A Day at the Globe

A few years ago, I was flying to Europe to begin a three-week journey through England and Ireland. The trip would begin with a night in London, followed by a solo jaunt through the Lake District. On a hot summer afternoon, before my departure, I got a call from the airline saying my flight had been cancelled. Would I be able to get on a flight that evening? I finished packing and, an hour later, had settled uncomfortably into my seat.

An earlier flight meant that I had a morning and afternoon in London to myself; a good friend would not be able to meet up until the evening. I was almost paralyzed by the abundance of choice: Tate Modern? National Gallery? Pub crawl? Something moved me to see if the Globe was putting anything on that Saturday afternoon, and, lo and behold, I see Othello would be starting in, oh, thirty minutes. I had taught the play at least five times at this point, but I had never seen performed on stage. I bounded into a cab and arrived just in time to purchase a five-pound entry into the "pit." (To give you a sense of scale, my cab was 15 pounds!). I was a groundling, and proud of it.

The "groundlings" in the real Globe would have been a rowdy yet also captive audience. While watching the play, these often lower-class theatergoers were unafraid to voice their opinions. They could easily be distracted by street urchins selling apples and perhaps even prostitutes trying to lure them away from the show. But of course, they were also closest to the performers, even touching the stage.

While there were no apple-sellers or prostitutes distracting me from the performance, I was vulnerable to the quickly changing English weather. Over the course of the next three hours, I saw, in the circle above the theater, steel-grey clouds, thick fog, a blue sky, and, as expected, rain. Of course, the weather had no effect on the performance, and, if anything, the light rain encouraged less-enthused audience members to leave, allowing me to rest my elbows on the stage, rain and, yes, spittle descending upon me.

As expected, Iago stole the show. With the dissolution of any fourth wall, we became complicit in his machinations. One could easily imagine groundlings in Shakespeare's own time hurling invective at this most evil creation. Yet there was one rather surprising element: this Iago was notable older than I had encountered in previous images and film productions; in fact, Shakespeare has the character say that he has been on this earth "four times seven years." I wonder if I was one of the only audience members who noticed this particular Iago claim to be on this earth for "six times seven years."

Does this matter? Yes and no. On the one hand, a younger Iago is more likely to be socially and professionally ambitious. He, as a young man on the make, would clearly be aggrieved by Cassio's promotion. It might also help to explain why he has no children. On the other hand, if Iago were indeed forty-two years of age, the sexual threat posed by a younger Othello and Cassio becomes more alarming. Iago, at forty-two, is already well past his prime, making his wife, in his paranoid mind, far more susceptible to the boyish charms of an Othello or Cassio. Even the fact that this production's Iago was quite bald worked well visually when he was standing next to the much more folliclely-endowed Othello and Cassio.

All this said, this production -- with its remarkable mixture of serendipity on my part and professionalism on the part of the Globe -- made me realize how important it is for us to see and not just read Shakespeare.