Imagining, and Reimagining, the Globe (Wa DC Exhibit)
Of all the debates about Shakespeare, it is perhaps second only to the enduring controversy over the identity of the author himself: what exactly did the Globe Theater, where many of his plays were first performed and his troupe resided, look like?
Did it have 16 sides or 8, 20 or 24? The argument swirls with all the passion of Stratfordians versus Oxfordians, who each claim the playwright as their own.
Over the last 200 years, attempts have been made to reconstruct the Globe on almost every continent. And the theater’s basic design elements, such as they are known, have inspired loose architectural interpretations that range from the polygonal Festival Theater in Stratford, Ontario, to a Globe made entirely of ice hundreds of miles above the Arctic Circle in Sweden.
The continuing fascination with Shakespeare’s theater and the myriad efforts to replicate its spirit — and, in many cases, its actual form — is the subject of “Reinventing the Globe: A Shakespearean Theater for the 21st Century,” an exhibition that opens on Saturday at the National Building Museum here as part of the city’s six-month Shakespeare in Washington festival.
Read entire article at NYT
Did it have 16 sides or 8, 20 or 24? The argument swirls with all the passion of Stratfordians versus Oxfordians, who each claim the playwright as their own.
Over the last 200 years, attempts have been made to reconstruct the Globe on almost every continent. And the theater’s basic design elements, such as they are known, have inspired loose architectural interpretations that range from the polygonal Festival Theater in Stratford, Ontario, to a Globe made entirely of ice hundreds of miles above the Arctic Circle in Sweden.
The continuing fascination with Shakespeare’s theater and the myriad efforts to replicate its spirit — and, in many cases, its actual form — is the subject of “Reinventing the Globe: A Shakespearean Theater for the 21st Century,” an exhibition that opens on Saturday at the National Building Museum here as part of the city’s six-month Shakespeare in Washington festival.