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"We even share the Green Room with the actors, where we can see a live feed of the stage while we eat lunch"
Research intern Casey Caldwell talks about his work at the Globe in his series of fortnightly diary entries.
- Week 1 & 2
- Week 3 & 4
- Week 5 & 6
- Week 7 & 8
- Week 9 & 10
- Week 11 & 12
- Week 13 & 14
Week 1 & 2
These first two weeks were a whirlwind of exciting new activities for me: acclimating to the buzzing life of London, the great work culture here at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, meeting people and trying to keep track of all the new names, attending the play openings and educational lectures, and settling into what will be my primary tasks during my internship here. One of my first impressions starting my internship is of how exciting the environment is here, with the theater space right next to the research and business offices. We even share the Green Room with the actors, where we can see a live feed of the stage while we eat lunch. Everyone here seems not only excited to work here in general but also to feel a real investment in this place, which is such a rewarding atmosphere to work in.
My two main tasks here at the Globe will involve our sound recordings of the End of Season Interviews and dramaturgical work for the productions currently in rehearsal. I will also be sitting in on Doctor Faustus rehearsals once they begin, to act as a dramaturgical portal for the company. The End of Season Interviews (EOSI) are recordings of interviews conducted by the research team here with people involved with the individual stage productions: actors, directors, designers, choreographers, text coaches, etc. We have a database of four years worth of interviews in our files, which we make available to researchers to access here on-site (in other words, you can not simply access these interviews via the internet). Right now, however, these files simply sit in folders organized by year under the given interviewee’s name, with no finer grain of organization available to visiting researchers. My task to begin with will be to come up with the best way to offer that deeper level of organization, to help researchers find more easily the kind of information they are looking for in the database.
I also had my first opportunity this week to work on a dramaturgical query from the Much Ado About Nothing company. Their dance choreographer was interested in anything we could find on Sicilian and Moroccan dance in the early modern period. As it turned out, there was nothing I could find specifically on early modern Moroccan or Sicilian dance, but I was able to find plenty of information (including dancing manuals) out of France and Italy proper in the period. We later confirmed through various researchers that, with Morocco especially, there is simply no information out there. This was a great relief for me, considering my first dramaturgical assignment for my internship lead me to say that I could not find anything! This response is a common one, actually, when it comes to answering questions about “what we know” from the period. There are great resources that aide us as researchers in accessing, interpreting, and organizing the facts we do know from the early modern period, however. In turn, one of the many rewarding aspects of working as a researcher in a professional theater is the chance you have to then see the production you helped in on its feet, in front of the public, and see how that research affected the production.
Week 3 & 4
Now that I am all settled in here, these past two weeks I have been able to move on to really laying the groundwork for the End of Season Interviews and getting started on building up the database. Doctor Faustus rehearsals are also under way, and I have had the opportunity to host a few Question and Answer sessions between Globe actors and the public or school groups as well. We had an interesting discussion this week about which side of our data we consider to be primary for the End of Season Interviews: the sound recordings or the written transcriptions of the interviews. Depending on how we want to model this database, one form or the other would be the baseline from which the other is derivative. So for example, if we used the sound files as the main point of contact for researchers, my main activity moving forward would be to break the sound files down into “time slices” that correspond to given search categories; whereas, if we wanted to offer the written transcriptions to researchers as our primary resource I would be working on creating a textual-based form of organization. After some fun “theoretical” discussion, it was decided that the sound files are to be the base line form of access and I showed everyone some examples of how we could organize this information.
Working on these categories has turned out to be half the fun of this project, in fact. I have had several extremely stimulating conversations with people from all areas of the Globe about the words we use to describe our practices and key aspects of the theater space. Some of the most engaging and challenging conversations have come from unexpected sources, in fact, people that are not necessarily “academically” trained, for example, but who simply have a real investment in this theater and have given some real serious thought to the way we do things here. It is these kinds of unexpected ways in which you learn from the people around you that, really, has been one of the most rewarding things about working here. Everyone is a kind of reservoir of unique perspectives and experiences, and at any moment you can have a conversation that will fundamentally change the way you think about theater, Shakespeare, academia, the Globe theater, whatever. It is like working in a knowledge mine field.
