Sunday, June 29, 2008

This Day in Theater History (The Globe Theatre Burns)


June 29, 1613—During a performance of the William Shakespeare-John Fletcher history play, Henry VIII, the Globe Theatre—not only the scene of most of The Bard’s greatest triumphs, but also a stage he had helped build himself and invested heavily in 14 years before—burnt to the ground.

The cause of the blaze was a cannon, jammed with gunpowder and wadding, ordinarily employed for special effects, such as fanfares. In one of the latter, according to an account written three days after the fire, some of the material lit on the thatched roof, "where being thought at first an idle smoke, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very grounds."

No account has come to light of any casualties at the event, though the above description mentioned that one onlooker "had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broiled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottle ale."

“A provident wit” and “ale”—how much does that sound like a character so popular even in Shakespeare’s own lifetime that the playwright had to bring him back, after everyone thought he was dead and buried, in a prequel (The Merry Wives of Windsor): Sir John Falstaff?

I read this account of the fire in Stephen Greenblatt’s
Will in the World, .just one in a whole slew of fine recent attempts to come to grips with the life and meaning of Shakespeare. The Bard continues to fascinate, nearly four centuries after his death, for three reasons, I believe:

1) his understanding of human psychology;
2) his infinite playfulness with language; and
3) the lack of abundant documentation, which has invited all kinds of speculation about his life, character and influences.

(My favorite Shakespeare theory—I’m not saying it’s true, mind you—came from the actor
James O’Neill. In Long Day’s Journey Into Night, son Eugene, through theatrical stand-in Edmund Tyrone, pours scorn on his father’s insistence that Shakespeare was Irish.

Well, what was wrong with the Old Man’s theory, says I? So much in Shakespeare’s life sounds typically Irish, if you ask me: all that lyrical poetry; the mixture of high comedy and crushing tragedy, sometimes in the same play; the way he made English do his bidding, rather than visa versa; and the considerable liberties he took with real people, such as Joan of Arc, in his history plays, with the last item illustrating my friend Brian’s frequently uttered claim that “It’s every Irishman’s prerogative to stretch the truth.”)

Interest in how Shakespeare was performed has risen along with the speculation about his life. That, in turn, has fueled interest in the Globe. James Shapiro’s
A Year in the Life of Shakespeare: 1599, tells how the theater came into being at Christmastime 1598, when Richard and Cuthbert Burbage—stars in many of Shakespeare’s greatest plays—approached the Bard and four other actor-shareholders in their company, The Chamberlain’s Men, with a proposal to buy a new site for the company, which was going homeless. The site would be in Southwark, just outside the city of London proper.

Even with a relatively cheap 31-year lease, Shakespeare & Co. were taking a huge gamble. For one thing, this was the first London theater by actors for actors, and you know how those creative types are—no head for business. But the entire enterprise was one that would make any modern risk manager break out in hives. Among the problems:

* The monarch’s displeasure—or, rather, the future monarch’s displeasure, since Queen Elizabeth I was aging and had no heir (something that nobody wanted to speak about too loudly, lest word get back to Bess Herself and she stuck you in the Tower of London), and the future royal family might well take exception to how the theater company had portrayed the forebears of the monarch in England’s past struggles over the crown;


* The plague—for obvious reasons, business went south when theatergoers feared catching a disease whose cause and cures they didn’t know;


* The reputation of their profession—Though audiences ate up the shows mounted by the Chamberlin’s Men, there was one significant group of Dissenters—in fact, they often were called “Dissenters” with a capital D—the Puritans. Sure, they were a minority now, but what if they seized power and succeeded in their dearest wish to close arenas of pleasure such as theaters?


* Fire—in Elizabethan times, a word much less metaphorical than real, as London would discover on a grand scale in 1666. And here, the deal proposed by the Brothers Burbage contained a cost-containment idea that looked okay at the time, but ended up costing them more dearly in 1613. The brothers would disassemble and transport all the material from their recently vacated venue, The Theater, as long as Shakespeare and the other four investors covered 10% of the new stage’s operating costs and its remaining construction expenses. o clamp down on the latter, the company dispensed with tile for the roof in favor of thatch, which, they all learned to their dismay 14 years later, was far more flammable.

After 1608, the Chamberlain’s Men began to perform in a second, more intimate setting, the Blackfriars Playhouse. Ron Rosenbaum, master of creative nonfiction, has a fine ironic account of how this second venue was replicated in, of all places, Staunton, Va.—birthplace of President Woodrow Wilson, a full 2 1/2 –hour drive from Washington, D.C.—in
The Shakespeare Wars.

Two and a half years ago, on a vacation in the Shenandoah Valley region, I had the pleasure of catching a performance in this newer
Blackfriars Playhouse of The Comedy of Errors, a wonderful opportunity to showcase how Shakespeare used all the resources of a comparatively bare-bones stage, language, the multiple talents of his crew (including singing and playing musical instruments), and close interaction with the audience. I hope to catch another performance again down there someday.

The burning of the Globe probably solidified Shakespeare’s decision to stay semi-retired, and he died three years later. The company rebuilt The Globe in 1614, but another one of the risk factors I mentioned earlier came to pass. In 1642, with Oliver Cromwell coming into his own as the new power in the land, the Puritans seized control and closed all the nation’s theaters. To add insult to injury, Cromwell’s men tore down the structure, leveled it and built tenement housing upon it.

It wasn’t until 1989 that the remains of the Globe were finally unearthed, by which time the dream of the American actor Sam Wanamaker was coming to fruition—the rebuilding of The Globe only 200 yards from the original.

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