5 - The New Globe

Summary

Discussions of Elizabethan staging in the early twenty-first century inevitably center on “Shakespeare's Globe,” the outdoor playhouse on the south bank of the Thames that W. B. Worthen calls “the most notorious theatre built in recent memory” (Force 28). This reconstruction was the brainchild of the late American actor Sam Wanamaker. According to legend, Wanamaker sought out the site of the original Globe during his first visit to London in 1949. When he discovered that the playhouse was only commemorated by a meager plaque, Wanamaker “made up his mind then and there to erect a proper monument – a full-scale, working replica of the theatre itself. And that is exactly what he did with the rest of his life” (Stasio 54).

This is a great creation myth, but it involves a good deal of oversimplification. Wanamaker did not set out to authentically reconstruct the Globe. His initial plan instead involved “a modern building which simply reflected the form of Shakespeare's Globe,” a design composed of “a brick drum with galleries, a roof and stage lighting” (Day 32) as in the “Swan Theatre at Stratford” (126). This structure was to be part of a major redevelopment of the Bankside area, intended to gentrify and rejuvenate this neglected borough. Wanamaker encountered strong resistance to this idea and turned for support to the international academic community. With their involvement the reconstructed amphitheater at the center of the project took on ever-greater importance. Toward the end of his life Wanamaker “reduced his vision for the south bank from the incredible to the merely improbable” and decided to build only the Globe complex, abandoning the rest of his development scheme (126).

The scholars who determined how the playhouse would be built saw it as a “test-tube” that would provide “the basis for experiments” (Gurr, “Staging” 159). Their discourse frequently adopts a scientific vocabulary. For Alan Dessen, the Globe would be “a laboratory for investigating how the original scripts would or could have been staged” (“Globe” 195). Andrew Gurr suggests that Shakespeare's plays “might be seen as a form of software, designed to fit a particular machine or piece of hardware, and we need to reconstruct the hardware the plays were designed for so that we can see more clearly how these supremely rich and intricate programs were designed to work” (“Rebuilding” 11–12). Many scholars do not accept this rationale.