Doctor Faustus rehearsals have also gotten underway, where I am on hand in case the director has any dramaturgical questions he would like me to field or take back to our research team. These past two weeks I have also had the chance to host a Question and Answer session, between two actors from our current touring production of As You Like It and university student group. The two actors, Emma Pallant (who is playing Jacques and Phoebe) and Ben Lamb (who is playing Charles, Le Beau, and Silvius), had really interesting perspectives on acting in the Globe and taking a show on tour and came with different experience levels as well. Emma has quite a bit of experience working in the Globe space, whereas Ben had a very fresh perspective on things as someone working here for the first time. The students had seen the production and were extremely interested, intelligent, and positive. We had a fun discussion about Emma playing Jacques, a character typically played by a male actor, and the way her gender affected the role of that character in the play as a whole. There was also some really fun discussion with Ben about doubling, and his thoughts on the character of Silvius. It was great to work with a such a positive group and two such interesting and dedicated actors, and getting to ask my own questions when it helped the discussions along.
Week 5 & 6
These two weeks have given me time to really start exploring the educational events on offer here at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, conveniently scheduled to begin after I am done working each day. They might actually be getting tired of seeing me at these events now, as I cannot get enough of them. But seriously, often twice a week I have a chance to attend an evening lecture called a Setting the Scene on a given play in our season, delivered by an expert scholar in the field. These are attended by a variety of people, scholars and interested audience members alike. For me it is like being a kid in a candy store, getting to hear several different dedicated and informed scholars take different approaches to introducing the same play over the course of my time here. I have been to multiple talks on All’s Well That Ends Well, Much Ado About Nothing, and As You Like It now, as well as post-show Question and Answer sessions with actors from All’s Well that End’s Well. In the coming weeks I am looking forward to talks on Doctor Faustus and Hamlet. I particularly enjoyed Tony Howard’s talk on Much Ado via film. He showed us a variety of clips from the earliest to the latest film versions of Much Ado, including a few scenes from the BBC Shakespeare Retold version of Much Ado that I found extremely enjoyable.
We also got in a really interesting dramaturgy request from the Faustus company I was asked to field. They wanted to know what early modern perceptions were of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V around the time Christopher Marlowe may have been writing Doctor Faustus (we think the play was probably first performed as early as 1588 or as late as 1592). I already knew some general history on Charles, with his role in Henry VIII’s “great matter” and his sacking of Rome and essentially holding the Pope hostage. What I learned through my research, however, helped highlight a deep structural continuity in Marlowe’s play of which I was not already aware. I have not spent as much time in my past work with Doctor Faustus as I have with other early modern plays, and I will freely admit that the middle portion of the play had always kind of baffled me. I understood (or thought I understood) the structure of the beginning and the end of play: Faustus seeks ultimate power through a deal with the devil for his soul, Faustus goes to Hell because of this deal. What happens in between is where I got lost: having gained infernal power on earth and the help of Mephistopheles, Faustus proceeds to engage in a series of hijinks and pranks that are far below the ambitions he expressions originally (I was really looking forward to seeing him wall Germany about with brass). But these pranks are not only below the ambitions Faustus originally expresses for the application of his new dark powers, the deep structure of the story we as audience members are being told had felt disjointed or simply uninteresting for me as well. Why of all the secular powers on earth should Marlowe choose to have Faustus visit Charles V, besides the nominal fact that Charles would be Faustus’ reigning monarch? How am I supposed to connect this visit with the others, like the visit to the Pope? And who cares about this Saxon Bruno guy that the Pope is having tortured? Sometimes when studying early modern plays, you can fall into a very specific kind of pitfall that leads you to underestimate a play: once you learn that certain parts of a play are the result of a collaboration or have been added later by other playwrights, the temptation for the scholar can be to dismiss to quickly and summarily what appears on the surface to be structural discontinuities as the flawed result of a play being coauthored. Plays like Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI and Pericles have at different times in their critical life fallen victim to this kind of reasoning. I knew before I started research for Doctor Faustus that scholars believe it to contain scenes not written by Marlowe, and I learned during my research here that the theater impresario Phillip Henslowe’s diary of the period contains a reference for a payment to the playwrights Thomas Rowley and William Birde to add scenes to the play. These scenes may be the “low” comic bits in the mid-portion of the play that appear in what is referred to as the B-text of the play, whereas these are lacking in what is thought to be the earlier A-text. So, without having known much about the play before I started research for it, I had already pre-judged the play as structurally sloppy due to additions after the original author’s death. There is already a problem with this attitude, however, from a scholar’s historical perspective: multiple authorship of plays was the norm in early modern London, not the exception.
