ABSTRACT
When Stephen Greenblatt confessed ‘a desire to speak with the dead’ (1988: 1) some ten years ago, he expressed a common longing, a hunger that has also shaped the most notorious theater built in recent memory: Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre on the Bankside. The texture of the structure promises to satisfy our appetite for such discourse with the dead (or at least with the creations of the dead, Hamlet, Ophelia, Shylock, and so on): an early-modern structure frames the return of early-modern subjects. In its meticulous reconstruction of building practices and ongoing research into the use of period costumes and staging, the Globe reflects a desire to see performance releasing original ‘Shakespearean’ meanings; the Globe is a monument to an understanding of dramatic performance as the embodiment of a textualized ‘past’, expectantly (or inertly) awaiting the chance to speak. At the same time, the Globe also enacts the ineluctable presentness of performance, the ways performance speaks with a difference. Despite the oak and plaster, the Globe is everywhere traced by the passage of history: it’s down the street from the
original foundations; it holds fewer, bigger, and quite different people; the hair-and-lime plaster uses goat hair (cow hair today is too short); the thatch is chemically treated; the lath and plaster conceals a modern firewall; sprinkler heads dot the ridgepole; the exterior timbering is whitewashed (a concession to modern ‘Tudor’ sensibilities); there are actresses, intermissions, numbered seats, toilets, ushers, ice cream, the restaurant, the cafe, the gift shop. The Globe epitomizes a host of attitudes toward history, not least the commodification of ‘pastness’ within the economy of international tourism; it ‘works’ as a theater because it epitomizes a contemporary sense of dramatic ‘performativity.’1
