Shakespeare's Globe Research Articles

A Short History of Western Performance Space

Reviewed by: A Short History of Western Performance Space D. J. Hopkins A Short History of Western Performance Space. By David Wiles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. pp. ix + 316. $60.00 cloth, $23.99 paper. In recent years, the discourse surrounding concepts of space has emerged as a defining feature of theatre studies. Drawing inspiration and methodological resources from such disciplines as philosophy, human geography, and urban studies, scholars of theatre and performance have come to rely on theories of space to describe and define performances and theatrical events in the context of their cultural and physical surroundings. Henri Lefebvre's book The Production of Space (1974) and Michel Foucault's brief essay "Of Other Spaces" (1967) have made defining contributions to this broad interdisciplinary field, particularly because of the ways these works think together the discourses of space and history. Space and history may be the most important dimensions of theatre, and David Wiles's new book provides a valuable, sustained inquiry into both. Though circumscribed by the "Western" of its title, Wiles's work has broad applications for scholars of the history of space and theatre forms around the globe. Wiles begins his epoch-spanning survey not with epic examples but with intimate, personal anecdotes about teaching and theatregoing. He quickly presents the reader with a claim that will be the basic assumption of the entire study: "The play-as-text can be performed in a space, but the play-as-event belongs to the space and makes the space perform as much as it makes actors perform" (1, italics in original). This position, offered as a foundational principle, is developed throughout the book, as later when Wiles argues, after Lefebvre, that "space is social, and the architectural object is conjoined inseparably to the audience as subject" (205). Wiles's study is innovative in its insistence that the production of (theatrical) space be regarded as essential to any history of the theatre. A notable refrain in Wiles's book is his discontent with contemporary theatre: theatre as it is staged and as it is organized as history. "Theatre-as-institution is a concept that serves the needs of the professional theatre historian, and [Oscar] Brockett adds his name to the distinguished list of those who have constructed such histories. The institution is thereby revalidated, with 'theatre' again cleanly separated from the theatrical" (2). By invoking the name of a historian who is himself an institution, Wiles sets out to differentiate his project from established historical narratives. And in this differentiation Wiles is largely successful. By foregrounding space rather than dramatic literature, Wiles provides a survey of theatre history that emphasizes the physical as well as cultural contexts for past performances. This emphasis makes his book a salutary critique of conventional, text-based histories, and an often exciting source of insight and information. Wiles divides his study among seven kinds of space: Sacred, Processional, Public, and Sympotic (see below), followed by chapters on "The cosmic circle," "The cave," and the concluding chapter on twentieth-century spaces, "The Empty Space." As most readers of Theatre Journal will guess, this last chapter is partially indebted to (though still a critique of) the ideas of Peter Brook. The handful of historian-practitioners quoted periodically throughout the Short History—including Peter Brook, Thomas Heywood, and Luigi Riccoboni—reflect Wiles's own impulse to write with an agenda. For all his scholarly acumen, Wiles is not shy about adding a dash of polemic to his otherwise reliably rigorous history. Wiles makes an interesting decision when he includes the reconstructed Shakespeare's Globe on London's Bankside in the chapter on sacred theatre spaces. The new Globe is not a theatre that [End Page 319] announces itself as conventionally religious, though as Wiles notes, the "faith that Shakespeare was the genius of the second millennium" is built into the ideology that informs this space (60). In a revealing passage, Wiles dismisses the criticisms of the new Globe by Shakespearean scholar John Drakakis. Many contemporary scholars are suspicious of the theme park-like aspects of the reconstructed theatre, alleging that the structure attempts to project an historical "authenticity" that is more fabrication than fact. Drakakis...

The Pendulum of Intercultural Performance: Kathakali King Lear at Shakespeare's Globe

Kathakali King Lear, presented at London's Globe Theatre in 1999, is a case study in the possibilities and difficulties of intercultural theatre practice. This article uses Bharucha's and Pavis's theories on intercultural theatre to frame its analysis and shows how this production, by a multinational troupe collaborating over ten years, crafted a work that crosses Indian and European cultural borders. Text adaptation, character type assignment, casting, resistance by Indian critics, and refinement of earlier versions are detailed. The ultimate success came as this classical text of Western theatre fused with the physicalization of emotion by kathakali masters. The production illuminated both the Western text and kathakali technique in ways that allowed spectators and performers to experience Lear and kathakali anew, offering a positive model for further intercultural work.

Shakespeare live: reproducing Shakespeare at the ‘new’ Globe Theatre

The brain-child of American actor Sam Wanamaker, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre on London's Bankside is part of a global proliferation of such reconstructions, which includes replicas in the USA, Germ...

London, Globe Theatre: Music for ‘Dido, Queen of Carthage’

Claire van Kampen, the Director of Music at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre on London's Bankside, followed up her jazz score for Macbeth and innovative minimalist style score for Cymbeline – complete with authentic ritualistic temple gongs from Burma – with an intriguing modern score for one of the plays for Season 2003 too.

