The story about Sam Wanamaker's 27-year battle to rebuild Shakespeare's Globe theater in London more than 400 years after it was closed down by order of Oliver Cromwell's Puritan government.
Imagine
this: it’s three o'clock on a blazing hot August afternoon, and we're in
London, in a theater perched on the edge of a murky river Thames, and the place
is jam-packed. Up on the stage they're near
the end of a performance of Julius Caesar,
and the evil Cassius is face-to-face in the dead of night with the ghost of the
slain emperor:
“Who
comes there? I think it is the weakness of mine eyes that shapes this monstrous
apparition. It comes upon me. Art thou any thing? Art thou some god, some
angel, or some devil, that mak’st my blood run cold . . .”
Spellbinding,
isn’t it? But there’s something strange going on. Who are those rowdy, rough looking people milling
around in front of the stage, their heads level with the actors’ feet. A while ago one of them grabbed Brutus’s sandaled
foot when he was in full stride! They’re a boisterous mob. They cheered Caesar
when he first came on, and they tossed tomatoes at Brutus. It’s quite a
spectacle!
If you think that’s odd, look around you.
Other things don’t ring true; the audience is all done up in Elizabethan dress! And why are Caesar and Brutus’s wives, Calphurnia
and Portia, being played by teenage boys? Why are there no women actors? And yuk!
This is disgusting, there’s an ammonia-like stench seeping out of our neighbors
sitting on these hard wooden benches.
It's as though nobody’s had a bath for weeks, months, even. And there, at the foot of the stage, is that
man really peeing on the floor? Yes, by
God, he is!
The theater itself is unusual yet
attractive. The building seems circular, but if you look more carefully you’ll
see it really has twenty sides. About
three-quarters of the thatched-roofed circle have three stories of oak benches,
all facing inwards. And in the heart of it
all there's a big space open to the sky that lets in the daylight and London’s
much maligned weather, not to mention one or two pigeons and sparrows.
Out into this open space juts the stage,
big, more than forty feet wide. The theater’s
roof, supported by stout columns, at least protect the actors from the
elements. In the rest of the sunlit open
area, on the three sides of the stage, and with no seating at all, are all
these noisy, unruly people. There must be several hundred of them.
So what's going on? You’ve probably guessed what’s going on. The truth is that we're back in time, and the
year is 1599. This is The Globe, the
very cradle of world theater, on whose stage many of Shakespeare's plays – and those
of many others – were seen for the first time.
Little does this crowd know that, fourteen years from now, during a
spirited production of Henry V, a
cannon will be fired to mark the king’s entrance, and a shower of sparks will
set the theater’s thatched roof ablaze and destroy the place in little more
than an hour. The Globe was rebuilt, and performances continued until 1642,
when Oliver Cromwell’s burgeoning Puritans, who thought theater to be immoral
and blasphemous, closed down every theater in England. Two years later the site was leveled and
tenement housing rose in its place. And
Londoners, aware neither of Shakespeare's greatness nor of his legacy to
literature, forgot about The Globe and left no monument, stone or other mark of
its fame or its existence.
Or so it seemed. But 300 or so years
later, in 1945, there was a sudden glimmer of hope that The Globe might be
brought back to life. American actor-director Sam Wanamaker was on a working
visit to London and took an hour or two off to search the south bank of the
Thames for such a memorial. There, on
the actual site of the long defunct theater he found a blackened, neglected
bronze plaque on a brewery wall.
Over the years, Sam Wanamaker and his
friends claimed that Shakespeare’s historic theater deserved more worthy recognition,
and it was more than a dozen years before he came up with an inspired
idea. Suppose he could raise enough
money to rebuild the theater on its original site, exactly as it was in the
1500s, built by master craftsmen using the same materials? No nails or screws please,
but real joinery, with good old Elizabethan doweling. And suppose there were
buildings nearby housing an education and a theatrical research center, with an
exhibition, together with a movie theater, an Elizabethan tavern, car parks,
and apartments for the people who’d staff these places? Now, there
would be a worthy commemoration of the man, his work and his theater!
