Historical and Contemporary Contexts

Abstract

In the last decade of the twentieth century the city of London gave birth to two new cultural institutions: the Globe Theatre in 1997 and the Tate Modern in 2000. The former is an Elizabethan-style playhouse built to imitate the sixteenth-century one in which Shakespeare’s plays were performed. Located where the original Globe stood at Bankside on the south side of the Thames, the new Globe produces Shakespearean plays using Elizabethan-style costuming and staging. The second new institution, the Tate Modern, is a sister museum to the original Tate Gallery, now referred to as Tate Britain. Dubbed the “national museum of modern art,” Tate Modern houses modern foreign and British art from 1900 to the present. Tate Britain, the “national gallery of British art,” may reclaim the British modern pieces at any time, however, to exhibit the history of British art complete in one place. Housed in the refurbished Bankside Power Station, Tate Modern stands on the south bank of the Thames not far from the new Globe. At the dawn of the new millennium in London, modernism and Elizabethanism stand side by side, shaping British cultural attention for the twenty-first century.