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This is one of those eternal questions of Shakespeare scholarship, and I think it owes something to the elevated position Shakespeare's works hold in contemporary English literature -- it's odd to grapple with the thought of Shakespeare's works as something that just anyone could pop out to see, not because they wanted to soak up some high culture but because they were hoping to catch a good fight scene, have a good laugh, be moved to tears, people-watch in the crowd, get a date, and maybe see some great special effects — and that this went for audience members of all classes. It wasn't that the "common" viewer appreciated Shakespeare's works on a superficial level, and only the clued-in intelligentsia really got how Shakespeare worked his magic -- that's how you get eeky things like that scene in Roland Emmerich's film Anonymous where the Earl of Oxford sits back stroking his mustache thoughtfully as the common people are whipped into a creepy fervor by the manipulative magic of his words (did I mention that Anonymous is an Oxford-wrote-Shakespeare joint?) even though these mere groundlings are clearly too rough and stupid to truly appreciate the full masterful subtleties of his language and so on and so on. Theater doesn't work like that, and it's a cliche that back-projects the modern understanding of Shakespearean drama as rarefied literature onto an audience who we assume would only really get the low-hanging fruit, the dick jokes and the pratfalls but not the sophisticated political commentary or the multilayered imagery. It's even tempting to fake-quantify this question and to say that, for instance, 90% of Richard III was understood by the landed gentry in the audience and only 30% was understood by common groundlings -- or conversely, to assert that only the coarsest commoners off the street really got Shakespeare's best gags, or that only his fellow actors would have grasped his subtle symbolism, and so on. This might be tempting but it's not fair to Shakespeare's contemporary audiences, or to the way Shakespeare's plays are put together. More than anything I think this is a consequence of how Elizabethan drama gets taught in the classroom, and awkward attempts to explain why Shakespeare's plays include both sophisticated themes and ribald humor -- by framing the former as the provenance of some audience members (the aristocracy, usually) and the latter as a sop to everybody else in the audience. It's an easy way to conceptualize this stuff but it's not correct.

If for no other reason, not being born an earl didn't make you a less-perceptive audience member or a less keen observer -- Shakespeare's university-educated fellow playwrights were not aristocrats by birth by a long shot, and they certainly picked up on the subtleties involved in Shakespeare's writing, enough to criticize him for not being subtle enough and to rip off his ideas as freely as he ripped off theirs. A comprehensive, rigorous university education was far from compulsory for nobility in this era -- some figures certainly achieved an extraordinary level of education, but generic nobleman Francis Fakename, Earl Of Genericshire wasn't necessarily attending the theater to utilize his razor-edged literary criticism skills honed back in his university days. (If he'd attended university at all.) For that matter, women of the nobility and gentry enjoyed the theater despite lacking formal access to university education -- they attended the theater frequently, and accordingly they had keen expectations for new material. The bulk of Shakespeare's audiences were drawn from the bulk of the population of London (and beyond) nd they reflected that mix of class backgrounds and formal educations -- could a country gentleman enjoy Shakespeare's scenes set in bars and taprooms as much as a London tradesman could? Could a bargeman with a flair for blood and guts appreciate Henry V or Richard III as much as a tailor with a political bent might? There was something for almost everyone, is basically what I'm saying, and this is generally how Elizabethan and Jacobean theater operated -- if you wanted to consume something so completely elevated and sophisticated that only those with courtly manners and courtly sensibilities could enjoy it, such literary pastimes were open to you, but you probably weren't seeking entertainment in a Bankside theater. Even completely unlettered audience members had been immersed in the Classical motifs, Biblical references, and contemporary political allusions of Shakespeare's plays their entire lives. These seemingly obscure references are no longer so contemporary to a 21st century reader of Shakespeare, but they weren't necessarily so obscure in their own day.

If I were to put out a film today about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, or the battle of Gettysburg, that material and all its particulars would immediately evoke a cascade of associations for modern Americans some 50 years later, both positive and negative -- in a similar way, the narratives of the political past of Elizabethan/Jacobean England were fresh in people's minds, and those same stories carried a lot of immediate baggage regarding the Elizabethan and Jacobean present. Even a story that was nominally about a long-dead monarch, or a monarch from another country, could evoke immediate and powerful comparisons to the current monarch -- which could render a play potent and resonant for sentimental audiences, or make it politically radioactive, depending on how those comparisons played out. These political and philosophical nuances were far more accessible to the average viewer in Shakespeare's time due to their immediacy, rather than less. In terms of dirty jokes, double entendres, and puns, many of these have become obscured by the shifts of language and pronunciation across the centuries -- the same goes for many of the subtle turns of language Shakespeare employs. (And frankly even some of the broader wordplay Shakespeare employs has suffered when removed from that historical grounding -- if you've never read an Elizabethan approximation of a Welsh accent and are completely unfamiliar with the history of Wales relative to England, Fluellen's lines in Henry V are likely to be clear as mud.) Some of these would likely have been lost in the bustle of action onstage and the sometimes inclement conditions of outdoor and indoor theater, but the same could be said for a modern stage production -- it's hard to quantify something that necessarily varies for each individual viewer and each individual performance.

Shakespeare and his contemporaries were writing for each other, as artists, and in some cases for their fellow players, but they were also writing for all aspects of their audience -- for the dudes, for the ladies, for the nobility, for any members of the gentry in the audience, for tradespeople and day laborers, for Queen Elizabeth and King James themselves, for people who came for a good laugh and for people who came with specialized interests in mind, viewers especially keen on politics or religion or blood and guts. Furthermore, there was no penalty to missing some of the subtext or meaning in Shakespeare's works -- you could revisit a play as many times as it was played in one theater or another, you could reread Venus & Adonis or the sonnets at your leisure and win points in discussion with similarly well-read friends down at the tavern, but in the playhouses the penalty was on the actors and writers if a play was a bust and made little money, not on the broader audiences if their post-show commentary didn't meet a certain incisive standard. To reap the broadest profits, a play had to be pleasing even to audience members who weren't interested in intellectual heavy lifting that day, or any day. The multiple dimensions and the pleasant subtleties were a part of the entertainment value of the theater, but contemporary English-language theater itself was not yet enshrined as the highest of high arts and the sense that all plays were necessarily equally-significant serious literary endeavors didn't exist, not when new plays frequently bombed at the metaphorical box office.

There are many, many Shakespeare plays where the apparently contradictory meanings of a play can be debated by academics for decades in ways that intimately rely on owning a copy of the play and being able to interrogate it through a certain academic framework -- is Henry V pro-war or anti-war? Is Merchant of Venice antisemitic, and if so, how, and if not, why not? What's going on with Iago? What's up with the ghost of King Hamlet? (To be honest, this probably describes all of Shakespeare's plays, and all of his contemporaries' plays, All of these questions require some intellectual heavy lifting to really delve into as deeply as possible, and they're the kind of things that people who really get into Elizabethan and Jacobean drama can make careers out of. But these are not essential to the enjoyment of Shakespeare's works, nor are they the sum total of what it means to engage with Shakespeare's works, and it took a considerable amount of time for Shakespeare studies as a discipline to approach that point, well past the point where Shakespeare himself was still alive and writing.

(edit because I misspelled Gettysburg... go figure.)