Shakespeare's Globe
The Extraordinary History of the Globe Theatre
The
Globe Theatre is the famous London Theatre in which 1599 the plays of
William Shakespeare were performed.
William Shakespeare, also spelled
Shakspere, byname Bard of Avon or Swan of Avon, baptized in April 26, 1564, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England, died in April 23, 1616, Stratford-upon-Avon, was an English poet, dramatist and actor often called the English national poet and considered by many to be the greatest dramatist of all time.
The Globe Theatre is a landmark attraction along the South Bank is actually the fourth reincarnation of what was Shakespeare's original theatre.
It is understood that Shakespeare and his company ran into trouble with their landlord and were forced out of the The Theatre, however it was when one of the group spotted a
loop hole in their contract and they discovered they actually owned the wooden structure that a plan then emerged. Over the Christmas holidays while the landlord was away
Shakespeare and his company literally stole the theatre over the course of four nights and when the weather improved and the river Thames thawed they floated the timbers
across the river on barges, over to the Las Vegas of London, Bankside, on the south side of the river.
Early in 1599 Shakespeare, who had been acting with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men since 1594, paid into the coffers of the company a sum of money amounting to 12.5 percent of the
cost of building the Globe. He did so as a chief shareholder in the company, and by doing so he helped to establish a uniquely successful form of commercial operation for the
actors of the time. This investment gave Shakespeare and the other leading actors both a share in the company’s profits and a share in their playhouse.
At this time, officially approved playhouses and officially approved acting companies had been in existence in London for only five years. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men was one
of only two companies licensed to perform within the London city limits. (For more on this subject, see Sidebar: Shakespeare and the Liberties.) The other company used the
Rose playhouse, owned by an impresario and his ex-actor son-in-law.
Stage of the Globe Theatre
The first public theatres in London were built in the late 1500s on the outer districts of the city, since they were not allowed within London itself.
The Globe was built in Southwark, a particularly disreputable outer district.
Shakespeare's acting company built a theatre outside the city limits after a London council began licensing plays that were performed in the yards of inns or on street
corners, where the company used to perform.
Technically, the 1599 Globe and its 1614 replacement span an era in the history of theatre design. The first Globe, based on the skeleton of the original Theatre of 1576, was
unique not just as the most famous example of that peculiar and short-lived form of theatre design but because it was actually the first to be built specifically for an
existing acting company and financed by the company itself. Shakespeare designed As You Like It, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Othello, All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for
Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Pericles, and The Winter’s Tale, not to mention Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens, for performance there.
The design of the original Theatre responded to a mix of traditions.
Its name, which up to then had been used for atlases (such as Mercator’s) rather than for playhouses, drew attention to the Roman theatre tradition. Its circular shape,
though, reflected not the D-shape of a Roman amphitheatre but the gatherings of crowds in a circle around the actors in town marketplaces, where all the players of 1576 got
their training. The concept of building a scaffold with three levels of galleries surrounding a circular yard mimicked the arrangement for audiences of existing bearbaiting
and bullbaiting houses. The stage, a platform mounted in the yard, was the kind of thing that traveling companies set up in inn yards.
The old Theatre was a 20-sided structure, as near to a circle as Elizabethan carpentry could make it. It stood more than 30 feet (9 metres) high, with three levels of seating
in its galleries. Audience access was either through two narrow passageways under the galleries into the standing room of the yard around the stage or up two external stair
towers into the rear of the galleries. Five of the 20 bays of the galleries were cut off by the frons scenae, or tiring-house wall, behind which the actors kept their store of
props, costumes, and playbooks and prepared themselves for their performances. The stage was a 5-foot- (1.5-metre-) high platform protruding from the tiring-house into the
middle of the yard. Two posts upheld a cover over the stage that protected the players and their expensive costumes from rain. The audience standing in the yard had no cover,
though when it rained they could pay more and take shelter in the lowest gallery.
The Globe reproduced this old shape, with a few innovations mainly in the fresh painting and decoration of the stage area. Each of the four London amphitheatres that scholars
know most about, the Rose, the Swan, the Globe, and the Fortune, had auditorium bays of a certain size, about 10 feet 6 inches (roughly 3 metres) from front to back and an
average width of 14 feet (about 4 metres). The Globe and Fortune, and probably the Swan, had 20 bays in all, while the smaller Rose had 14. Seating in the form of degrees
(wooden benches raked upward to the rear), along with the roofing over the topmost gallery, provided all the comfort short of a cushion that Elizabethans expected. A few
rooms were reserved for the most privileged on the stage balcony itself. Including the space for nearly a thousand customers to stand in the yard around the stage, the small
Rose had a total capacity of about 2,400 people, while contemporary estimates of total audience capacity at the Swan and the Globe claimed 3,000.
