Encore More Than 350 Years After The Puritans Closed Shakespeare’s Theater, The Intricately Reproduced Globe Theatre Takes The Stage
Jutting up on the south side of the Thames is a startling sight: a white cylinder with Tudor timbers and a thatched roof. It’s Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, or at least the closest reconstruction that scholars, architects, archeologists, builders and one determined actor could devise.
The original Globe was the stage for which Shakespeare created the bloody fields of Agincourt, the forest where fickle lovers chased and eluded each other, and the rooms where countless wooings and betrayals took place.
That theater burned down in 1613, after some wadding from a cannon shot off during a production of “Henry VIII” ignited the thatch. Rebuilt after the fire, it flourished until 1642, when the Puritans under Cromwell closed all theaters. Then it was built over and forgotten.
More than 350 years later, the new Globe Theatre has opened its solid oak doors a few hundred yards from the original site, whose ruins lie under the Southwark Bridge Road and a 19th-century building. The theater officially opened June 12 with productions of “Henry V” and “The Winter’s Tale.” Beginning in August, “A Chaste Maid in Cheapside” and “A Maid’s Tragedy” will join them in repertory.
“We are not re-creating the Globe, at least not as a romantic evocation,” said Michael Holden, chief officer of the International Shakespeare Globe Centre. “We are re-creating a vibrant new form of theater, which we are rediscovering by trial and error. It is our laboratory, our ‘quick forge and working house of thought.’ “
The 1.2-acre, $49 million complex also includes an educational center, an exhibition, and a second, smaller theater, the Inigo Jones, which is scheduled to open in 1999.
That the complex has come into being at all is due largely to the vision and persistence of Sam Wanamaker. The American actor came to London in 1949 to direct a play (and, as an unrepentant leftist, to flee the McCarthy era). Instructing a cabdriver to take him to the Globe Theatre, he was appalled to find that no one seemed to know anything about it. Or cared.
According to the book “This Wooden ‘O’: Shakespeare’s Globe Reborn,” by Barry Day, Wanamaker became obsessed with the idea of rebuilding it. He talked it up with anyone who would listen, and in 1970 he established the Globe Playhouse Trust with the objective of raising funds for the project.
The idea, as it evolved over decades, was to build a theater as close as possible to the design and construction of the original Globe as well as give some insight into the works of Shakespeare and into the theater and society in which he lived and worked.
What it took to get the theater up is worth an article in itself. Wanamaker ran into entrenched resistance from the local government. Many in gritty, decaying Southwark felt that the land should be used for housing, not for Shakespeare. Wanamaker was perceived to be an opportunistic Yank merely out to make a buck, who would build some kind of Ye Olde Tavern, complete with bosomy wenches. Commercial interests kept a grip on the land. Then came the oil embargo and the recession, which tightened donors’ purse strings.
Several times the project had to be scrapped and then started over. With the discovery in 1989 of the fragments of the original Globe and another Elizabethan theater, the Rose, the project suddenly became real for people. Unfortunately, Wanamaker died in December 1993, the year construction started. Theo Crosby, the architect, died in 1994, further complicating the project.
But all the efforts have paid off. Years of scholarship have gone into making the “lathe, lyme, and haire” theater as authentic as possible. Craftsmen, aided by theater historians, have experimented with various combinations of ancient materials to get it right. Green oak from Britain’s oldest forests was fashioned into mortise-and-tenon joints, willows were split into laths and sand was mixed with lime and goat’s hair to create plaster for the walls. The cannon is back. So is the thatched roof, now made fire-retardant.
The theater is made up of 20 sections, joined to form a circle, 100 feet wide and 33 feet high. It has three tiers of seats and an open area for the “groundlings.” For the privilege of standing more than three hours in the one area of the theater not covered by a roof, the groundlings pay about $8, the equivalent of the one penny charged in Shakespeare’s day.
The rectangular stage juts out into the groundlings’ area. Two hefty pillars supporting the balcony and roof are painted to look like marble. In contrast to the plain wood of the rest of the theater, the underside of the roof, called the “heavens,” is brilliantly painted. This will be a fitting touch when Hamlet next strides over these boards and says, “Look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire.”
None of the 1,400 theatergoers is farther than 66 feet from the stage. The groundlings, in fact, lean on it. The rows are curved, so everywhere you look, the walls appear to be papered with people.
The actors are in the same light as the audience, under daylight for matinees or floodlight at night. “This equality of light places actor and audience in the same locality, so that both participate with their imaginations in the same event,” said Holden, the center’s chief officer. “There is no hiding place, no emotional distancing.”