SHAKESPEARE AND THE GLOBE THEATRE
Shakespeare was a playwright and poet, the greatest writer of the English language. He was mainly an entertainer, someone who wrote plays to attract people who paid to watch them. Most of these people could not read and write. In his days he was as popular as a TV series today.
He wrote for his living. He usually wrote about popular stories or events that people knew but there are also stories that Shakespeare made up himself. He didn’t write stage directions in his scripts. His first plays are “Richard III” and “Henry IV” but the play he put first on stage was “Julius Caesar”.
At this time, most of the London’s theatres were on the south bank of the river Thames, outside the city of London. This was because theatres had a bad reputation; they made people take time off work and the crowds of people from different places could make people getting ill more easily.
Shakespeare’s theatre opened in 1599. It was a three-storey open-air theatre where about 3,000 people could watch a play. It was one of the four biggest theatres in London. Rich people could pay for a seat, usually on the balconies but the poorer paid less and stood up, usually in the courtyard. The “Globe Theatre” got its name from the logo of the theatre showing Hercules carrying a globe while its motto was
“ THE WHOLE WORLD IS A STAGE “
Shakespeare didn’t have lighting, microphones and moveable sets. So, he performed his plays early in the afternoon when there was enough light and from May to September when the weather was good and not rainy. Actors needed loud voices so that everyone could listen. Women didn’t play and boy actors played their roles. The audience understood that the scene has changed when the actor said for example “Here is the forest at last”.
Shakespeare and his actors shared the money that people paid, so it was important to write and perform plays that a lot of people liked. He wrote plays to suit his audiences who liked romances, historical events, tragic stories and comedies so that people chose to come to his theatre rather than going to another one!
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