My research on Charles further put the lie to my naïve preconceptions. As I learned once I started digging up information on how early modern Europeans would have perceived Charles, the seat of Holy Roman Emperor was perceived as the secular counterpart or compliment to the religious seat of the Pope. The Holy Roman Emperor ruled over the secular city of the human race, whereas the Pope ruled over the spiritual city. Furthermore, the first Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne (Holy Roman Emperor Charles I), was created by the Pope as a political buttress to his own power (and hence to the Catholic church), meant to help consolidate the church’s pan-European authority. Charles V consciously styled himself as a second Charlemagne after taking power, which naturally would have tapped into early modern European’s associations between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope in terms of a Europe-dominating Holy Roman Empire. This idea of a unified Europe was falling out of favor in the political views of the time as the individual nation states emerged from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern and Modern age, seeking as they were to consolidate and isolate their own national identities. Charles V’s amazing and rapid consolidation of power would have had some of the trappings of a revival of the past, therefore, for contemporary Europeans like Kit Marlowe (a past perhaps they wanted to leave behind, but which was forcing itself back onto the present political scene in the person of Charles V). Keeping all of this in mind as the historical and political backdrop for Doctor Faustus, as well as Charles V’s role in England’s break from Rome and the Catholic Church, I suddenly could see a deeper structural continuity in the play than I had previously. I could also see a greater ambition in the play, a larger scope of associative links with the shape of his world that Marlowe was building into his play for audiences- but links whose bonds were very much of the moment. Now that I had overcome the impediment of my earlier close-mindedness, I could see that the succession of scenes from the Pope to the Holy Roman Emperor in Doctor Faustus played upon deep religious, political, and historical associations in early modern Europe. Associations that tied into the more overt religious themes of the play and the protestant and anti-papist ideologies in circulation in Marlowe’s Elizabethan England. It occurs to me only now that Marlowe’s play may have suffered acutely and singularly a fate normally reserved for comedies from the period: the loss of sense of unity in structure of popular comedies from the period due to their reliance on topicality, that vital but ephemeral precious dramatic resource for comic playwrights. But Marlowe weaves topicality with more timeless strategies of themes (good versus evil, ambition versus human limitation, the existence of God and the Devil) and characterization in a way that is different from the comic’s, one that is less direct. Perhaps we still read too much of Shakespeare’s strategies in dramatic tragedy onto his contemporaries, burying underneath alternative and risky modes of constructing a vital, living tragic structure for early modern audiences.
Week 7 & 8
I am really cranking along now with mapping out the time slices for the End of Season Interviews, and we have had several more interesting dramaturgy requests from the companies. I put together a packet on sports in early modern Germany for the Faustus Company that brought its own challenges- mostly because there has been relatively less written in English on German sports than English and French. One of the main insights I gleaned from my research was the fact that sports were seen by the church as competition, in much the same way as the playhouses appear to have been. I knew that James I had made pronouncements in England regulating sports in relation to church-going, but I did not know that this concern was shared in Germany.
