Shakespeare's Globe Center--USA: Center for Globe Research

History of Globe reconstruction attempts

Part of a theatre historian's job is to reconstruct performance conditions for past historical eras in order to understand how theatre evolved to where it is today. The reasoning behind reconstructing Shakespeare's Globe is so we can get a better knowledge of Shakespeare's plays and their importance to literary and dramatic history. Shakespeare never intended for his plays to be published, writing them solely for performance. He had his troupe and his stage (the Globe being one of several where his plays were initially performed) in mind when he created them. Understanding the dynamics of an actual Elizabethan performance space is crucial to the understanding of the plays themselves.

• 1767 -- Edward Capell, seventh editor of Shakespeare's Works, is the first scholar to call for an investigation into "the stage he appear'd upon, its form, dressings, actors . . . as every one of those circumstances had some considerable effect upon what he compos'd for it."
• 1790 -- Edmond Malone, in his The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, includes the contract Phillip Henslowe and Edward Allen used for carpenter Peter Streete to build the Fortune Theatre. Streete had built the Globe, and the Fortune contract instructs Streete to base the Fortune on the same dimensions. Maddeningly, the contract refers to an accompanying sketch, which has been lost.
• 1817 -- German novelist and scholar Ludwig Tieck visits London to research Shakespeare.
• 1836 -- Tieck and theatre architect Gottfried Semper convert their analysis of the Fortune contract into architectural drawings.
• 1881 -- William Poel begins staging Shakespeare, experimenting with the relationship of play texts to their original performance context.
• 1888 -- William Archer publishes his report on Karl T. Gaedert's discovery of the de Witt/van Buchel drawing of the interior of the Swan Theatre, c. 1596 (right). It is the only pictorial evidence of what the stage in an Elizabethan public playhouse looked like.
• 1893 -- Poel constructs a portable stage, "the old Fortune Theatre," based on the Swan drawing.
• 1902 -- The London Shakespeare Commemoration League displays a model for a proposed Globe Theatre reconstruction, at the urging of Poel. The plans later develop into a state-of-the-art theatre for Shakespeare's plays rather than a faithful reconstruction.
• 1907 -- Archer and architect Walter H. Godfrey draw up their own plans based on the Fortune contract. They went an extra step and converted their plans into a scale model.
• 1912 -- A "Shakespeare's England" exhibition at Earl's Court features a working Globe Theatre.
• 1921 -- Nugent Monck builds the Maddermarket Theatre, an 18th century chapel converted into and approximation of Shakespeare's Blackfriars (the smaller, indoor theatre they used).
• 1934 -- At the Chicago World's Fair, Thomas Wood Stevens builds a working (though smaller--the third gallery was strictly decorative) Globe Theatre reconstruction for the English Village portion of "A Century of Progress." Stevens staged mostly 30-40 minute versions of Shakespeare, with an occasional longer performance. It is this Globe that first drew a young Sam Wanamaker's attention to Shakespeare.
• 1935 -- The San Diego Globe is built from the same plan as the Chicago Globe, but without a roof over the yard. Other fairs in Cleveland, Dallas, and numerous other (and more loosely interpreted) adaptations. The impact of these reconstructions and interpretations helps stimulate the rise Shakespeare festivals in America.

Here is an example of one such theoretical reconstruction, done by G. Topham Forrest in an appendix to William Westmorland Brane's, The Site of the Globe Playhouse, Southwark, London: London City Council, 1921. His reconstruction was conjectural only, and was never built (nor meant to be built). Forrest meant the designs, based on a reconstruction project done in 1912, to serve as an approximation of the Globe to give scholars as well as directors an idea of how the performances might have been staged.

The dimensions depicted here would result in a much smaller Globe than the discovered remains indicate.

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