What's the Globe Good For?

Abstract

I saw two plays at the Globe last summer. I'd done a little work for the in-house magazine, and as my reward, I was given two house seats to whatever was on for the brief period of my stay in London. It turned out to be The Maid's Tragedy and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. For both productions the seats were in the second row of the lowest gallery, about two thirds of the way around the circle-eight o'clock on a watch dial. My guest and I rented cushions, for ?1 each, to mitigate the authenticity of the wooden benches, reminding ourselves that cushions were authentic, too; in fact they felt a little too authentic. The cramped legroom was more ominous; had we been an authentic five feet tall, like the putative Globe playgoer, perhaps we wouldn't have minded. I've spent forty years explaining to students that it didn't matter where you sat in a theater like the Globe; it was basically an auditorium, where what mattered was the acoustics. Sitting in the center was no better than sitting on the sides because on a thrust (rather than proscenium) stage, the actors wouldn't have played only to the center. I will now stop saying this; it is an egregious error, as is the implied assumption that acoustics aren't a problem in such a theater. From our vantage point, the pillar, as we could see even before the play began, was a problem. I should emphasize that our seats were not said to have impeded views, and if we had bought our tickets, we would have been charged full price for them-?22 each. In fact the actors in the 1996 performances at the Globe, Peter Hall's troupe from the Old Vic, had complained particularly about the pillars, even to the point of insisting they couldn't have been authentic. The evidence overwhelmingly indicates, however, that the pillars are historically correct: it is the actors who are not authentic. At The Maid's Tragedy, we saw a huge mess of scenery, largely hidden behind the column; three quarters of the back facade covered with a very baggy black cloth; and, in the middle of the groundlings' space, a throne on a dais. Richard Proudfoot, praising this set, observed that it is a perfect reconstruction of a court-masque set. So it is, and that is exactly what's wrong with it: it is the set for a production in the Whitehall Banqueting House, requiring a proscenium stage and an audience located in front. Such a set has nothing whatever to do with an open, three-sided stage such as the Globe's. For us and about half the audience, all the action of the masque was hidden behind the pillars. What the people sitting in the center saw was quite stylish, though even here the black cloth still looked perfunctory and makeshift, a clear index to how badly this production wanted to be somewhere else. In fact The Maid's Tragedy did nothing whatever to take the special qualities of the theater into account. Most of the action was played halfway back, as it would have been on a proscenium stage, rendering it invisible to much of the audience. The performers of A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, on the contrary, did their best to work with the house and even had quite a lot of fun with it. All entrances were made around the outside of the pillars; most of the action was played as far downstage as possible; and there was a good deal of use made of the pillars and of the architecture of the Globe generally-leaning on the columns, climbing up to the roof, emphatically not ignoring the building. For this theater A Chaste Maid was a much better show. But in both productions acoustics