But Sam soon found that the stuffy, conservative
British establishment was skeptical of his ambitious plan, believing the
theater would turn out to be a flashy tourist attraction. Partly to overcome
this, with the help of Diana Devlin, a noted drama academic, he began to promote
his vision to the British public, and in the U.S. In 1972 (all of twenty-seven years after he
found that bronze plaque on the bank of the Thames) he staged Hamlet with a cast of talented actors in
a rough and ready canvas and scaffolding auditorium near the original site of The
Globe. I was there, and it was a boldly
avant-garde production, and some thought it too much so. In the play, the
characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern roared into Elsinore on motorbikes in
black leather gear; old Polonius, from behind the arras, used a tape recorder
while spying on Hamlet's conversation with his mother in her bedroom. And in the final, murderous fencing match
between Hamlet and Laertes, the points were lit up on a garish digital neon
scoreboard.
Though the show certainly started
people talking about Sam, the production may have done his venture more harm
than good. It played into the hands of his many critics, those modern day
Puritans who already believed his plan was to create a Disney-like commercial showplace.
And dammit, wasn’t this fellow an American?
The British media were scornful and academics, to whom Shakespeare was deadly
earnest stuff, questioned his gravity and integrity. Truth be told, this first
attempt failed to explain his brilliant concept to the skeptical Brits.
One year after the Hamlet production, Sam tried again, presenting a less sensational
production of Anthony and Cleopatra
on the same site, in which Vanessa Redgrave played the lead. This, too, was a failure, but for no fault of
the now desperate Sam Wanamaker. Heavy rains flooded the makeshift theater, and
the play was taken off well before the end of its season. By this time The Globe Playhouse Trust, which
Sam had set up to raise funds, had become insolvent. The public hadn't taken Sam seriously, and an
ill wisher warned Diana Devlin, "Working for Sam, you will have to prepare
large quantities of ready mixed concrete to support his castles in the
air. And he won't have the money to pay
for the concrete . . . "
But Sam, seen by many as a willful and
difficult man, was not ready to give up, and each obstacle he confronted only seemed
to strengthen his resolve.
What
his opponents never understood was that this was, for him, no mere business
venture. It was a passionate one-man crusade to recreate not only a thriving
Elizabethan theater, but also an educational center that would enable tens of
thousands of adults and children to study drama, and to learn what it’s like to
produce and act a play on The Globe’s unique stage. This side of the hoped-for
enterprise, Globe Education, would offer a remarkably wide range of workshops,
courses, lectures, on-stage readings, and even distance learning programs.
After
the failure of Anthony & Cleopatra,
Sam already faced a loss of £50,000 ($80,000). In the next year he lost more,
and in the next more again. The ultimate
blow came when the British government, itself in financial trouble, withdrew
its annual grants of £37,000 ($60,000).
Six
more years passed, while Sam’s plan lay dormant, and in 1982 he made a radical
change of strategy. If Britain was
unprepared to fund a living memorial to its greatest literary figure, he
argued, why not turn to America for the lion’s share of the money? At home several years earlier he had set up
the Shakespeare Globe Center (ISGC) in Chicago, an education and research body
to study practices in 16th Century Shakespearean theater, and at the old Globe.
Now, with help from mostly volunteer sources, he set up a flagship headquarters
for the center in New York, and created several more across the country and in
Canada. As a sort of parent to the SGC he registered an umbrella organization
called the International Shakespeare Globe Center (ISGC). Artfully, he gave
this a set of broad, non-commercial sounding aims, including “to improve . . .
understanding of Shakespeare, both in performance and education.”
He
then made an inspired choice. He persuaded Armand Hammer, the internationally
known, egocentric oil billionaire, to become the nominal head of ISGC in New
York. After nearly two decades of failure and disappointment, Sam and his
supporters experienced a fresh upsurge of hope.
Hammer gave a considerable sum of money to the new organization, and his
name alone lent the plan both the legitimacy it needed, winning the support of
a significant number of the tycoon’s friends and corporate leaders. Soon
afterward, ISGC mounted a ten-city fund-raising tour in America and Canada that
not only raised enthusiastic financial support but also created awareness of
the Globe concept.
