Shakespeare's Globe
...castles in Scotland to the bustling cities of Italy and the high seas of colonial change. An emblem of the Renaissance, the Bard of Avon was not only the conqueror of his own mind and pen, but also of the language of his own social, political, and religious reality. His theatre, the epic Globe, mirrors the stories of the early, bustling London and ever-morphing England in the duration of its own life, from plank and dirt to flame and fame.
By 1598, Richard Burbage was the practicing don of the London theatre world, extending his fingertips for production all over the lively center of British commerce and governance. His players, a collection of all-male actors, were widely recognized throughout the theatre world, one of the only sources of popular entertainment. Burbage produced the works of a variety of writers, including William Shakespeare, in his own space called "The Theatre." That year, however, Burbage ordered his company to pull down The Theatre and remove its timber to Bankside.
London was ripe with theaters, including the Hope, Theatre Royal at Whitehall, The Fortune, and The Blackfriars, among others. Bankside was home to the most elite of all of these, The Rose and The Bear-Garden. There, on the southern shore of the Thames, Burbage ordered the popular carpenter Peter Street to erect a new playhouse. Burbage decorated the new theatre with an embellished sign depicting that classic Ayn Rand image of Atlas, bearing the globe on his shoulders, underlined by the legend: "Totus Mundus Agit Histrionem." A whole world of players did exist inside the wooden walls of the open-air theatre, where the Lord Chamberlain's Men mad their new home.
The Globe itself was an open-air, octagonal building the space of which is most largely occupied by its own stage. The building measured approximately 100 feet in diameter, of which the stage alone...
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