deathWe did manage to get to the Globe on Saturday, the day before Shakespeare’s birthday, for a guided tour.
I’ve seen pictures of the Globe before. In fact, in ninth grade I did a Geometry project on the building, which involved pointing out all of the different shapes on it’s exterior. I made a to-scale, extremely life like drawing of the theatre, which is a big deal for me because I wasn’t an artist. I spent hours using a grid to copy from a photograph onto the piece of construction paper I was using with a pencil and then went over everything again with marker. Then, when it came time for the grade, I didn’t get full marks because, according to Mrs. Smith, “I didn’t do anything extra, just the assignment.” Grrr. But I digress.
Actually, I feel bad complaining about how long it took me to draw the globe, because the tour guide told us the story of how the current theatre came into being, and it took a long time. What happened was Sam Wanamaker, an American fleeing McCarthyism, came over to London to make a new, red scare free, life for himself. The first thing he wanted to see when he got to London was Shakespeare’s globe, so he hopped in a taxi and spent an entire afternoon driving around the south bank looking for the theatre. But to no avail, all he could find was a plaque on the side of a tavern saying that this used to be the site where the Globe Theatre once stood. He was amazed that such a vital piece of cultural history had been allowed to vanish, and from that day forward he dedicated his life to rebuilding the Globe Theatre, in an exact replica of the original.
And he did. Sort of. He died three years before it was completed, which sort of breaks your heart. The Southwark city council (the neighborhood where the Globe is built,) didn’t want to give the project funding because they felt a theatre dedicated almost exclusively to Shakespeare would be too elitist. So Sam turned to private funders, and spent an uber long time raising money and researching what the Globe would have looked like, and how it might have been built. There are a bunch of flagstones outside the theater with the names of the donors who contributed to the building (I can’t remember if it’s three hundred or six hundred pounds that buys you a stone). Our guide pointed out some of the more interesting ones, including one from Sir Laurence Olivier (or “Larry” as she called him) and a stone that was bought by John Cleese which bears the deliberately misspelled name of his fellow Python Michael Palin (the stone has two L’s).
The theater that stands there now (about a block and a half away from the site of the original theatre) is built as close to the original as possible. One of the things the guide (a little old British lady, who was very knowledgeable and oh so English) pointed out was that the entire building was held together by hundreds of wooden bolts; each of which was hand made, using only technology that would have been available in Shakespeare’s time. There’s also a thatched roof, the thatch of which is so tightly woven together that birds can neither steal the straw nor perch on it. The interior is really amazing. I’ve seen pictures of it before, and from the look of it the stage has two marble pillars, but when I got to take a close up look, I found out that the pillars are actually painted wood. The entire stage is painted wood, and it’s been painted to resemble an Elizabethan idea of the solar system. The ceiling is painted with signs of the zodiac, and the stage in earth tones. There are trap doors in both the ceiling and the floor for Gods to drop from above and ghouls to rise up from below.
The tour guide gave an excellent lecture on Shakespearean theatrical practices, and how those practices are being continued today. The Globe productions are done mostly in original costumes with no stage lighting. No stage lighting means no blackouts. I didn’t really comprehend what a big deal that was until the guide pointed out that a dead character can’t get up in a blackout and walk offstage, so if someone dies (and in many Shakespeare plays practically everyone dies) their body has to stay onstage unless there are enough characters standing to carry them off. I’m excited because the Globe season starts next week, and to be a Groundling (people who stood on the ground—incidentally the name doesn’t come from the fact that they stand on the ground, which would be far too logical, but from the name of a fish that always has its mouth open. The groundlings were famous for never shutting up) costs only five pounds, about ten American dollars. They’re doing Coriolanus as they’re opening play, which I read for Shakespeare class. I can’t wait to see it.
