It was polygonal and open to the sky in the center, like its modern counterpart, built near the original in 1997. The theater had been newly rebuilt (a story well told by Shapiro 1-7), using the timbers of the Theater in Shoreditch, originally constructed in 1576. As several critics have urged, sorting out the sacred and the secular in Elizabethan and Jacobean England is not as straightforward as it seemed to become during the Enlightenment, and Shakespeare's plays arguably appealed in a serious way, as his theater suggests, to the Christian assumptions of his audience (Cox, Knapp, Shuger).ģThe earliest recorded performance of Julius Caesar is in the “straw-thatched” Globe Theater, as seen by Thomas Platter on Septem(Schanzer, “Platter,” 466). While Shakespeareʼs plays indeed deal exclusively with the saeculum (the “secular” world of common experience and observation), it is not clear that they proceed as if the sacred context of human action were irrelevant, especially where moral expectation is concerned. For many critics, such as Stephen Greenblatt, this symbolic location is no more than a vestige of the biblical history plays-a symbol that has been “emptied out” by the secular stories of the plays themselves. At the same time that the public theaters were located in a socially and politically ambiguous space, they also symbolically located their stories between the “heavens” above and “hell” below. (Oddly, two plays with settings in ancient Greece are the principal exceptions: Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens.) Moreover, Shakespeare arguably took the moral context of his theater more seriously than Marlowe did. Yet Shakespeareʼs plays are seldom as caustic and dark as those of another contemporary, Christopher Marlowe. Shakespeareʼs commitment to the public theaters suggests in itself that his political ambition was more modest than that of his contemporary, Ben Jonson, if only because Shakespeare appears to have made no attempt to succeed as a court playwright, as Jonson did. All were located in the London suburbs, with competing political authorities, social ambiguity, and relative freedom from official control (Mullaney). It will be useful here to summarize his findings by distinguishing the same four shifts in theatrical style that mark the history of criticism outlined above-from the original performance at the Globe in 1599 to neo-classical, Romantic, modern, and postmodern, with particular attention to concurrent political changes in each case.ĢThe Globe Theater was one of several public theaters to which Shakespeare remained committed throughout his entire career. Scattered among his bookʼs informative pages are suggestions about why production values changed, but his real strength is in recording the changes themselves. John Ripleyʼs census of English and North American theatrical performances alone for 1599 to 1973 runs to twenty-four pages (287-311), and his book remains unsurpassed, with its thorough attention to changes in play text, actors in various parts, alterations in acting and theater style, costume, and venue. 1 Julius Caesar is unusual among Shakespeareʼs plays in that a book-length study has been devoted to the history of its production on stage from the beginning to the late twentieth century.
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