Repeopling the Globe: The Opening Season at Shakespeare’s Globe, London 1997

Summary

Rebuilding the Globe Playhouse on London’s Bankside cost Sam Wanamaker, the scheme’s only begetter, more than forty years of zealous and tenacious labour. That extended history of delay and disappointment had one fortunate consequence. The resplendent building which now adorns the Southwark waterfront is a decisively different phenomenon from the one which would have been erected, say, in 1960 or in 1975 if, by some miracle, the necessary money had then become available. Only in 1989, for instance, did new scientific discoveries make available a way of using chemicals to impede the spread of fire in thatch. Before that date, safety regulations would have imposed an inauthentic tiled roof on the reconstruction. Similarly, numerous details of the final design were strongly influenced by the researches of John Orrell, whose key book on the subject, The Quest for Shakespeare’s Globe, was only published in 1983. Orrell’s conclusions have in turn been modified by archaeological discoveries made during the recent excavations on the Rose and Globe Playhouse sites, and the results of that rethinking have also been incorporated in the new building. And, finally, the construction of the new Globe has been intimately shaped by the ‘vast knowledge of historic timber framing’ painstakingly acquired by Peter McCurdy, who only became associated with the project in 1991.