Theatre site - from Globe theatre research

Site

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

Shakespeare's Globe Rebuilt edited by JR Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (advisory editor Andrew Gurr) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK: 1997