Blackwell Reference Online

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Open to the sky, enveloped by wooden arms, the new Globe theatre emerges from London's Bankside like one of Prospero's sleepers, awakened from the grave by some black magic. Set atop wooden pegs, the Globe has been reconstructed with unseasoned oak timbers, while “its roof is made with water-reed thatch, and its three hundred feet of wall is plastered with lime and goats' hair by means of a technique that goes back to the year 2400 B.C.” (Kiernan 1999: 3). The Globe is provocatively historical, perhaps even archaic, in its architecture, and at the same time, absolutely up to date about tourism, marketing, and theatre scholarship. The reconstructed Globe incarnates the best speculations about the house Shakespeare wrote for – speculations supported by archaeological research, visual interpretation of drawings, historical and cultural scholarship, and a nexus of beliefs and assumptions about the project of reconstruction more generally (see Orrell 1992, Blatherwick & Gurr, 1992, Mulryne & Shewring 1997, for information about the Globe's history and archeological findings; and Worthen 2003, for a discussion of the Globe's performativity).But the performances of the plays, texts deduced from four centuries of fascinatingly obsessive editorial intervention, take place in a city full of strange noises that now include airplane engines, car horns, and cell phones. To hear Richard ... log in or subscribe to read full text