I have spent several hours now listening to the End of Season Interviews, and I have come to truly appreciate how much I am learning not just about the Globe but about Shakespeare and performance in general through these. I am working my way systematically now, starting with all the directors from 2006 (where the interviews start) to 2010. It is fascinating to hear the different ways the directors talk about their approach to their craft here at the Globe. One of the insights I have gained from working through these is the fact that the directors have similar things to talk about, regardless of genre. The Globe audience, and controlling or seeking not to control their reactions, is a general theme regardless of genre, in part because tragedies and histories as well as comedies get a lot of laughs in this space. Conversely, some directors of comedies find they are getting laughs where in fact they would rather have a personal, intimate moment be allowed to unfold in silence for a quiet and attentive audience. The general sense of the history of the development of this theater I am gaining from these interviews is great as well, given the continuity of people from year to year, some of whom run back to the days prior to the existence of this physical place. This is all, furthermore, getting paired off for me with my real time experiences observing the direction for Doctor Faustus.
Something else I have had a bit of a learning curve about since coming to the Globe is my growing awareness of the cultural differences in the way dramaturgy is organized in theaters in America and the United Kingdom. Coming here from the US, I was familiar with their unitary model, where a single scholar as dramaturg trains to become a kind of stand-alone figure in a professional theater. Here at the Globe we work in a more ensemble fashion, with no single person acting as main dramaturgical scholar for the companies. Rather, as a team we share equal responsibility for the research produced for the companies and we spread the labor evenly between us. I have found the habit we have developed here of pooling our knowledge while any given person is working on a dramaturgy inquiry to be extremely positive and engaging. In fact, if a document is not finished by one researcher, another will pick it up and finish it. While I was working on the sports question, I was free to simply mention to others what I was working on and several interesting leads on books and resources to look into were mentioned. And visa-versa when someone else is working on something: I can offer up anything I know of that might help them with their research. I can see strengths and weaknesses now on both sides, with something to be gained from both forms of dramaturgy, but overall I have to say that I have found the dramaturgical model here to be an extremely positive and mutually supportive environment to be working in. The camaraderie especially is an aspect I have enjoyed, and I think the way the ensemble-based dramaturgical work here disperses authority really contributes to that in a healthy way.
Week 9 & 10
I attended probably one of the single most significant events of my early modern scholar and practitioner life in these two weeks. A group of us from the Globe, both artistic and education and research, took a trip to the University of Bristol to participate in a lighting experiment held in one of their theater spaces. A reconstructed interior based on the Worcester College drawings of an early modern hall has been built within the shell of a modern theater space there. A candle lighting experiment was set up in this space for us to observe and take notes on. We used two kinds of candles: beeswax and tallow, both materials that would have been used in the period. The candles were hung in chandeliers over the stage and mounted on sconces on pillars on the sides of the stage, with seating areas in front and on either side of the stage area. We then got to watch actors from the Globe, in costume, perform the final scene from The Winter’s Tale and a scene from Middleton’s The Lady’s Tragedy under various permutations of lighting. The actors played the scenes with just the candles in the chandeliers and on the sconces lit; with just these lit plus actors holding torches, candles, and lanterns; with all of these lit and a few spot lights over the stage raised to a dim level; with each of these plus a light box on stage right and left providing ambient artificial light; and finally, natural light from outside was allowed in through slats in the walls high above the stage and added in to the mix of combinations of lighting.
