“Rich eyes and poor hands”: Theaters of Early Modern Experience

Abstract

Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, the functioning period model built by Sam Wanamaker in Bankside, London, is, according to its website, “dedicated to the experience … of Shakespeare in performance.”¹ The painstaking archival and archeological work that went into the new Globe makes it clear that “experience” here is to be produced by a strictly historical technology that is then in some sense activated by the event of performance. This archival and archeological process is oriented at every point toward the strange attractor of the performance, when actors and audience enter the completed architectural machine and the transitory, emergent structure of early modern theatrical experience is generated, like a hologram, from the precisely measured timbers and thatch. Yet this theater of history is as immersive as it is specular, as much like a holodeck as like a hologram: audiences “experience the ‘wooden O’ either sitting in a gallery or standing informally as a groundling in the yard, just as they would have done 400 years ago.”² The same theater-machine that processes our diverse bodies into the collective body of an audience is also a history- machine that allows us literally to take the place of an early modern audience. We attend the Globe not simply to view the past, but to inhabit an event that has returned from it. The promise of “experience” here lies in the sudden collapse of the historical distance that haunts the archive and the archeological site: Shakespearean theater re-embodies and re-enacts, conjuring a dead past into a living event.