:Guilty Creatures: Renaissance Poetry and the Ethics of Authorship

Introduction 1 Courting Heresy and Taking the Subject: John Skelton's Precedent 2 Spenser and the Poetics of Indiscretion 3 The Properties of Shakespeare's Globe 4 The Witch of Edmonton and the Guilt of Possession 5 Samson's Death by Theater and Milton's Art of Dying 6 Guilt and the Constitution of Authorship in Henry V and the Antitheatrical Elegies of W.S. and Milton Index

Performing Shakespeare: A Reconstructed Student Teacher's Tale

Each year the Shakespeare Globe Centre Australia conducts the Sonnet Stroll. Audiences progress though Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens and intermittently actors surprise them with a performance of a Shakespeare sonnet. In 2002, the Second Year Master of Teaching Drama students at the University of Sydney were invited to take part as performers. The task they undertook paralleled the Group Devised Performance project which forms part of the Higher School Certificate Examination for year twelve students of Drama in New South Wales. This article reports on the experiences of the students as they prepared, performed and reflected on their Shakespeare activity. The research findings are presented as a constructed narrative.

Re-casting shakespeare: gendered performances and performativity of leadership

The executive development courses offered jointly by the Praxis Centre of Cranfield University's School of Management and Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in the summer of 1999 and 2000 were the impulse for this article. I respond to the gendered implications of re-presenting and performing Shakespearean roles as a training guide to leadership and business success. My critical analysis adapts Lyotard's (1984) market performativity and Butler's (1990) gender performativity to pose the promise and perils of performing leadership roles based on Shakespeare's characters. This paper re-presents a performative instance of resistance to the dominant masculine metaphors that management education draws out of Shakespeare. I interrupt the play and re-cast the organizational leader and performance consultant as a moral agent who performs the service discourse of the feminine-in-management based on ‘the Other’ in Shakespeare.

:Shakespeare's Mystery Play: The Opening of the Globe Theatre 1599

Part 1 The building of the Globe and the Elizabethan calendar controversy: building Shakespeare's Globe and the Elizabethan calendar controversy calendrical markers in Julius Caesar temporal markers to mid-June 1599 in Julius Caesar Shakespeare's Corpus Christi archetypre Part 2 Endemic time confusion in Julius Caesar: the web of Caesar's time Shakespeare's vernal equinox gambit - Here lies the East... why the Sunne of Rome set at three o'clock. Part 3 Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and the moveable feast discordnaces of 1599: the disrupted Easter cycle of 1599 Shrovetide, Saint Valentine's Eve, and the Roman Lupercal Ash Wednesday, the night of the Lupercal and the eve of the Ides of March Good Friday, the Ides of March, and the day Christ died Shakespeare's Third day, the Book of Samuel and the Mass of the Catechumens Holy Easter, and Shakespeare's April Fools. Part 4 Shakespeare among the assassins: the writer who changed the world. Part 5 Evidence of Calendrical markers in other plays of Shakespeare: prolegomenon for a mode of criticism Illyria's faulty calendar real time in Hamlet.

Shakespeare's Globe Rebuilt

Preface Acknowledgements Part I. Past and Present: 1. The once and future Globe Ronnie Mulryne and Margaret Shewring 2. Shakespeare's Globe: a history of reconstruction and some reasons for trying Andrew Gurr Part II. Varieties of Research: 3. Designing the globe John Orrell 4. The archaeological evaluation of the Globe Playhouse Simon Blatherwick 5. Design as reconstruction/reconstruction as design Jon Greenfield 6. Timber framing, the two bays and after Jon Greenfield 7. The interior decoration scheme of the Bankside Globe John Ronayne 8. The iconography of the Bankside Globe Part III. The Globe in Performance: 9. Staging at the Globe Andrew Gurr 10. Playing the Globe: artistic policy and practice Mark Rylance Part IV. Documents of the Elizabethan Playhouse: 11. Selected documents from the Elizabethan Playhouse edited by Ronnie Mulryne.

Shakespeare's Globe

Shakespeare's Globe

From the globe to globalisation: Shakespeare and Disney in the postmodern world

Summary Both Disneyland and the New Globe Theatre in London, which purports to be a faithful copy of Shakespeare's Globe, are informed by specific concepts of historical authenticity, reconstruction and entertainment. Using the chance conjunction of the Globe Theatre and Disneyland Paris during the author's holiday in Europe, this article offers a comparative study, in terms of both theory and personal experience, of the nature of these two cultural institutions in a postmodern world.

