Manufactured Memories The Globe Theatre
Constanza Larach K. The Original Globe Theatre was built as collective enterprise by a group of actors in 1575, and 25 years after being constructed, it was dismantled and moved into a new location in the South Bank of London, where some of the most important plays by William Shakespeare were created and performed. In 1614 it was burnt down and reconstructed again until it was finally shut down in 1644. For almost 400 years, the place where the theatre had been was only referred to in books. A small plaque erected in a building of the area remained as the only physical element that recognized and led to its supposed location, becoming the memorial of the Playhouse and opening up to an idealized, but conceptual and personal recall of what that place used to be. After visiting the site, an American actor and director, Sam Wanamaker, decided to reconstruct the theatre in its original location, to bring back to life and to London, the world of Shakespeare, reintroducing it to a modern time and to a modern audience. Based on texts that described its shape and structure, drawings of similar Elizabethan theatres and some archaeological findings of the time, it was rebuilt, as it should have been and in the way it should look; it has been open since 1997. The New Globe Theatre has become an image and a constructed memory of a place, a commemoration of a time and of a historical ideal. In a nostalgic gesture, it intends to perpetuate a past. The construction of Sam Wanamaker’s vision and the recreation of a previous building, aims for an image that is as close to the original version as it can, but it is made in a new context, designed to accommodate a new audience and done with new technology. It cannot become the real building and it stands to be an evocative description of it. By bringing forward to the future his vision of a past, his building can only appeal to the emotions and then, it remains as an icon, taking the knowledge or recall of a historical narrative and transferring it into a single object or building. It becomes an “artificial memory1” that intends to produce an authenticity that can never be genuine. A manufactured idealized image that is recreated by an architecture where thoughts and intellectual concepts are substituted by a sensible perception. The New Globe Theatre confuses the authentic past with the one that is produced by the new created memory, and in the experience of it, this past is replaced by a new impression of place and an image that is never the original. The new building takes the place of the vanished one, and its significance is also transformed. “When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning”2. The new audience, the new actors and the new building participate in the representation of a former time that they have never been part of. The building itself turn out to be a simulated timeless figure that eliminates the passing of time, as an image that never changes, never ages and forever repeats a glory of a past, but can never become the past that it is longing to be.
1
Yates, Frances A. The Art Of Memory. Bodley Head, 2014.
2
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Glaser. The University of Michigan Press, 1994.p 6
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Bibliography: Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Glaser. The University of Michigan Press, 1994. Mulryne, J. R., and Margaret Shewring, eds. Shakespeare’s Globe Rebuilt. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. “Remains of Shakespeare’s First Globe Theatre Unearthed in East London.” Mail Online, February 26, 2016. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1160701/RemainsShakespeares-Globe-Theatre-unearthed-East-London.html. “Shakespeare’s Globe, Bankside, Southwark, London / Shakespeare’s Globe.” Accessed February 29, 2016. http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/. Yates, Frances A. The Art Of Memory. Bodley Head, 2014.