Who ordered the rain and the cold for this town? Because I sure didn't. Apparently it's not usually quite this cold or this rainy in May, the locals tell us, but here we are. I read in the paper that "April showers bring May monsoons." How appropriate. Let's be serious--I am kind of a wimp when it comes to the cold. As evidenced by me taking up the whole first paragraph of this blog post complaining about it.
So ANYWAY, on to the real reason you're reading this post: the first of my two-part excursion to the Globe Theatre. You thought I was just being lazy with my blogging by missing a couple days, but it was semi-intentional. I wanted to have the whole experience before writing, ya know?
So, to get there on Friday, we got off at the Southwark Tube station and walked past the Tate Modern (a famous modern art museum) for this view of the Thames, St. Paul's Cathedral, and the Millennium Bridge. The Millennium Bridge is a steel suspension bridge spanning the Thames that is only for pedestrians, and I've walked across it several times. More on that later.
The first shot. Kind of pretty for being so grey and cold.
The smile belies my freezing state. When I'm cold I get kind of grumpy.
Less than 200 yards from the Millennium Bridge lies (cue epic music) THE GLOBE THEATRE!
As we learned from our Globe Exhibition tour (which was the reason we were there on Friday) this Globe is not, in fact, built on the original site. The real site is about 500 yards away and a couple blocks further in from the bank of the Thames. We actually went there, and it looks like this:
A plaque on a little bit of wall that used to be a brewery, according to our tour guide. This wasn't part of the tour, by the way--our program director took us here afterward, but our tour guide told us about it.
Kind of a pathetic memorial to one of the greatest literary figures of all time, isn't it? Sam Wanamaker (an American actor and director), who visited the site in 1949, thought it was lame too, and it inspired him to campaign and build a new Globe Theatre for London. The new theatre, which was about 20 years in the making, opened in 1996.
Right down the street from the old Globe site you can see the plaque pictured below:
This is where the Rose Theatre stood, a competitor with Shakespeare's Globe. An open sewage ditch ran nearby, which made going to this theatre a rather aromatic experience, as you might imagine. There's a reference to this in one of Shakespeare's plays, actually. Ever heard the line
What's in a name? A Rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
And you thought Shakespeare was being all philosophical and poetic right there.
Right next to the Globe Theatre there's the Globe Theatre Exhibition, which is kind of a museum that has a lot of information about the Globe itself and Elizabethan theatre--things like sound effects, props, and costuming.
A corset, a French farthingale (bum roll) and a hoop skirt. Boy, am I glad I didn't live then. Corsets are NOT for me.
A costume for Queen Elizabeth I made using authentic materials and sewing techniques. Amazing.
After our Globe Exhibition tour, we walked across the Millennium Bridge to take another train home. It took us about 15 minutes to get halfway across the bridge because we stopped to take lots of pictures along the way.
If all the world's a stage, and the Globe is a stage, and I have the Globe in my hands, does that mean I have the whole world in my hands?
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