There were three things in particular in all of this I found fascinating. First of all, I noticed that when the actors were not holding lit candles and only the chandeliers and sconces were lit, the outer perimeter rather than the center of the stage attained a kind of gravitational pull for the actors. This was because, in essence, they were finding their light without being directed to- and the most direct light that could fall on their faces was, in this experiment anyway, coming from the candles mounted on the sconces. The light directly above the stage from the chandeliers was not nearly as intense as the outer perimeter for the faces of the actors. The implications this level of lighting could have for staging practices in a future indoor reconstruction are, to say the least, exciting. Second, it was pointed out that when the actors carried on their own mobile light sources, like a torch or candle in a holder, they in effect became variable lighting designers. As they walked about the stage, they carried with them the effect a spot light would provide in a modern theater- except that here, because they themselves controlled the spot of light they were enveloped in, the actors could then also cast theirs upon other objects near them. So for example, when the reveal of the “statue” in The Winter’s Tale occurred while the actors were holding light sources, the actors clumped around the statue and held the light up to her to great theatrical effect. And finally, I was simply amazed by how rich and varied the language itself of early modern drama came across in that dim light- rather, I think its better to say “in that thick darkness”. The darkness itself, pervading the space and pooling up around the actors and our seats, became a central texture of the experience. I remember once, when I was an student in the Shakespeare at Winedale program in Texas, the power was knocked out in our theater-barn due to an electrical storm and we had the choice of moving forward or not with our performance that evening of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The theater barn we performed in is an open-air theater much like the Globe, except it is open to the elements on the sides and back, rather than on top. As a group, we decided to go forward with the performance. Lighting that evening was provided by the director of the program, James Loehlin, and his wife Laurel, holding flashlights in the audience balcony above the stage; and by a car’s headlights shining down the central entrance to the stage from the front of the theatre. We went on to perform The Tempest in these conditions, and despite the general lighting provided, my main memories of this performance are of disembodied voices incanting Shakespeare’s lines in the darkness. And the audience loved it. What has stayed with me ever since is the rich texture of the language itself that came forward that night, divorced from any reliance on or conditioning by the visual- except by the very palpable experience of darkness, which is a part of visual experience in its own way.
I had this exact same experience sitting in the University of Bristol’s reconstructed interior. The curves and edges, the rough patches and slippery places in the spoken drama of early modern theatre enveloped me in a way that it does not in any other space. I was especially struck by how little I needed the actors’ facial expressions as a guide to the sense and meaning of their words. In a strange way I would almost compare the experience to reading, in the way your imagination is unhooked a bit from the eyes and works simply by the logic of words and whatever images your mind wants to conjure in response to what is being said. The imagery and textures of sound produced by the actors, not the image of the actors on stage, worked on my imagination much more directly. As I mentioned above, I am really excited now to see how these lighting conditions affect staging practices in the new theater. The role of gesture and facial expression, in relation sound, will be especially exciting to watch develop in the new Indoor Jacobean theatre.
Week 11 & 12
These two weeks have taken on an exciting new tempo for my work. Along with continuing to categorize by time slice the archived End of Season Interview sound files, we are now conducting End of Season Interviews with the current companies. We have started with the All’s Well That Ends Well Company and will then be working our way through various members of the Much Ado About Nothing Company as well. Above all, I have been extremely honored by the trust the Globe Education department has placed in me in allowing me to conduct these interviews, at times running the interview on my own with a given actor or other company member. It has been incredibly rewarding, in particular, to get to speak to actors, directors, designers, text, movement, and voice coaches, casting directors and producers, all people that helped to build the plays I have seen several times this season. And now to get to speak to them about their involvement in the process and what they have learned from working on these plays has been invaluable.
