Shakespeare's Globe & Tate Modern

Continuing along the south bank of the River Thames, after the bridges at Blackfriars, one soon arrives at The Millennium Bridge - the footbridge that seems to draw a pencil line across the water, between the Tate Modern museum and St Paul’s Cathedral. Yet before crossing over to the north bank, we took a very short walk to the nearby Globe Theatre.

Opened in 1997, the reconstructed replica is in fact called Shakespeare’s Globe; whereas the original, built in 1599, was known as The Globe Theatre.

William Shakespeare belonged to, and wrote for, the playing company known as Lord Chamberlain’s Men - named after their patron, Lord Chamberlain, also in charge of court entertainments under Queen Elizabeth I. The company of actors, with the help of workmen, built The Globe themselves, by bringing the wooden beams from the previous site they had had to vacate, north of The Thames. 

The structure had an oak O-shaped frame and was destroyed by an accidental fire in 1613, when a stage cannon misfired, setting the wood and thatch alight.

Cyril Walter Hodges's idea of the first Globe 1599-1613
(drawing from the 1950s)

A second Globe Theatre was built in its place and it was allowed to be used from 1614 to 1642, until the Puritans closed it down. 

^ 1638 sketch of the second Globe (1614-1642)
by Wenceslas Hollar for his Long View of London

^ Part of the 1647 Long View of London by Wenceslaus Hollar
showing The Globe where the building is marked Bear-Baiting Enclosure!

Maps show that the theatre was not along the river, not on the bankside itself, but on Maiden Lane, 200 yards away from the shore. Confusingly, when Wenceslaus Hollar drew the second playhouse for his 1647 panoramic Long View of London, he wrongly labelled the structure, swapping the name with the nearby circular bear-baiting enclosure – which happened to be on the riverside.

(more in the previous post about Hollar and London http://gherkinscall.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/gabriels-wharf-and-blackfriars-bridges.html)

^ Amended picture showing The Globe by Hollar (1647)

The current modern Shakespeare’s Globe is on the south bank of The Thames and could not occupy the exact same spot as the original anyway, as the landscape has changed and some listed townhouses are now in the way.

Visitors queuing under the word WONDER – the season of events.

Artwork for the plays was designed by Dan Hillier who made some digital collages, using Victorian images as starting points. 

The 2016 poster for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 

by Hillier, as seen in my photo.

The 2016 poster for The Taming of the Shrew, by Hillier.

The Globe Theatre is thought to have been a 30-metre-in-diameter open-air amphitheatre (round or possibly 20-sided), three storey high with three levels of seats around the yard, but also with a pit at the bottom for the poorest spectators to watch the play standing up on earthen ground. It could accommodate 3,000 people. The current building can only have 1,400 spectators due to safety regulations. The modern design merges features from both the 1599 and the 1614  Globe theatres. It is made of English oak with no steel used at all, the joints were fixed, using wooden pegs. It is also topped with the only thatched roof permitted in London since the Great Fire of 1666 (water reed thatch).

The thatch is great but it is the white-lime washed wall panels, contrasting with the dark beams, that I like best.

Since April 2016, the site has also been “planted” with some fake trees – metal sculptures by Lez Brotherston, a set and costume designer, “composed of printing plates with detailed etching on each” – I think they are nice, with their white silvery colour and the garlands of LED lights twinkling in the fading daylight, somehow very Christmassy.

There were banners with the slogan “1616: A Momentous Year,” because this year happens to be the 400^th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and every major London cultural organisation has been contributing to the Shakespeare 400 festival.

One of my favourite features were in fact the wrought iron gates with all the different iron items on them. We didn’t have time to take a good look (there are some objects on the inner side, as well, which can only be seen when one is in the yard) and I wondered if they represented Shakespearean references or just theatrical symbols. 

I found out since, that these five-metre-high Bankside Gates were made by Richard Quinnell MBE and decorated with 125 figures crafted and donated by 130 blacksmiths from all over the world (12 nations) and from all ages, some professionals and some amateurs (the youngest being a 12 year-old Australian); the Japanese Noh mask was made by a blacksmith in Japan. 

 Each little scene is a reference to Shakespeare, his sonnets and plays included. For instance, the Noh mask refers to Juliet’s “mask of night” and the hawk on a blade of handsaw represents the line in Hamlet, “I still know a hawk from a handsaw.” There are some flowers and fruit, some insects and creepy-crawlies, some birds, a cat, a deer, a mole, an otter, sea creatures, some fairies, mermaids, some dragons, some masks…

Siren (Luciana’s singing in The Comedy of Errors) 

Noh mask (Juliet blushing in the dark)

Dolphin (“his delights were dolphin-like” Cleopatra about Antony)

Where the iron bars of the gates meet, in a weaving pattern, there are rounded bolts, though originally some metal roses had been prepared to be affixed there, but they are believed lost.. However, every year, on Shakespeare’s birthday, people walk from Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey or from the original site of The Globe to weave white and red roses on the gate.

It is believed that the first performance at the Globe, in 1599, was Henry V, by Shakespeare - with its famous “wooden O” line in The Prologue, “Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France? Or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques that did affright the air at Agincourt?”

Aptly, the current Shakespeare’s Globe opened with a performance of Henry V, in 1997. Until 2016, performances did not use spotlights nor microphones nor speakers nor pre-recorded music. This year, new artistic director Emma Rice has introduced a lighting and sound rig.

The 2016 poster for Two Gentlemen of Verona, by Hillier, 

as seen above the Exhibition & Theatre Tour entrance.

