Touring Shakespeare's Globe
In late June of 2013, I stumbled out of the Globe Theatre in a blissful haze, as if I were myself awakening from a pleasant dream in the woods beyond Athens and slowly regaining my feet. Dominic Dromgoole’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or rather, the experience of it, became a treasured memory that would be summoned by leisurely walks along the Thames in crisp air - the spring of 2014 and the summer of 2016. The revival of that wistful ecstasy inaugurated this ongoing year of postgraduate studies in London, when on a whim, I bought a cheap standing ticket for Boudica from a man whose friend had cancelled last minute.
Now, it blooms again.
Cabin fever had settled in after a few dull days spent indoors, so I joined a pair of friends on a trip to the Globe Theatre Exhibition & Tour. A gauntlet of timelines, narratives and artefacts, the Exhibition alone could absorb a few hours – cornets, crumhorns and tabor pipes, Marion Cotillard’s woven coronation dress from Justin Kurzel’s 2015 film adaptation of Macbeth. The legacy of the Chamberlain’s Men (the Company to which Shakespeare belonged) is palpable, but so are the shifts in how their work has been treated.
For too many today, Shakespeare is a remnant of their high school syllabus, forced and inaccessible, that left them feeling guilty and un-cultured if they didn’t enjoy it. Reading Shakespeare may seem like a chore, because he wrote for performance. This is the note on which our marvelous guide, Mark, begins the tour. He paints the scene: a London eager for new theatrical work after the Queen’s recent ban on religious content, work that would reflect the landscape of their lives – love, death, dreams, ambitions. He speaks of the unregulated Liberty of the Clink, south of the River Thames, where brothels, cock-fights, bear-baiting rings and theatres had their place. The Chamberlain’s Men relocated here in 1599, 230 meters from the Globe’s current site. Every sinew of the theatre’s construction, like the words of the plays written for it, were designed for its site, its time, its audience, its efficiency as a place of performance.
Typically at theatres today, we sit in the dark gazing voyeuristically through an invisible fourth wall, the actors on stage pretend we are not there, as if they existed within a contained alternate reality. The Chamberlain’s Men performed in daylight, the open ceiling of the theatre allowing the early afternoon sun to beam in unhindered (except of course, by England’s persistent clouds) – they could not avoid their audience of groundlings, the “baying mob” who surely expressed their every response to the action. Shakespeare wrote to the Globe’s audience – soliloquies and asides, direct addresses to the viewers. He allowed their imaginations to “piece out [his] imperfections with [their] thoughts” (Shakespeare, Henry V) by describing location and background to compensate for the minimalism of the stage – a thrust design with three playing levels of heaven, earth and hell, and a virtually bare set (the Company performed a different play every night). Like a maestro he conducted their emotions through beats and phrasing – surge and pacify, surge and pacify.
Mark takes us to the upper gallery just as the actors for Michael Oakley’s Much Ado About Nothing mount the stage to rehearse for that day’s performance. I think about the thrill they must feel on it, a replica, but close enough to the original (and trodden by many a great in its own right) that it must feel sacred. I think about that vulnerable stare into the pit, the electricity of catching someone’s eye and sharing a moment of understanding and relationship, albeit without the sensory overload of smell and vocalization that Shakespeare’s actors must have played with.
A wistful ecstasy indeed. There’s a reason the Greeks gave this one to Dionysus.