The Sunday Poem: Building the Globe

We heft the oak beams, one two three, each count
A sturdy truss; smooth hewn and splintered, blunt
And heavy, painted gaily marbled, dun
And costumeless. By numbers shall we know
Their place, when Southwark greets our lumber load;
The Theatre is no more, and soon we’ll have a Globe.
In Shoreditch now there stands a hole, on lease-
Land Burbage didn’t own. And past the trees,
By open fields, his Men will have a Streete-
Built O, wherein proud Oberon will prance
And Lear cry out his woe; where faery dance
For groundlings’ sake, and Puck plays out his pranks.
We’ll sift the straw and lay it straight on top,
And paint anew the spangled sky aloft
Above proscenium’s boards. We’ll stop
The crowd with good stout rails, so high-pitch boys
Can stain their lips and flounce their tails, and raise
A ruckus to the skies, the center of our noise.
But first, we must dismantle, first we take
Apart. If all the world’s a stage and planks
Are how it’s made, then for our Good Lord’s sake
I hope he spent his seven days as well,
Assembling worlds in beams of thirty ells,
A Shakespere for his script, Queen Bess, and all
A-toiling midst the sound of London’s bells.

Annotations:

As the story goes, the owner of the Shoreditch land where The Theatre stood didn’t want to renew the lease. This caused problems for Richard and Cuthbert Burbage, because although they had inherited the actual structure from their father James, the owner could and did simply bar them from using the land. And The Theatre was special — the very first theater in London ever, for until then plays were played in courtyards of inns. So they got Peter Streete, a master carpenter, to help them; and then the actors themselves crossed the river to sneak in and dismantle the old theater building. Then they sailed the huge oak beams and other pieces across the Thames, and reassembled it under Streete’s guidance in a pretty field in Southwark.

No small task, but that’s how the structure that we know as The Globe Theatre was born: assembled out of the numbered pieces of another building, smuggled over the water and past an angry landlord’s eye. The structure was shaped like an O, with no roof above the standing area where the low-paying groundlings stood to watch. But the stage itself was covered by a small roof, with a sky painted on it, moon, stars, and sun. All told, the structure held several thousand. Some of the columns were painted carefully to trick the eye into seeing marble, but really, it was all flammable wood — which was eventually its doom, when a special effect went awry years later.

The troupe needed a theater, of course, because their livelihood was always at risk, with plague forcing closures and the risk of angering the bureaucrats in the government who looked down on boys playing women’s parts and rowdy innuendo-laden plays. Besides, their sometime actor and regular scribe was very much in the favor of the Queen despite his perhaps sometimes Catholic leanings. As long as they had him in town and he wasn’t summoned home by Anne, they needed a place to perform the words of William Shakespeare.

Of course, the poem is in iambic pentameter, the meter of Shakespeare’s verse, though it is in tercets rather than blank. I suggest you try reading it aloud, ignoring line breaks, reading it as prose. I played a lot with interior rhyme.