I think this practice is especially good because of the general level of contact it maintains between theatre practitioners and scholars. When we get to sit down and actually talk to a given actor or director about their work here, the basic level of real human interaction that occurs helps to break down barriers of misperception that exists on both sides of the page/stage divide. They see that what we are interested in learning from them is nothing to be nervous about, and I suspect it must be nice for them to give an interview that is not going to be funneled into the London press as well. On our side, we get to hear directly from the source what went into preparing the given theatrical moments we have witnessed from the audience and we get to see how the front-end research we provided the companies during rehearsal comes out the other end as their season closes. I remember during the first couple of interviews we conducted, I was self-conscious about how I sounded given I was being recorded for something intended for research, but the people producing plays here are so positive and invested in this place I quickly forgot about that. The interview quickly becomes a conversation, one that you are very invested in, about what it means to perform early modern drama in this space and institution. I found it particularly fascinating to talk to actors from Much Ado About Nothing after talking to actors from All’s Well, as they had very different directors. The director for All’s Well, John Dove, had directed early modern drama for the Globe space before whereas Jeremy Herron, the director for Much Ado, had not directed any early modern work or directed in the Globe before. I was especially excited to speak with both sets of actors as I enjoyed and have a lot of respect for both productions. The main sense of difference I had between the story the actors had to tell about their process with Much Ado versus All’s Well, was that the company as a whole along with the director seemed to have gone on a mutual journey of discovery where the actors at times took the lead in making discoveries, while the All’s Well company had more to say about moments they played being crafted by a director who knew and was anticipating audience reactions in the Globe. That is not at all to say the actors in All’s Well were not making discoveries for themselves, or that actors in Much Ado were not directed to play certain moments in specific ways. It seems more a matter of emphasis with each process, and what I loved was that each production was such a success on its own terms.
These interviews also helped me think about these plays in juxtaposition in terms of their content as well. By talking to the actors playing Beatrice and Diana, Bertram and Claudio, Dogberry and Lavatch, Benedick and Parolles, Leonato and the French King, my mind suddenly started making deeper thematic and character-based links between these two plays that in turn expanded my understanding of these plays individually as well. Adding to this a collection of interviews with the designers for the two shows about what they picked up on in them and wanted to highlight, the process the casting director went through for each show, what a voice coach worked on with them, or a text coach like Giles Block, resulted in a process that was streaming insights constantly into my brain as we were also compiling excellent research data for future scholars.
Finally, I should add that we have actors here that are also Globe Education Practitioners, running workshops for students at the same time that they are performing in the shows here over multiple seasons. The interviews with these actors have an extra level of robustness, because they have simply had that much more time to think about acting in this space. What I learned from our interviews with other company members is that a form of institutional knowledge is preserved and passed on through these veteran actors- not in the sense that they are giving the newer actors notes, which is a big theatre no-no, but rather simply through example and the knowledge demonstrated by their acting practice here. Several new actors here have talked in their interviews about how helpful it was for them to rehearse and perform with actors that already had experience with this unique and often times initially intimidating space. The overall impression is of a continuous community of people over time, putting up the greatest plays ever written in one of the world’s exceptional theaters in one of the world’s exceptional cities.
Week 13 & 14
It is difficult to believe these are my final weeks here at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. I will avoid reflecting on this until the end of this diary entry, and focus instead on the work I have been doing at the end of my time here. These last few weeks have seen, first of all, the wrapping up of the End of Season Interviews that I will be working with-- more will happen with other companies as their performances wrap up, but that will be after I finish my internship. I especially enjoyed my first Interview with a director. This one was with Matthew Dunster, the director of Faustus and past productions with the Globe as well. This had a nice symmetry for me, as I also had the opportunity to sit in on and observe rehearsals for this production, seeing Matthew in action. This production of Faustus was simply a delight, especially considering how difficult this play is to stage effectively. A common pitfall with staging Faustus, or any theater-making really, is allowing the spectacle to run away with the show and leave the story behind. Directors can often be seduced into staging spectacle or some specific special effect for its own sake, in other words, to the neglect of the story. From beginning to end, Matthew’s production always met the challenge of staging spectacular special effects and design elements which were in turn in service of the story. Achieving both of these at once is very difficult, and his production pulled it off. To then get to talk to Matthew about his process, his thoughts on staging the play at the Globe, on working with the A- and B-texts, on early modern drama in general, provided me with a real sense of completion with my experience with the production.
