The Quest for Shakespeare's Globe

Review Articles The Quest for Shakespeare's Globe D .F. ROWAN John Orrell. The Quest for Shakespeare's Globe Cambridge University Press 1983. 187 The title, timing, and achievement of Professor Orrell's book invite an examination within the broader context of the work of Elizabethan theatre historians over the nearly two decades since 1968. Herbert Berry in his article I Americans in the Playhouses' in Shakespeare Studies, 9 (1976) provides an admirable survey of the scholarship supporting the enterprise of the Globe from Malone at the end of the eighteenth century to the early '970s, and notes 1968 as a significant date. In that year G.E. Bentley completed his monumental ,acobean and Caroline Stage, and David Galloway mounted the first of the series of seminal International Conferences on the Elizabethan Theatre held at the University of Waterloo. The international scope of the enterPrise is reflected in the names of the participants in that first conference, among whom were the distinguished theatre historians Herbert Berry, Richard Hosley, and Glynne Wickham, coming respectively from Canada, the USA, and England. The majorrole played in the quest by Canada and Canadians was again underlined by the gathering of nearly all major theatre scholars during the meetings of the First World Shakespeare Congress held in Vancouver in 1971. The impetus given to theatre studies by these conferences has been picked up and focused in the special theatre seminars which have now become an established feature of the annual and on-going meetings of the revivified Shakespeare Association of America, The scholarly papers presented and discussed at all these conferences, seminars, and meetings have touched on nearly aU aspects of Elizabethan theatre history. The documentary and graphic evidence relating to over a dozen playhouses, public, private, and courtly, has been surveyed and reassessed in the light of new evidence and new perspectives, and the plays themselves have been pressed to the limit in a search for clues about their original productions. Wide-ranging and ec1ectic as these studies have been, they can all be fairly subsumed within the limits of Orrell's poetic, or at least romantic, title. The theoretical reconstruction of the Globe, the theatre of Shakespeare and Burbage, has been something of a Holy Grail to all these scholars; the knowledge of the UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 55, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1986 SHAKESPEARE'S GLOBE 425 physical structure of this theatre, and consequently of its playing conditions and conventions, must ultimately contribute to our understanding of the theatrical dynamics reflected in and supported by the plays of the world's greatest playwright. Such a quest must command the respect and allegiance ofany theatre historian. It is against this international background and within the context of a renaissance of Elizabethan theatre scholarship arising in the early 1970S that Orrell's achievement must be judged. He is an Englishman educated in England and now teaching at the University of Alberta, and thus working in the distinguished tradition ofF.M. Salter. In his 1976 survey of the field and the track, Berry does not mention Orrell, even as astarter; this is not surprising, as Orrell is a latecomer to the quest and his remarkable contributions are mainly the product of his work over the last half of the last decade. Nevertheless, this recent work alone is an ample testimonial to his stature as an inventive and imaginative, but also methodical and painstaking, scholar. In his book four major 'breakthroughs' are presented in an engaging colloquial style which movesus easilybutsurely from PeterStreet, the builder, layingout the foundations of the Fortune and the first Globe with his carpenter's rod and his surveyor's line, to the arcane mysteries of Renaissance theatre theory and Vitruvian modules, and ultimately through the trigonometry and physics which are made to yield the precise diameterofthe Globe theatre and its alignmenton the axis of the summer solstice in London. The first four chapters of this short seven-chapter book culminate in Orrell's statement that 'these two theatres [the Hope and the Globe] and very likely many of the other Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses were built to a common design whose plan was a circle, or apolygon inscribed within a circle...