ABSTRACT
The replica playhouse erected on the Bankside in London is called, officially, not ‘The Globe’ – the original name for the theatre in which the Lord Chamberlain’s Men/King’s Men played – but ‘Shakespeare’s Globe’. The title explains the rationale behind the theatre’s construction: in getting the Globe back, it is thought, something about Shakespeare will be returned to us. For a similar reason, the Rose is being ‘reconstructed’ in Lenox, Massachusetts, oddly, and questionably, because, says the website, it was ‘Shakespeare’s first theatre’; while the replica Blackfriars theatre in Staunton, Virginia, was built to be ‘a laboratory. We’re going to learn so much.’1 It is powerfully believed that the shape and nature of the playhouses for which Shakespeare wrote are elements of his drama: only by recreating his spaces can we recover some of the dramatic meaning of the plays. For ‘Shakespeare invented his dramatic construction to suit his own particular stage’, wrote William Poel, one of the founders of the idea of replicating Shakespearean theatres and performances; ‘the plays were shaped to suit the theatre of the day and no other.’2
