundlings when this songster took to the stage.
He is grotesque; no doubt the contrast he affords is humorous as well as ghastly; I dare say the groundlings roared with laughter at his coarsest remarks.
With this idea, which springs from the wish to get rid of a mere external supernaturalism, and to find a psychological and spiritual meaning in that which the groundlings probably received as hard facts, one may feel sympathy.
I believe that it is what Shakespeare intended, and that he despised the groundlingsif they laughed.
Here were the lowest classes represented, but not those alone; here was a rawer wit than among the groundlings of the Globe Theatre; here was a smaller measure of acuteness than there, and here was a loutishness that was there absent.
The groundlings talk in undertones as they light their pipes.
The sanitary arrangements were of the most primitive description, and the groundlings resisted all attempts at reform on the part of the management.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "groundlings" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
