2 - Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage

Summary

In a year in which the remains of the Rose and now, as it seems, of ‘the great Globe itself’ have been restored to view, and their status in our heritage has exercised the leader writers of the national press, it is appropriate to start with the theatres Shakespeare himself knew and used, and their status in his own day. John Orrell, the author of two distinguished books, The Quest for the Globe and The Theatres of Inigo Jones and John Webb, has now produced The Human Stage: English Theatre Design, 1567–1640. This is not merely a synthesis of his earlier work, though inevitably it covers some of the same territory. It is, rather, an attempt to find a coherent thread and purpose running through the theatre-design of the whole period. Contemplating a bird’s-eye view of London c. 1600, he observes: ‘Save for the great churches, no other class of building in the prospect [than the theatres] announces with such certainty that it is shaped by an idea transcending the utilitarian, or bears so closely the imprint of the human spirit’ (p. 4). He adroitly undermines the claims for the two most commonly advanced utilitarian 'models' for the Theatre and its successors, the inn-yards (where he looks closely at the Red Lion and the Boar's Head) and the animal-baiting rings, before advancing his own thesis: The theatre design in the Second Book [of Serlio's Architettura] was enormously influential in England, especially through its readily imitable scenic constructions, but also through its auditorium planning ... It governed the design of many of the Court theatres of Inigo Jones . . . and there is . . . some reason for believing that it helped to shape even the commercial playhouses, both public and private, of Elizabethan and Jacobean London' (P- H9).