During my time here at the Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, I have also been working on a research paper on theories of laughter. When I arrived here I had already done some work on the paper, and planned on suggesting a revised theory in relation Bergson, Freud, and Bataille, one that proceeded from an embodied perspective on laughter. A major change in my thinking occurred, however, while living in this city and working at this theatre. This is the longest I have lived in a European city, having only made week-long trips in the past. Really living, settling in and experiencing day-to-day life with its rhythms and contours, in a European capital like London, changes you. I mentioned in my first entry in this Diary the distinct pace of life that exists in London- even at the simple level of how fast you walk through the London Underground. When I visited here in the past, I remember experiencing that pace of life as an outsider and finding it fascinating even as I realized I did not have enough time to match it. Much like records that have to played at the right speed to work, when you match the pace of living in London the city comes into resolution for you. During my time here I got to experience that transition, from being out-of-pace with a blurry city and its fast-moving denizens to seeing it clearly and hearing its music. As I moved through that transition, my experience of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre changed as well. For the first time in my life, I experienced what it was like for the everyday to be suffused by the raw presence of a very specific manifestation of “history”. A history that rises up into the skyline along the north bank of the Thames and gazes across the river at you while you stand in front of the Globe. The mixture of modern, early modern, medieval, and earlier histories in the buildings in London march into the rhythms of your life and take up residence there as you settle into inhabiting the city as your home. Day trips to Oxford and St. Albans, and a week in Edinburgh, Scotland for the Fringe Festival, coupled with the experience of history I was having in London and amplified it. Finally, the reason I say a “specific kind of history”, is that this is not the same history that stands before you in a desert gazing at a rock formation, looking up at the Southern Cross in the night sky on the beach in the Southern Hemisphere, or listening to a high school football game on the radio as you blaze down the highway through the Texas panhandle in your ’72 Chevy Chevelle on a hot summer’s day with no air-conditioning besides two windows and your imagination. This is old, crowded European history, a cacophony of architectural timelines, worn down cobble-stones and Pizza Express, a crisp grey morning walking the trace of history and minding the gap. You live at the right speed in this city, and it admits you into the tissue of times that define it.
Going through this transition changed, in turn, my experience of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. The building itself gathers up this tissue and folds it over on itself, history and time itself bunch up into the seats and yard and the stage at the Globe. Time literally folds into space in there. And you begin to see not only several different cultures and theatre-going practices crisscrossing the audience, but the whole mélange of timelines and historical traces in London in general spreading like a net or wompy grid across the audience and actors. These lines run through you too, of course. I had the distinct experience one night, standing in the audience during a performance, of laughing “in history”. And for a moment it was as though my laughter was echoing down a corridor connecting us to ghostly afterimages of audiences in London’s distant past when these plays were first staged. It was not exactly as though I was transported into the past, laughing with the audience that night (not any more than London as a whole simply gives you this experience), but rather I experienced laughing in a kind of temporal echo chamber. I did not go anywhere, but the sound of my laughter bounced amongst the superimposition of several layers of culture and time all concentrated in one place. And like a bat’s echo-location, the sound of laughter we all shared the production of located me in a fragment of mixed time that draped down around me as I stood there and literally changed the way I see the globe.
I want to thank Amy Kenny and Sarah Dustagheer, two of my senior collogues at the Globe, for giving me an outlet to vent these thoughts and for challenging my thinking to continue along these lines. I would also like thank the Globe’s head Librarian and Archivist, Jordan Landes and Ruth Frendo, for fielding my thinking about life in London in general and at the Globe. Finally, my biggest thanks goes to Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper for giving me the chance to have this experience, for teaching me so much about Shakespeare and the Globe, and for creating so many rewarding opportunities for me during my time here- including this diary! I would not have had this life-changing experience without her making it possible, and I will forever be in her debt.