‘Useful in the Year 1999’: William Poel and Shakespeare’s ‘Build of Stage’

Summary

‘When you have finished this letter’, William Poel wrote in postscript to a correspondent at Trinity College, Cambridge, early in 1909, ‘send it on to the British Museum! It will come in useful in the year 1999.’ Poel as usual got the details wrong but the main drift quite right. The letter was not sent on to the British Museum: instead, it survives in the Theatre Museum, part of a huge collection there of Poel’s papers, photographs, programmes, promptbooks and other memorabilia which was amassed by Poel himself, his widow, and others, including the family of his correspondent. Nor is the letter, taken in isolation, especially useful for readers of Shakespeare Survey: it presents developments in Poel’s plans to stage a new English translation of the Alcestis of Euripides and reports on a recent performance, at the Manchester Corn Exchange, of Poel’s production of Milton’s Samson Agonistes. Yet as those readers will be well aware, in the year 1999, a century after Poel started campaigning for the erection in London of a purpose-built reconstruction of the first (1599–1613) Globe, a building such as that which he sought is a permanent feature of the Bankside in Southwark. Poel’s career as a whole contains extensive and impressive evidence of both the possibilities but also, and even more, the limits of theatrical reconstructions. Those limits tell against– indeed, they preclude – any claims for theatrical reconstruction as experimental science. Reconsideration of Poel’s record is indeed useful in the year 1999.