British accent please.
Natural speed please.
Thank you ! :)
Welcome to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. You’ve chosen to listen to this audioguide to discover this famous building. You will learn about theatre in Shakespeare’s time, and as you will see, it was pretty different from contemporary theatre.
For a long time, theatre was considered as a vulgar form of entertainment, much less respectable than reading for example, because only the nobility could read. Most people didn’t go to school, so they didn’t learn to read and obviously, cinema and TV
didn’t exist. So everyone watched plays.
At the beginning, theatre was itinerant, which means that theatrical troupes went from village to village and performed in the street, in front of a small audience. But watching plays became very popular during Queen Elizabeth’s reign: around 20,000 people a week were watching plays in London. So they had to build fixed theatres, like the Globe theatre in London.
The Globe Theatre was built on the River Thames in 1599. Shakespeare described the Globe Theatre as the "Wooden O" because it was circular with an open roof.
It was made of wood and straw and was destroyed in 1613 by a fire. It was rebuilt a year later and then demolished in 1645. A new theatre was reconstructed to the original plans in 1996.
At the time, there was no lightning, so plays were performed in the afternoon. It had seats around the walls which cost two pence. And if you paid three pence you had a cushion, it was more comfortable. However, here, in front of the stage, which is called the pit, the spectators were not protected from the rain, so places were cheaper: it was about a penny, but the people had to stand for the duration of the play, just like you right now. The people who stood in the pit to watch the plays were called “groundlings”, because they stood on the “ground”. The stage had a trap door, through which actors could appear or disappear.
Watching plays at the time was very different from watching plays today. Indeed, when you go to the theatre, you’re supposed to be quiet, and well-behaved. Well, in Shakespeare’s time, the spectators were asked to react to the play: cheer the actors if they liked the play or boo them if they didn’t! They could even throw rotten fruit at them.
Some plays would involve musical elements – like the ball scene in Romeo and Juliet for example. That’s why there were boxes for musicians, right behind the stage. But as you can imagine, there were no complicated special effects to make the plays exciting, as in fact Shakespeare didn’t need them: he used his words instead. His plays were so
well-written that he could make the audience sad, happy, excited, or even terrified.
Indeed, he used 18,000 words, much more than any other writer. He even completely made up 2,000 new words such as “eyeball” and “moonbeam”, for example. He was the first writer to really create words, so it is thanks to him that, today, the English language is so flexible!
