Performing at the Globe Essay -- Shakespeare Description Place Essays

Performing at the macrocosmI recently had the peak good fortune to do a one-week residency at Shakespeares humankind in capital of the United Kingdom, rehearsing and playing in the eldest Quarto version of juncture with the University of Texas Shakespeare at Winedale Program. Our experience there, behaveing 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 throng B. Ayres, of the University of Texas at Austin, and Patrick Spottiswoode, of the Globe Education department. The Globe, which opened two old age ago, was mean to function both as a theatre for professional surgical processs 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 actors memorial reconstruction of the play as adapted for performance, and its lean, fast 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 spot 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... ...al realities for us, calculate in the very architecture of the building. It was this sense of the rightness of the space, the congruity of these spoken communication and actions with this physical worl d, 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 cardinal Gentlemen of Verona in the prologue season of 1996 the stage was too big, the atmosphere to artificial, the actors unable to sleep with with the physical demands of the building. Yet striding onto that stage, feeling the embrace of those galleries, hearing the ringing clearness with which the wooden O gave us back Shakespeares 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.