Performing at the Globe

Performing at the Globe

I recently had the extreme good fortune to do a one-week residency at Shakespeare's Globe in London, rehearsing and performing in the First Quarto version of Hamlet with the University of Texas Shakespeare at Winedale Program. Our experience there, working in the theatre and watching the Globe company perform, taught us much about the staging challenges of an Elizabethan playhouse, as well as the invigorating possibilities of such a stage for actors and audiences.

The First Quarto Hamlet project was set up by James B. Ayres, of the University of Texas at Austin, and Patrick Spottiswoode, of the Globe Education department. The Globe, which opened two years ago, was intended to function both as a theatre for professional performances and as a laboratory for learning. Accordingly, Spottiswoode invited Ayres, a Texas English professor, to bring some of his students to work on the 1603 First Quarto, the earliest published version of Hamlet. The First Quarto, or Q1, is probably an actor's memorial reconstruction of the play as adapted for performance, and its lean, fast-paced text seemed a good choice for exploring the staging possibilities of the Globe. After performing the play once at Winedale on August 15, Ayres' twelve students came to London for a week of work at the Globe, culminating in a performance for an invited audience on August 31. I had been associate director of Shakespeare at Winedale for the summer, and was added to the Hamlet company in London to take on the role of the Ghost.

Shakespeare at Winedale is an English department summer program, founded by Ayres twenty-eight years ago, wherein students explore Shakespeare through an intensive experience of performance. A group of studen...

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...al realities for us, figured in the very architecture of the building. It was this sense of the rightness of the space, the congruity of these words and actions with this physical world, that was perhaps the most valuable lesson of our time in the Globe. I had had my doubts about the Globe ever since I saw the initial, unsatisfactory Two Gentlemen of Verona in the prologue season of 1996; the stage was too big, the atmosphere to artificial, the actors unable to cope with the physical demands of the building. Yet striding onto that stage, feeling the embrace of those galleries, hearing the ringing clarity with which the wooden O gave us back Shakespeare's words (or some of them, in the case of Q1)--this experience convinced me of the value of the Globe, not only as a theatre but as a testing ground for our ideas about what Shakespearean performance was, and can be.