The stage was large, 43 or 44 feet (about 13 metres) across and 27 or more feet (some 8 metres) deep. The two stage posts were substantial, since they had to uphold the large
cover, or heavens, which had a trapdoor in it with a windlass for winding boys playing gods down onto the stage. Below the heavens trapdoor was one in the stage, which served
as the entry point for King Hamlet’s ghost and the grave for Ophelia. The tiring-house wall had two doors on its flanks for entrances and exits and a central opening,
normally covered by a set of hangings (Polonius’s arras) that concealed the caskets in The Merchant of Venice and Hermione’s statue in The Winter’s Tale. Above the three
openings, a balcony ran the width of the stage wall, the central room of which was used for scenes that required an upper window or balcony or the walls of a town.
It took seven months to rebuild The Theatre, which was renamed The Globe, presumably so no one would notice they’d stolen it. The Globe ran from 1599 until 1613 until an
incident involving gun powder and some rather over-zealous special effects caused the theatre to burn down during a performance of Henry VIII.
The replacement Globe was rebuilt within a year, however this time with a tiled rather than thatched roof. Although Shakespeare died in 1616 the Globe continued without him
until the 1640’s.
1616 The Globe Theatre at Bankside, London.
Performance at the Globe Theatre
The experience of watching a performance at the Globe was radically different from that of viewing modern Shakespeare on-screen. The plays were staged in the afternoons, using
the light of day, and the audience surrounded the stage on all sides. No scenery was used, except for occasional emblematic devices such as a throne or a bed. It was almost
impossible not to see the other half of the audience standing behind the players. Consequently, much of the staging was metatheatrical, conceding the illusory nature of the
game of playing and making little pretense of stage realism.
Panoramic View of the Globe Theatre
Rebuilding of the Globe Theatre
The Globe was pulled down in 1644, two years after the Puritans closed all theatres, to make way for tenement dwellings.
In 1970 the American actor Sam Wanamaker, who was driven by the notion of reconstructing a replica of the Globe, established the Shakespeare Globe Playhouse Trust. Seventeen
years later a groundbreaking ceremony was held on a Bankside site near that of the original Globe, and in 1989 the foundations of the original building were discovered buried
beneath a historic 19th-century building. Although only a small percentage of the original theatre could be examined, the discovery of these foundations enabled scholars to
make certain design adjustments. They changed the planned 24 sides to 20, for instance, and, using the angles revealed by the archaeologists, they made the whole polygon 99
feet (30 metres) in outside diameter. By referring to a number of extant Elizabethan buildings for clues to the structure, style, interior, and roofing, scholars and
architects completed the design of the Globe Theatre reconstruction. Using traditional methods and materials, with only a few concessions to modern fire regulations and the
like, builders completed work on the new theatre in the mid-1990s. It is now part of a larger complex of buildings known as the International Shakespeare Globe Centre.
Shakespeare's Globe Theater: "The Merry Wives of Windsor", 2008.
The new theatre is not a perfect replica of the original building. It is made, for example, from new green oak, like the Fortune, not from the 23-year-old timbers of a
dismantled building, like the original Globe. Its design is still speculative in key areas, such as its size, the shape of the stage, and the decorations. In addition, certain
compromises had to be made to satisfy the constraints of fire-safety regulations. These entailed making the stairways and access doors wider, increasing the number of
entrances to the yard, positioning sprinkler valves in the ridging of the thatched gallery roofing, and including conduits for electrical wiring. These provisos—and a
restriction on the size of the audience at any performance to a maximum of 1,600, roughly half the number that attended the original Globe—have secured the right for the new
Globe to be used once again as a theatre.
The basic justification for attempting to reconstruct the Globe in a faithful version of the original is that it can be used to learn more about Shakespeare’s plays. The Globe
was Shakespeare’s machine, financed and built by the company that intended to use it. How it worked and what it produced have a great deal to offer to students of
Shakespeare’s plays—those written pre-texts, as they have been called with some justice, which record all he thought his fellows needed to know when they staged his plays.
Everything that has been wrung from these pre-texts in the last four centuries is enhanced by a better knowledge of Shakespeare’s original concept.
Shakespeare's Globe Theater was modeled on surviving documentary evidence of the original one, pulled down in 1644.
Rererences:
1. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Globe-Theatre
2. https://www.swanlondon.co.uk/history-of-the-globe-theatre/
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