An Original Drawing of the Globe Theatre

Summary

In last year’s Shakespeare Survey, after reviewing all the known pre-Restoration pictures of the Bankside theatres, I argued that Hollar’s ‘Long View’, published in 1647, is the most trustworthy of these. I pointed out that there was every reason for supposing that Hollar etched it from drawings made for that purpose before he left England in 1644, but that in it he must accidentally have interchanged the names of the Globe and Beargarden. This argument has since received strong corroboration. The Librarian of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts has drawn my attention to the existence of two Hollar drawings of Southwark which seem to be studies for the foreground of the ‘Long View’. These are in the possession of Iolo A. Williams, who in 1933 reproduced and described them in The Connoisseur (xcii, 318–21), but they have apparently escaped the attention of historians of the stage. The drawing of the “West part of Southwarke” is reproduced in our Plate XI; the full-size detail of the theatres in Plate XII should be compared with the equivalent portion of the ‘Long View’ reproduced in the first volume of Shakespeare Survey, Plate XIII.

In these drawings of Southwark no building is named. Presumably Hollar in Antwerp etched from them or similar studies; if so he would have had to insert names of buildings from memory, and thus might very easily have interchanged the theatre labels. The corrections in Hollar's inscriptions on both these drawings indicate some uncertainty of memory and suggest also that the drawings were inscribed some time after they were made, perhaps in Antwerp when Hollar came to review the material he had collected for his 'Long View'.