The entrance to the Sam Wannamaker Playhouse is 

on New Globe Walk – on the left of the 3 fake metal trees.

The bar and restaurant on the corner is called Swan.

There is also an indoor theatre on site and a rehearsal studio nearby, as well as an exhibition and guided tours. Sadly, the actor Sam Wannamaker, who campaigned so much for the reconstruction of the Globe, died four years before the project was completed. In 2014, the indoor theatre opened and was named The Sam Wannamaker Playhouse.

Statue on top of the Swan Bar and Restaurant

St Paul's Cathedral, on the other side on The Thames,
reflected on the Theatre Tour entrance.

Shakespeare lived in London, from 1590 to 1613 approx. In the 1590s, he lived in the parish of St Helens, just north of London Bridge, close to The Curtain and The Theatre playhouses – the latter was where Shakespeare worked for The Chamberlain’s Men, before they dismantled it to build The Globe with its timber. From 1598 to 1602 approx, Shakespeare lived in the Paris Gardens area of Bankside, near The Globe.

The Shard
Shakespeare's Globe (thatched roof)
49 Bankside

< From here, we started to get a good view of the top part of The Shard (the tallest building in the UK,  309 metre high), which is near London Bridge, a 12 minute walk from The Globe. 

Cardinal Cap Alley, now sealed with a gate >

My eye caught the colourful doors on Bankside, the street that seems to veer off from the promenade along the river to end in a cul-de-sac against the wall of the Bankside Power Station – now Tate Modern museum. This street, which is lower than the riverside walk, was the original road along The Thames.

As I was looking at the stone acorns at the top of the white building – or are they hard-boiled eggs? I noticed a man on the roof terrace at the back, opening the parasol and settling down. His ordinary gestures made me wonder if he often reflects on where he lives and if that matters to him. 

That is when I saw that the front door bore the name Cardinal’s Wharf and featured a couple of shields or coats of arms under a crown (above the doorway). 

Number 49 also has a fancy plaque near the door. It states, “Here lived Sir Christopher Wren during the building of St Paul’s Cathedral ~ Here also, in 1502, Catherine Infanta of Castille & Aragon, afterwards first Queen of Henry VIII, took shelter on her first landing in London.”

I thought it was charming, especially that St Paul’s Cathedral was being reflected on the sash windows of the little row of houses. Christopher Wren is of course the architect who designed the rebuilding of St Paul's Cathedral after the Great Fire of 1666, as well as 51 other London churches - I hope that story is true...

Tate Modern, seen from Bankside

During WWII, the then- three terrace houses were damaged and later rebuilt as only two dwellings.

Allegedly, the story is untrue and the plaque possibly put there by the new owner after the second world war. A different house further up Bankside had claimed it had been Wren’s accommodation, until its demolition in 1906. At some point, the people living here ran ferryboats and barges.

Is this a crack in the story which I see before me?

Tate Modern is Britain’s national museum of International Modern and Contemporary Art.

It is part of The Tate group, which includes Tate Britain (art gallery since 1897 with largest collection of Turner, located on Millbank) but also Tate Liverpool, Tate St Ives and Tate Online.

Housed in the former Bankside Power Station, designed in 1947 (with second stage in 1963) by architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, who also designed Battersea Power Station in the 1930s (3 miles upstream from Tate Modern and also on the south bank).

Battersea Power Station as featured on the 1977 

Pink Floyd album Animals (cover designed by Storm Thorgerson). 

Decommissioned in 1983, it featured in movies such as 

Sabotage (Hitchcock), Help! (Beatles), The Meaning of Life (Monty Pythons).

ART CHANGES WE CHANGE

Bankside Power Station closed in 1981. It took nearly five years to convert it into the Tate Modern (1995-2000) and it cost £134 millions. The architects were Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron from Switzerland.

The name on the façade is NEW TATE MODERN.

The galleries and huge turbine hall (35 metre high and 152 metre long) display works of art dated from the year 1900 to the present day. It is one of the largest modern art museums in the world.

The chimney is 99 metres high. There are also three oil tanks converted into performance art spaces, and, since June 2016, a new ten-storey tower above them called The Switch House.

The Shard looking quite small from this angle...

Art on display includes work by the artists Kandinsky, Antony Gormley, Georges Braque, Dalí, Andy Warhol, Picasso, Mondrian, Max Ernst, Miró, Matisse, Jackson Pollock, Pierre Bonnard, André Breton, Henry Moore, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Magritte, Fernand Léger, Monet, Robert Delaunay, Arshile Gorky, Paul Klee, Degas, Wifredo Lam, (and many more.)

Tate Modern is the most visited modern art gallery in the world.

Is it because admission is free? All the same, that fact must be applauded and with it the free admission to so many other museums in London: Tate Britain, The British Museum,  The National Gallery, Museum of London, Imperial War Museum London,  Victoria and Albert Museum, Natural History Museum, Science Museum, The British Library, Museum of London Docklands, National Maritime Museum, Royal Air Force Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Bank of England Museum, V&A Museum of Childhood, Royal Academy of Art, Serpentine Gallery, Somerset House, The Wallace Collection, Saatchi Gallery, Twinings Museum, The Vault (Hard Rock Café), Wellcome Collection, Guildhall Art Gallery, Newport Street Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery…

Tate Modern seen from the Millennium Bridge, about half-way across it. 

A last look at Shakespeare's Globe
hidden behind real trees,
from the Millennium Bridge.

Next post: 

The Queen’s Walk, South Bank - part 5 More views of and from the London Millennium Footbridge
http://gherkinscall.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/london-millennium-footbridge.html