But
there were more dark clouds ahead. A
clause in Sam's contract with the landowners and the local town council for lease
of the proposed Globe site had ordained that, if no building work had begun
within two years, the agreement would become null and void. So when problems
pushed the building schedule beyond that time, the deal fell apart in 1984.
Quickly, Armand Hammer, a shrewd businessman and money manager, withdrew his
active support from the plan, though he did agree to remain ISGC’s titular
head.
Smarting
from Hammer’s withdrawal, and infuriated by what he saw as a breach of
contract, Sam sued the landowners and the borough of Southwark in London’s High
Court, and the case lingered, wasting valuable time. But when the judge handed
down his decision he ordered Southwark to pay ISGC £9 m). ($14 m.)
It
looked as though the Globe plan was saved again. Flushed with confidence, Sam
Wanamaker planned an International Shakespeare Week in Britain, which he
conceived as a £16 million fund-raising campaign. However, after fewer than 1000 people took
part compared with his estimated 20,000, the event ended with a net loss of
£47,000 ($75,000). Fortunately, by this time Sam had won the hearts of a good
proportion of the world's leading Shakespeare scholars. His tireless efforts, from international
music concert tours and educational events to corporate and private sponsorship
opportunities, had raised enough capital at least to begin work in earnest.
From here on, Sam decided, he would fund a single segment of the theater at a
time, cross his fingers and pray that money would come in bit by bit. A major
morale booster was the fact that the Royal Family was taking an interest, and
that Prince Philip had agreed to be the theater's patron, and be present at
ceremonies to mark various stages in the theater’s construction.
On
July 16, 1988, Shakespeare's birthday, Sam and his devotees celebrated the
official start of work, during which actress Judi Dench donned a yellow hard
hat and drove a bulldozer. In the
following year the theater's foundations were completed. Progress was slow, but
over the next five years the new Globe became an intriguing and much
talked-about feature on the Thames bank. At last, everything was looking good.
And
then, five years later in 1993, the unimaginable happened. Sam Wanamaker died
of cancer at the age of 74, three and a half years before the curtain would
rise for The Globe's first full season. But by then he was vindicated, and
assured that the highs and elation of his 25 year crusade had been worth the
abject lows of rejection and disappointment. Only seven months later, his chief
architect and close friend, Theo Crosby, died. He, too, did not live to see the
theater’s first performance. Nor did Sam’s wife, Charlotte, who also died only
months before the opening ceremony.
But
Sam and Charlotte were high in the audience’s minds at The Globe’s final opening
ceremony in June,1997. Zoë Wanamaker, their daughter, watched by Queen
Elizabeth and Prince Philip, stepped onto the stage and spoke the lines from
the Prologue to Henry V:
O!
For a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The
brightest heaven of invention:
A
kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And
monarchs to behold the swelling scene .
. .
It wasn’t only the building materials –
English oak, thatch from the county of Norfolk and plaster mixed with goat hair
– that are identical to those in the original theater. The new Globe presents
its plays in much the way it did in the late 1500s. There are no stage sets, no
special décor, no microphones and no spotlights. Since performances are mostly
held in daylight, the actors, never more than sixty-six feet from anyone in the
auditorium, can see the faces of everyone in the audience, and interact with
them. Remember that wild mob that was free to roam in the seat-less area around
the stage? These were “the groundlings,” poorer citizens, sailors home from the
sea and mostly illiterates, who came to the theater as a change from nearby
entertainments such as bearbaiting and cockfights. There are still groundlings
today, who pay only £5 ($8.00) for a ticket. Though better heeled, more
educated and far better behaved, they can still get pretty rowdy and boisterous
during performances.
Sam
Wanamaker didn’t just rebuild a theater, though that would have been enough to
hand down to posterity. Thanks to The Globe’s worldwide educational program,
children and adults on every continent are learning to act, to understand and
interpret Shakespeare’s nearly 40 plays, and to pass on their knowledge and
passion to their own and future generations.
Now, there’s a true legacy.
ooo00ooo
