Thursday 26 April 2012

All the world's a stage..but which one?


Swan theatre, London


Shakespeare in London. Shakespeare at the Globe.
 Right now, a replica of the Globe sits near the Tate Modern in London, the original lost to history. No photographs remain (what with the technology having not been invented yet), so how do we know what the Globe looked like?
 In 1596, whilst visiting the Swan theatre in London Johannes De Witt (a Dutchman) made a crude sketch of the Swans interior from the point of view of the upper galleries - a large stage,and an area behind the stage where the actors changed (the 'tiring', short for 'attiring'. It was multileveled so it was also used for balcony scenes), and a partial roof. The original of this has been lost, but a friend made a copy, and this is what's been passed down to us. This is the only known record of an Elizabethan London theatre interior, and in its defence it's probably similar to how the Globe looked.
 Then, a Bohemian called Wenceslas Hollar (in either the 1630s or 1640s) drew an illustration of London that showed London, but the perspective is from one that he couldn't have ever seen - diagonally above the tower of Southwark Cathedral. The only way he could have been there is if:

a) A building had existed there at the time. It didn't.

b) He'd been suspended by a crane.

c) He'd been levitating.

c would have violated the witchcraft laws of the time (when the law came down hard on you for it), and b is just silly, so he probably drew it from imagination. It suffers, though, from showing the second Globe, not the first, and Shakespeare had died in 1616, so it couldn't have been the one that premiered Hamlet. There was another illustration, an engraving by a Dutchman Claes Jan Visscher that clearly shows the original Globe theatre - the one that we all think of when we think of the Globe, a crude 'O' shape made of wood - and it's been the basis for what we've thought the Globe looked like to this day.
 Except that he'd never visited London. He'd done his engraving based on an earlier engraving from 1572, before the Globe had been built. So, probably what it was that the 'O' shape was a common design. Or there had been an earlier theatre that got burned down, rebuilt, and renamed by its owners. It's hard to say, like everything else about Shakespeare it's maddeningly elusive. All we have, apart from a few signatures, are speculations and reasonable predictions. Oh, and conspiracy theories.

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