The brain-child of American actor Sam Wanamaker, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre on London’s Bankside is part of a global proliferation of such reconstructions, which includes replicas in the USA, Germany, Japan and Australia. In an event which has been mythologized in narratives of the reconstruction, the project was initiated when Wanamaker attempted to find the ‘real’article in Southwark during a 1949 trip to London. Disappointed to find nothing but a plaque engraved with the words ‘Here stood Shakespeare’s Globe’, Wanamaker began in earnest his campaign to rebuild the Globe in the early 1970s. In 1997 the Globe began operating as a fully functional commercial theatre and most years Wanamaker’s wish that at least one production every season ‘be as “authentic” as possible’has been realized. 1 The project is, however, still haunted by the absence Wanamaker sought to vanquish in the construction of the theatre. Driven by the desire to re-create Shakespeare’s theatre, the building and its inhabitants, paradoxically, become sites for the performance of loss. As a ‘live’phenomenon, performance exists only ever in the present, shadowed by traces of absence and loss which are underscored when the performance ceases to be enacted. The Globe offers an especially heightened manifestation of this proposition, particularly where the building and original practices productions are concerned. Like much performance and theatre scholarship, which is concerned with documenting material traces in order to reanimate the performance event, the Globe may be read as producing what Peggy Phelan would call ‘an illustrated corpse, a pop-up anatomical drawing that stands in for the thing that one most wants to save, the embodied performance’. 2 This situation is paralleled in one of the major strands of scholarship on the nascent Globe which saw it as an educational opportunity to recover lost theatrical practices. 3 In contrast, the other main strand of early Globe criticism was concerned to explore the ideological underpinnings of the project. 4 In an effort to develop further the growing body of criticism on the Globe’s cultural