Shakespeare's theatre

The story

A boy from Stratford

William Shakespeare was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, an English town, the son of a craftsman and glove-maker who had also been a town magistrate. He studied at the local school, where the main subject was Latin. At eighteen he married Anne Hathaway, who was twenty-six, and they had three children: Susanna and the twins Hamnet and Judith. Little Hamnet died at the age of eleven, in 1596.

We do not know much about these years. Then, around 1590, Shakespeare was in London, the biggest city in England, where he worked as an actor and was already beginning to write for the theatre. In 1592 another writer mentioned him with scorn as an “upstart crow”, a sign that he was already having success.

Theatre in London

In London, in the age of Queen Elizabeth I, theatre had become a popular entertainment. Until shortly before, companies had performed in the yards of inns or in the houses of noblemen. In 1576 an actor and builder, James Burbage, had the first permanent wooden theatre built outside the city, and simply called it “The Theatre”. Others followed, such as the Curtain and the Rose. The theatres were outside the walls, first to the north in Shoreditch and then on the south bank of the Thames, where the city authorities, worried about public order and epidemics, had less power.

The Elizabethan theatre was a round or many-sided building, open to the sky in the middle. The stage jutted out into the audience. The poorest people, called “groundlings”, stood in the yard in front of the stage and paid a penny, while the richer ones sat in the covered galleries. Plays were performed in the afternoon, by daylight, and the audience was noisy: they ate nuts, made comments and joined in.

There were no actresses: women's parts, like Juliet or Lady Macbeth, were played by boys. The scenery was simple, and a lot was left to the words, the costumes, the music and the imagination of the spectators. This is why Shakespeare's texts contain so many descriptions of place and time.

A company and a Globe

In 1594 Shakespeare joined a company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, of which he was actor, author and also partner. In 1599 the company built a new theatre, the Globe, on the south bank of the Thames, using the timber of the old Theatre. Many of Shakespeare's masterpieces were staged here. When James I came to the throne, in 1603, the company became the king's own, the King's Men.

Shakespeare wrote about thirty-eight plays, including comedies, tragedies and history plays, and 154 sonnets, that is, poems of fourteen lines. Among the best-known titles are “Romeo and Juliet”, “Hamlet”, “Othello”, “King Lear”, “Macbeth”, “A Midsummer Night's Dream” and “The Tempest”. In 1613 the Globe burned down during a performance of “Henry VIII”: a cannon shot used as a stage effect set fire to the thatched roof. It was rebuilt the following year; in 1642 the Puritans, who considered theatre a sin, had the theatres closed, and the Globe was pulled down soon afterwards.

The book

Shakespeare died in 1616, aged fifty-two, in his home town. Seven years later two of his fellow actors gathered his works in a big volume, the “First Folio” (1623), with thirty-six plays. Without them, more than a dozen plays, including “Macbeth” and “The Tempest”, would not have come down to us. In 1997 a Globe rebuilt on the basis of historical records was opened in London, near the site of the original, where his plays are still performed today.