By Emma Ross April 23 marks the birthday as well as the death anniversary of the great Bard William Shakespeare, as he died on that date in the Gregorian calender.
Memorials have been built all over the world for this great dramatist over the centuries.
But by far the most important tribute to his greatness is the new Globe Theatre built in London in 1997, fashioned exactly as the very first Globe Theatre in which Shakespeare staged his plays in the 16th century, In a lifespan of 52 years (1564 - 1616) Shakespeare wrote 37 plays, long poems like Venus and Adonis, and sonnets.
The plays, most of which are classics, were first staged in the Globe Theatre of Southwark in London.
It was built in 1599 and the Bard and a group of actors put money together to build the theatre..
So it became from 1599 as the number one venue for dramas.
It was a round building.
It is in fact a twenty-sided wooden O, a polygonal O.
And it was made of oak in the main, and it's an open air O, so people gather round in the theatre to hear a play and was certainly the number one venue for Shakespeare's plays until 1613.
The Globe was restricted to announcing its programme with a coded flag message, hoisted high above the top of the theatre for passers-by to see; a black flag indicated a tragedy, white was a comedy, and red showed that a history play was being performed.
What made the Globe Theatre so entertaining was the fact the actors and the audience always interacted, especially the groundlings who probably paid half the rates,.
The boisterous crowd would hurl oranges, nuts, apples and gingerbread at the performers, even joining in the mock fights with them! The noise must have been tremendous as a full house at the old Globe meant 3,000 paying audience.
And in 1613 they put on a play about Henry VIII and they had a cannon effect to announce the arrival of the king on stage.
But it was a special effect that went badly wrong because a spark from the cannon flew up and hit the roof which is made of thatch.
It caught fire and the theatre burnt to the ground during a performance.
It was rebuilt again.
But In 1642, the Puritans, who found theatre 'vulgar and intolerable', shut down all of London's theatres...
including the Globe.
The Globe would remain a ghost for the next 352 years.
All that was left of the old Globe Theatre just a plaque: a tiny one in a brewery that prosaically noted, that it happened to be built in the same location where the Globe had once existed 300-odd years earlier.
The man behind the magnificent reconstructed New Globe Theatre, nestling the south side of the River Thames in London, UK was late Sam Wanamaker.
As a visiting American actor, so the story goes, he came to London in 1949 looking to gen up on the history of the historic old Tudor Globe playhouse.
He was appalled, however, to find no real lasting monument to the great bard and the venue that premiered his work.
He settled in England and started organizing the finances for the new Globe Theatre.
Led by the vision and financial savvy of Wanamaker, workers began construction in 1993 on the new theatre near the site of the original.
In 1989, Sam Wanamaker was diagnosed with cancer.
He did not make this knowledge public (he didn't even tell his family right away), but he did change his focus on the Globe.
No longer did he have plenty of time; he needed to make things happen now.
Rather than continuing efforts to raise the entire 24 million pounds needed for the entire Globe Centre, Wanamaker decided to try and put together the 8 million pounds needed to simply build the theatre itself.
Once people saw the theatre, raising the rest wouldn't be a problem.
The new Globe Theatre was completed in 1996; It is actually a near-faithful reproduction of the original theatre.
To achieve this amazing feat, experts used old pictures, clues from texts of plays, descriptions by visitors of the time, archaeological findings and even building contracts from Elizabethan times! But Wanamaker did not live to see the completion of his dreams and died in 1993.
Queen Elizabeth II officially opened the theatre on June 12, 1997 with a production of Henry V.
The new Globe is as faithful a reproduction as possible to the Elizabethan model, and has a capacity of about 1500, 500 of whom stand on the ground in front of the stage.
However, the total income per performance is approximately the same as it was for the original theatre (adjusted for inflation).
According to Globe tour guides, the fee for entering the original Globe, one penny, was approximately 1/84th of a minimum week's wage.
Currently, the fee for entrance is 5 pounds, which is approximately 1/40th of a minimum week's wage, or approximately double the value of the original Globe's fee.
Thus, while size of the audience has been cut in half, the value of the ticket price has been doubled.
In its initial 1997 season, the theatre attracted 210,000 patrons and for all the subsequent years the attendance from Shakespeare admirers all over the world stays near quarter million.
But that's not all.
Shakespeare's Globe today officially goes under the name of the International Shakespeare Globe Centre Centre (ISGC).
This complex dedicated to Shakespeare and to theatre, is built up around the Globe itself.
It includes an excellent exhibition displaying all manner of Elizabethan drama-related paraphernalia, a Globe Caf‚ and a Globe Restaurant, a Gift Shop.
There are also workshops, lectures, walking tours and many other activities that fall under the broad banner of Globe Education.
In 2007 the income of the IDGC was ten million pounds and over the years it has been able to build a corpus of 25 million pounds for its activities.
-(Maharaja Features) By arrangement with Albion Features of U.K.
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