Fugitive Inklings is what the blog Fugitive Ink has turned into, and just over a week ago, it featured a delightful posting about a visit, by Madam Fugitive Inklings and her young son, to the Globe Theatre. This is one of London’s most successfully idiosyncratic recent architectural additions, being a recreation, as authentically as they could make it, of the original Globe Theatre, pretty much where it originally was, where many of Shakespeare’s plays were first performed.
Mother and son attended, not a play, but a stage fighting demonstration, done with the exact sort of weapons that would first have been used in these plays. Better yet, they got to hear about it from the man who contrived these weapons. This is one of those posting where you start out trying to pick a particularly good bit, but end up wanting to copy the whole thing. So, instead of copying and pasting any of it, I say: go there and read the whole thing.
Not long ago, I read a book called 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, which starts off with the tale of how they moved the original manifestation of the Globe Theatre from its previous home in north London, across the river to the South Bank, i.e. to where the Globe is now. And I think it was also in this book where I read that a great many of the people in the first audiences for Shakespeare’s plays were soldiers, camped outside the city limits of what London then consisted of, waiting to go off to fight on the continent. Such audiences would have paid particular attention to fights, and to the weapons used in them. And of course they would have understood perfectly all the verbal references to weaponry that occur in the plays, many of which now baffle most of us.
Thank you for the recommendation. Ms Inkling writes beautifully and the experience at The Globe sounds fascinating. I wish she had managed to quote some of the arms master’s references as I would have found the icing on the cake.
Including the one to the (now) infamous long-shafted petard, of course.
I wholeheartedly recommend seeing shakespeares plays from the pit at The Globe. The only strangeness was the noises from helicopters and jets flying overhead.
What is a “long-shafted” petard, PFP? A petard is a small explosive; to be “hoist” by one is to be blown up by your own bomb. As far as I know they don’t have shafts.
I’d imagine a long-shafted petard would be similar to a spar torpedo. When attempting to deliver a substantial bomb, it is good to be well away from it. Putting it on the far end of a pole serves this purpose.
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I have yet to have the pleasure of a visit to the Globe Theatre, but I did see the Globe Theatre Players performing The Merry wives of Windsor, and authenticity seems to be their hallmark.
The set at Theatre Royal Bath was a simple rotational one. One side for the front of Pages House and the other side for the other scenes.
But on top of this elegant set was a Minstrel’s Gallery, with real live minstrels playing real live Elizabethan instruments like Lutes and Sackbuts etc. Extremely good indeed.
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Read about agenda 21, British forests, and corporatism
“Hoist by his own petard” (which I do realise refers to a sapper blown up by his own bomb) is usually misquoted, at least here in America, as “hoist on his own petard.” Hence, many have a mistaken impression that it’s some kind of pike.