Games R US - and Most of the Western World as Well

Postmodern theory, quite rightly I think, warns us against the grand narratives of modernism; the stories that purport to show history as a progression to a present or future enlightened state. Such narratives are problematic because they produce the idea that history is somehow inevitable and fixed and perfectly knowable. I want to apply this notion of the grand narrative to a highly specific case study -- a certain genre of computer strategy games: the 'god' game, which utilises the grand narrative as a innate structuring principle. The god game is a sub-genre of the strategy game -- a genre that grew out of an analogue hobby: warfare simulations and board games. When transferred to the computer, the genre took with it many of its built-in restrictions -- "playing fields" composed of hex grids, elaborate tables charting vital statistics, and a "turn-based" playing regime. The advantages of the computer were that it could automate a machine opponent for the human player to compete against -- and it also automated the various dice rolls and charts that made the games tedious to the uninitiated. Most of these warfare simulations limited their subject matter to specific historical settings -- great battles and so on --, but the transfer to the digital medium enabled more ambitious aims. Simply put, to chart and direct the course of human history. The two first and still most famous attempts to do this were Sim City and Populous. The former put the player in the role of mayor and town planner, and charged them to build and maintain a city. The latter conferred on the player Godhood -- and placed them in charge of a small band of worshippers who had to be looked after by changing the landscape and calling down volcanoes and earthquakes on rival tribes. These games look primitive today, but they developed and refined the conceptual and visual vocabulary (particularly the "gods-eye-view" -- the sense of viewing and manipulating the events on screen from a great distance that paradoxically imparted perfect detail) that virtually all their successors would utilise. It was a game (portentously) called Civilization that would first marry the god game elements and the strategic warfare elements with a codified and modular map of human history. In it the player was directed to lead a tribe (the English, the French, the Egyptians etc) throughout human history, researching new technologies, exploring, fighting, conquering, until the space age. The final goal, the telos, was to construct a spaceship that could successfully transport the player's chosen tribe to the Alpha Centauri solar system. The choice of tribe affected a few initial starting conditions -- principally the number of beginning technologies. But other than that it assumed no overriding cultural differences or imperatives and imposed on all an ahistorically westernised path of conquest and colonialism. Historical changes and events were rendered into discrete, abstracted symbols -- monuments to build and place in a player's city. And these symbols were resolutely western -- Shakespeare's Globe, Darwin's voyage on the Beagle, the Manhattan project. I don't think it is too much to suggest that computer games such as this are highly effective tools of the hegemonic apparatus, through their seductive encoding of specific historio-political models through an entertaining front end. The time is ripe to begin to develop more sophisticated and resistant reading strategies to respond to these most beguiling of games. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Nick Caldwell. "Games R US -- and Most of the Western World as Well: The Hegemony of the Strategic Computer Game." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.5 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/strat.php>. Chicago style: Nick Caldwell, "Games R US -- and Most of the Western World as Well: The Hegemony of the Strategic Computer Game," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 5 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/strat.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Nick Caldwell. (1998) Games r US -- and most of the western world as well: the hegemony of the strategic computer game. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/strat.php> ([your date of access]).

:The Archaeology of Shakespeare: The Material Legacy of Shakespeare's Theatre

Shakespeare's work is usually presented in a literary context, while wider aspects of English Renaissance culture are ignored. Using illustrations of contemporary paintings, drawings, tomb sculptures and buildings to illuminate a discussion of Shakespeare's theatre, the reader is given an idea of how the plays would have been set, staged and costumed.

Un-Sainting James: Or, Othello and the "Spanish Spirits" of Shakespeare's Globe

Research Article| April 01 1998 Un-Sainting James: Or, Othello and the "Spanish Spirits" of Shakespeare's Globe Eric Griffin Eric Griffin Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Representations (1998) 62: 58–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/2902939 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Eric Griffin; Un-Sainting James: Or, Othello and the "Spanish Spirits" of Shakespeare's Globe. Representations 1 April 1998; 62 58–99. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2902939 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRepresentations Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1998 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Un-Sainting James: Or, Othello and the "Spanish Spirits" of Shakespeare's Globe

Un-Sainting James: Or, Othello and the "Spanish Spirits" of Shakespeare's Globe

Julius Caesar and the Properties of Shakespeare's Globe

<i>Julius Caesar</i> and the Properties of Shakespeare's Globe

The Great Globe Itself: Sam Wanamaker's ‘Shakespeare's Globe’

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OB or not OB?

Shakespeare's Globe Theatre has recently reopened, nearly 400 years after it burned down. To mark the event, this article publishes interim results from an ongoing research programme which has so far lasted 25 years. Shakespeare is often believed to have been merely a playwright, philosopher, psychologist and poet. But according to the author of this article, his greatest act of genius may have been to invent the academic discipline of Organisational Behaviour and to found the Harvard Business School case study approach to management education.

Rebuilding Shakespeare's Globe. By Andrew Gurr with John Orrell, foreword by Sam Wanamaker. New York: Routledge, 1989, Pp. 183 + illus. $26.75. - Globe Theatre, publication of The Museum of London, Department of Greater London Archeology, October, 1989. Pp. 4 + illus. [‘Site of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre Revealed’, Archeological Services, Museum of London, 1990. Pp. 2.

Rebuilding Shakespeare's Globe. By Andrew Gurr with John Orrell, foreword by Sam Wanamaker. New York: Routledge, 1989, Pp. 183 + illus. $26.75. - Globe Theatre, publication of The Museum of London, Department of Greater London Archeology, October, 1989. Pp. 4 + illus. [‘Site of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre Revealed’, Archeological Services, Museum of London, 1990. Pp. 2.

Rebuilding Shakespeare's Globe

Rebuilding Shakespeare's Globe