Going to a play in Shakespeare's England was obviously an aural and a visual experience, but Hamlet's announcement "we'll hear a play" (2.2.538) instead of "we'll see a play" (as we might put it) has aided those who think that the aural experience was primary. John Orrell claimed that the Globe playhouse was "an acoustical auditorium, intended to serve the word and the ear more fully than the image and the eye" and listed acoustic highlights from Shakespeare's plays:

Lear's rage and Cleopatra's immortal longings, the old mole in the cellarage, or the music of the god Hercules leaving Antony: can anybody doubt that it was the sound of these things rather than the sight of them that mattered first?1

These are important moments for sound, but Orrell did not claim they were anything more than special occasions of aural pleasure. Bruce R. Smith's view is more broad: "The South Bank amphitheatres were, in fact, instruments for producing, shaping, and propagating sound. Evidence that theaters were thought about as sound-devices is not hard to come by" and "The 1599 Globe was an instrument to be played upon, and the key element in that instrument was wood."2 Smith described playgoers as listeners, and Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa noted that

The term "audience" itself, taken from the Latin "audire," to hear, indicates the expectation that plays are things to be heard rather than seen. In Shakespeare's time the alternative word, "spectator," from the Latin "spectare," to see or watch, became a late intrusion which never succeeded in capturing the concept of what a playgoer truly was.3

In his wider study of playgoing, Gurr offered a qualitative view of the references to "hearing" and "seeing" and commented that the actors' skills of movement (including swordplay and dancing), their expensive costumes, and the use of fireworks and "discoveries,"

all assumed that the eye was a stronger sense than the ear. So the spectator should have replaced the auditor with ease. But if we make such assumptions we ignore not only the survival of "audience" as the standard word but the vastly greater readiness of Elizabethans to use their ears for all forms of learning…. Both the collective "audience" and the singular "auditor" enjoyed a much longer currency in English than "spectator," and in Shakespeare's time the competition was on fairly even terms.4