The country that gave birth to Shakespeare can be expected to be quite proud of their literary heritage. This didn’t escape our notice during our barely week-long escape to the United Kingdom (really just London) to attend the CFE-CMStatistics conference in December. We arrived on the evening of Friday, December 12, and already on the short ride on the Elizabeth Line from Heathrow to our hotel near Tottenham Court Road we were greeted by the myriad of advertisements for plays and musicals happening throughout the West End district and beyond.
Which isn’t to say I’ve been to that many countries, but none of the other places I’ve visited have appeared to be this interested in plays. Even Japan, which is about as literary as countries can be, only really has (at least from a common pedestrian’s standpoint) just about a handful of shows at select places. In London they’re practically everywhere: just on one of our evening walks between Westminster and Covent Garden we passed by at least five, showing everything from mainstream hits like My Neighbor Totoro and The Devil Wears Prada to lesser known works by debutant playwrights.
And then there’s the Shakespeare element to it all. Anyone who studied the English language in their schooldays would have encountered at least one of Shakespeare’s plays. My wife and I happen to be huge fans of them. She herself is a big theatre nerd. So when the opportunity arose to finally visit London, as soon as we got our visas we immediately booked tickets to see a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream happening at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater in the Bankside district.
The Globe Theatre is itself a historical curiosity. We learned through its guided tour that the current Globe is only a recreation – initiated by an American, no less! The original Globe, built in 1599, stood in a location about 230 meters away from the current one. Its actual foundations were rediscovered in 1989 beneath the parking lot of Anchor Terrace on Park Street. Unfortunately, because Anchor Terrace was itself a listed historical building, further excavations could not be permitted. Instead, the original position is marked by a line on the ground and commemorated with a plaque.
The new Globe was built as close to the river as possible to recreate the original atmosphere, and following descriptions found in old maps and textual references, even complete with a thatched roof. Looking at it from outside via the esplanade along the Thames, it almost feels like seeing the original. Sam Wanamaker, an American actor and director, is widely credited as the “father” of the modern Globe. Apparently he had come to London in 1949 seeking out the site of the original theater, expecting to find a glorious monument worthy of its historic legacy, but was instead shocked to find only a blackened plaque on the wall of a brewery in a run-down industrial district.
He found this to be unacceptable, and decided to initiate the correction himself. Wanamaker’s own personal history is worthy of note: apparently he had been in the UK for filming work just in time for the McCarthy-era Red Scare taking hold of his home country. A propos of his brief membership to the American Communist Party from 1943 to 1946, he found himself blacklisted from doing any further work in Hollywood. Fearing imprisonment or interrogation to testify against his colleagues, he decided to stay in Britain effectively as a political refugee. Which isn’t to say his life and career was lost: he successfully rebuilt his career as an actor and director in London.
Rebuilding the Globe ended up being a decades-long endeavor, starting from the founding of the Shakespeare Globe Trust in 1970 to raise funds and secure the necessary permits. Unfortunately, he would die in 1993 of prostate cancer, just years ahead of the new Globe’s opening in 1997. In his honor, a second, smaller playhouse was opened just next to the reconstructed Globe, called the Sam Wanamaker playhouse. It was in this candle-lit indoor playhouse that we watched a quasi-modern comedy-turned-horror interpretation of Midsummer.
We watched the play on the evening of December 15, our last evening to be spent in London, as we were flying out at 7pm the following day. It was the perfect way to cap our short tour of the city, which in its course had included pub crawls along the Soho District (including one named Shakespeare’s Head, founded by a distant relative) and a quick visit to the Shakespeare Hotel for luggage storage. Of course there were also books, but that’s a topic for another post.
Dominic Dayta 
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