Your thoughts on the Globe Theatre Experience
 

Hello! I've been planning a father/daughter trip with my dad for his retirement. Many of you were so helpful with my preliminary planning. You may or may not remember that we're very interested in literary London. Because of your help I've worked up an itinerary that I'm very excited about! Thanks particularly to those of you that suggested Greenwich for one of our day trips!

Anyway -- We were planning on going in June, but life happened and we've had to change our plans to late March/early April. Airfare is considerably cheaper in March, but I notice that we'll miss out on the 2008 Globe theatre season. Is this a huge deal? I'd love to hear about any experiences, thoughts and or suggestions.

I enjoyed the GT Experience a whole lot - interesting bits of history in displays on walls and the theatre itself unless some play is going on. Exhibits on the more unsavory aspects of Elizabethan plays were interesting.

the tour guide was good.

Interesting to me that the displays cast doubt on Shakespeare actually writing the plays - saying he in no way had the proper classical education to do so and pointing to some royal.

The tour of the Globe is great - and in the off season you stand a better chance of getting inside the theatre/backstage. During the summer they don't let tours inside during rehearsals/walkthroughs.

If you are interested in theatre as well as literature - other theatres also offer terrific back stage tours. Theatre Royal Drury Lane is one of the best, and of course there is the Royal Opera House.

I have been to watch a performance at the Globe, and it was fun. I am not usually a great fan of Shakespeare, but I find the plays in their "Raw" form more enjoyable than some modern adaptations.

The constant drone of aircraft overhead on the approach to Heathrow can be a little off putting, and if you are in the £5 standing area you will get wet if it rains.

All in all I think it is well worth doing, but if you book a seat, pay a little extra to hire a cushion!

willit: The OP is going in March - no performances then, only tours . . . . .

The Globe thing is also well situated for lots of nearby neat sights:

Borough Market
Tate Modern
that new bridge over Thames to St Paul's
London Dungeon (OK this one's a joke)

and you can stroll what to me is one of Europe's finest walking paths - the South Bank path all along the Thames to the Eye Over London - great people watching on a nice day as well - benches overlooking the busy Thames, etc.

Well it sounds to me that a tour of theatre might fulfill our needs and then we can stroll over and catch the borough market. That's one that my dad really wanted to do. I'm going to see if I can find out a bit more info on it.

There was a recent thread on Borough Market in recent days here.

"Interesting to me that the displays cast doubt on Shakespeare actually writing the plays"

Although I've not seen the exhibition, I'd go and watch a game of Blouseball if the Globe really did imply it supported the Oxfordian theory.

No-one's ever argued Shakespeare was written by a royal. What was proposed (amazingly, by a man called Looney, which probably tells you as much about all this as you need to know) was that Edward de Vere the Earl of Oxford, a nobleman whose widowed mum married a horse-master (unlike royals, who marry horses), wrote Shakespeare.

Practically no-one believed him, though a bloke called Crinkley (they do choose their names to match their theories, don't they?)resuscitated the idea in the 1980s.

The core idea was that an oik like Shakespeare couldn't possibly have learned enough to write the plays. Trouble with that is that Shakespeare went to school (a proper grammar school too) and Oxford didn't. So to think Oxford was brighter than Bill you have to be the sort of loon who thinks the aristocracy inherits erudition and intelligence the same way they inherit weak chins and speech defects.

Which is manifestly the opposite of the case. Looney was just starting the campaign to destroy grammar schools.

speaking of a 'proper' education...

i won't go there

I guess the Wannamaker Foundation or whoever dictates things at the Globe thinks differently

Not sure who they thought could be the real Bard but i remember reading one whole panel disdaining the idea that William shakespeare who it said had no formal classical education a'tal could hardly have written the plays that rely so much on the classical references. Or maybe they are loony enough to think that.

I don't know but i would not bet on Bill Spearshakes

Maybe I've forgotten, but I was thinking that any comments there about Shakespeare NOT writing the plays were merely quotes by other people, and were shown to be so with proper "credit". Normally I think such quotes should not be construed as the "opinion of the management".

For goodness sake, you daft grummet, as Flanner said, Shakespeare didn't as far as we know attend a university but he went to a grammar school where practically all that was taught would be Latin and Greek.
It's possible that the boys in Shakespeare's school would actually be made to talk to one another in Latin.

Hi Patrick! Do you remember me? you recommended Farnum and Christ to me and through them we found our precious little Notting Hill flat. Well, all was set to go for June, but our flat is not available in March :( I'm so terribly bummed out about this. Lisa is looking into other possibilities for me and I'm looking into VRBO flats in the same area, but I'm worried..

josser - at the Bard's 'birthplace' in Stratford the conclusion i got from things there is that any links to Spearshakes is nebulous at best

appears very little is actually known about this farmer's son

gee, was I called a daft gummet for reporting that the billboards in a museum credit the quotes they use? What am I missing here? I certainly made no other statements about anything at all. Or does "daft gummet" mean "one who reports the facts"? Or was someone else being called a daft gummet?

>>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;>>>>>..

laustic, OUCH. Here's hoping you find something. Ann recently called me and said someone wanted to rent my usual Covent Garden flat in June, so they wanted to check my schedule first before letting it go. Wasn't that nice of them? But I told her we aren't making any plans right now, so to go ahead and rent it.

He's calling PalQ daft. And he is.

Lack of data about Shakespeare is no indication he was thick. In fact, since just about the only thing we know about his early life was that he went to a school where they got flogged half to death for a false quantity, never mind failing to remember their conjugations and declensions, we can be pretty sure he knew at least as much of the classical authors as the unschooled chinless wonder down the road.

As a Spearshakean scholar the only thing they really know about William Spearshakes is that he was a theatre manager/part owner in London and little else

and theatre types in those days of bear baiting, etc. were no literary or classical scholars

like saying PT Barnum wrote Ulysees

that said yeh a lad who went to such a school could have learnt all those classical references without going to Oxbridge, etc. i guess - after all we here have the perfect example in flanneur himself of rising above his lack of 'proper' schooling

he was schooled in a slum area of Liverpool by Catholic nuns who would 'rapp' his knuckles (this is where the term 'knuckle up' came from) to instill in him the kind of stuff he says may have been forced down Bill Spearshakes throat in a then rural Stratford (where they just demolished the huge cattle market right in town) - and of course flanneur has become, IMO, the most articulate in rhetoric of any Fodor poster (now that audere has fled - but he of course did have a 'proper' education).

But did Bill Spearshakes have the vast intelligence and cerebral abilities that flanneur has - would be hard to believe.

Anyway laustic if you go to the Globe Exhibition look and read the large panel talking about the dubiousness of Shakespeare actually writing the plays accredited to him.

Where on earth do you pick up this rubbish, Pal?

The Globe Theatre makes no such suggestion. They're simply reporting on the widely spread (and widely debunked) notion that Shakespeare's plays were written by the Earl of Oxford. Which they weren't. No serious scholar believes otherwise, and you have misread the panel you are quoting.

You are probably right about misquoting but i didn't mean to quote - just that by reading it it left an indelible impression on me that Shakespeare was an unlikely person to write the stuff he did

i don't know - though i have read every Shakespeare play known to man i have not studied this topic - so that all my impression was of the info at The Globe, and it did surprise me a lot that it was there in black and white