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The Elizabethan playhouses in London were (mostly) all built on the outside of the city walls (seen as not politically/socially acceptable).
Odeon is now on the fringe of the city frame (within the frame) for different reasons. Historically,..
- at the time (1594-1604) were an oversupply of ampitheatre playhouses in London
- amiptheatre playhouses were all on the periphery of London, outside city walls in an 'entertainment ghetto' alongside animal baiting and brothels - a bustling unfashionable locality
- many spectators would have felt that in attending the Globe, they were engaging in something slightly risque
Design
The form: there was no obvious medieval tradition of circular or polygonal structures apart from animal baiting arenas - but hardly likely that such a grand structure would be purely imitating these. Theories below:
- Stonehenge
- similarity with Stonehenge dimensions (dressed inner faces form tangents to a circle of just over 97 feet across - Globe was around 99 foot); however, from the centres of the stonehenge stones the same measurement on average is 99 feet just like the posts at the Globe...but no other similarities...
- Vitruvius & the Roman ampitheatre
- Vitruvius's theatre plan was round
- sound rises in orderly concentric circles from its source, so also the theatre ranges its degrees of seats in the cavea of the auditorium in a plan developed from the circle
- the whole theatre is proportioned in imitation of that harmony which the late Hellensitic Platonists posited as the fundamental tendency of the phenomenal world...
- while Vitruvius makes these connections between nature and art, acoustics and architecture, he describes the particular way in which a theatre is laid out according to a pattern of 4 equilateral triangles inscribed within a circle, a pattern borrowed from astrologers who used it to describe the harmony of the heavenly spheres
- the Roman ampitheature uses only half a circle
- What the Globe and Roman ampitheatres have in common is not so much a design tradition as the natural laws governing the transmission of sound
- The 'Globe' or world
- the Elizabethans thought of their theatres as a little world, its stage cover a heaven, its cellar a purgatory
- The body
- book III (Vitruvius) describes the body and proportions of the circle within the body - see the homo ad quadratum image
Construction
- built with timber from another theatre building ('The Theatre')
- deeply influenced the design of the Fortune playhouse
- 20 sided polygon
- Alberti and Vitruvius both attest to the fact that round or polygonal theatres were designed this way for their acoustic qualities.
Daylight, open air
- similar to a sports arena, some playhouses (eg. Fortune) had been used for bear baiting
- 'anti-illusionistic' effect of the daylight auditiorium
- unomodified by the effects of illusionistic lighting
- interplay between stage and audience is enhanced (lighting, proximity)
- daylight - naturalism
- audience can more clearly see each other as well - more likely to get caught up in the crowd's gestures and emotions
- orientation of the original Globe was 48degrees East of true North meaning that the stage was always in shade
- this angle is also very close to the azimuth of the midsummer sunrise on this site
- intended to use only during the Summer months
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