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Peter Street at the Fortune and the Globe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2007

By
John Orrell
Edited by
Kenneth Muir
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Summary

Of all the documents on which our knowledge of the Elizabethan stage is founded, none is more tantalizing than the Fortune contract. It is unique in giving precise dimensions for a public theatre, but it is in just these specifications that it is most likely to differ from its models, the other theatres of the age and especially the first Globe. Four times it mentions ‘the late erected Plaiehowse On the Banck in the saide pishe of Ste Saviors Called the Globe’, and on three of these occasions it is to avoid having to go into unnecessary detail when the model is so readily available and its building of such recent memory. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the contract goes into most detail when the proposals for the Fortune differ most from the example of the Globe, and in nothing is this truer than in the very dimensions which give the document its dangerous fascination. Some scholars, anxious to seize on any evidence that will lead towards an understanding of Shakespeare’s playhouse, have too hastily assumed that the stage at the Globe was 43 feet (13.11 m) across, simply because that is the figure given for the Fortune. Yet on this point the language of the contract is ambiguous, to say the least.

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Shakespeare Survey , pp. 139 - 152
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1981

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