‘All which it inherit’: Shakespeare, Globes and Global Media

Summary

Shakespeare’s association with something called ‘the Globe’ began in the late 1590s, when the first playhouse of that name was built in South-wark. Shakespeare’s plays had been and would be performed in other locations, but the Globe has held a near-monopoly on the imaginations of later generations. There have been Globe theatres in England, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, Canada and the United States and no doubt elsewhere. In 1997 ‘Shakespeare’s Globe’, reconstructed with assiduous scholarly care, opened near the original site on the South Bank of the Thames. Scale drawings, physical models, cinematic representations, editions of the plays, virtual reality tours and countless references in scholarly and popular literature sustain the almost automatic pairing of playwright and playhouse. ‘The Globe’ has become a near synonym for Shakespeare’s work in the theatre.

This would not have been the case if the playhouse had been given a different name such as the Rose or the Curtain, for the local and historical embeddedness of the Globe is balanced by its being at the same time a reference to the world as a whole. Such a name helps reinforce the frequent claims that Shakespeare's plays are universal either in their appeal or in the accuracy and completeness of their representation of the human world. Before such a contemporary expression was ever uttered, Shakespeare had become a 'global' author.