6
Far and away the most revealing document about the physical characteristics of the Globe1 is the contract which Henslowe and Alleyn drew up with Peter Street for the construction of their new Fortune playhouse, dated January 8, 1600. Street was the master carpenter who had erected the Globe for the Burbage consortium and it is clear that he had done a sufficiently impressive job that it was to be used in almost every respect as a model for the Fortune. Leaving aside some of the legal preamble, and some of the terms and conditions to which Street was required to submit, it reads:
The frame of the said house [is] to be set square and to contain fourscore foot of lawful assize every way square without and fifty‐five foot of like assize square every way within, with a good sure and strong foundation of piles, brick, lime and sand both without & within to be wrought one foot of assize at the least above the ground. And the said frame to contain three storeys in height. The first or lower storey to contain twelve foot of lawful assize in height. The second storey eleven foot of lawful assize in height. And the third or upper storey to contain nine foot of lawful assize in height, all which stories shall contain twelve foot and a half of lawful assize in breadth throughout, besides a jutty forwards in either of the said two upper storeys of ten inches of lawful assize, with four convenient divisions for gentlemen’s rooms and other sufficient and convenient divisions for two penny rooms with necessary seats to be placed and sett as well in those rooms as throughout all the rest of the galleries of the said house and with suchlike stairs, conveyances & divisions without & within as are made & contrived in and to the late erected playhouse on the Bank in the said parish of Saint Saviour’s called the Globe; with a stage and tiring house to be made, erected & set up within the said frame, with a shadow or cover over the said stage. … And which stage shall contain in length forty and three foot of lawful assize and in breadth to extend to the middle of the yard of the said house. The same stage to be paled in below with good strong and sufficient new oaken boards. And likewise the lower storey of the said frame withinside, and the same lower storey to be also laid over and fenced with strong iron pikes. And the said stage to be in all other proportions contrived and fashioned like unto the stage of the said playhouse called the Globe; with convenient windows and lights glazed to the said tiring house; and the said frame, stage and staircases to be covered with tile and to have a sufficient gutter of lead to carry & convey the water from the covering of the said stage to fall backwards; and also all the said frame and the staircases thereof to be sufficiently enclosed without with lath, lime & hair [i.e. plaster], and the gentlemen’s rooms and two penny rooms to be sealed with lath, lime & hair, and all the floors of the said galleries, storeys and stage to be boarded with good & sufficient new deal boards, of the whole thickness where need shall be; and the said house and other things beforementioned to be made & done to be in all other contrivitions [contrivances?], conveyances, fashions, thing and things effected, finished and done according to the manner and fashion of the said house called the Globe, saving only that all the principal and main posts of the said frame and stage forward shall be square and wrought pilasterwise [in the manner of pilasters, square or rectangular wooden pillars projecting from a wall, usually with bases and capitals], with carved proportions called satyrs to be placed & set on the top of every of the same posts; and saving also that the said Peter Street shall not be charged with any manner of painting in or about the said frame house or stage, or any part thereof, nor rendering the walls within, nor sealing any more or other rooms than the gentlemen’s rooms, two penny rooms and stage before remembered … And saving that the said Peter Street shall … also make all the said frame in every point for scantlings [builders’ regulated measures] larger and bigger in assize than the scantlings of the timber of the said new erected house called the Globe. (ES 2: 436–9)2
Street was to be paid £440, and the work was to be completed by July 25, some twenty‐eight weeks from the date of the contract. If the construction of the Globe followed the same schedule, and commenced when the lease was signed, it should have been finished by the first week of September.
The most obvious difference between the Globe and the Fortune is that the latter was to be square, outside and in (as now know, somewhat like the Curtain: p. 198), whereas the Globe was polygonal in structure, possibly finished off with plaster to appear circular. The recent excavations of the Globe, though much less extensive than those of the Rose, have shown that it was indeed larger than that playhouse, or indeed than the Theatre and the Curtain. Whereas they were all about 72 ft (21.95 m) in diameter, the Globe either had sixteen sides and was 84 ft 6 in (25.76 m) in diameter or eighteen sides and was 95 ft (28.96 m) in diameter (Bowsher and Miller, 2009, 89–102; Bowsher 2012, 89–96).3 The specifications for the Fortune might incline us towards the former: 80 ft (24.38 m) square on the outside and 55 ft (16.76 m) square on the inside, the latter figure being arrived at by allowing for galleries on all sides 12½ ft (3.81 m) deep.
On the face of it the Globe’s layout would give better sightlines, especially to those in the three storeys of two penny rooms, but perhaps Street was meant to adjust the groundplan in places to allow for this. Alleyn, of all people, must have known what he was asking for. The foundation was to be of brick and piles, the framework of wood, which would be boarded within, the whole being coated with plaster. There were to be three galleries, rising to a height of 32 ft (9.75 m); their roof was to be tiled. (In what was probably a cost‐cutting decision – which proved to be singularly unfortunate – the Globe was thatched with reeds.) Also to be tiled were a “shadow or cover” over the stage, the “heavens,” and the staircases. Here modeling it on the Globe works to our disadvantage, since Henslowe and Alleyn could assume Street knew what was expected – including any special provision in “the heavens” to fit descent machinery, and indeed the number of staircases. There are indications elsewhere that there would be two of them. That is the number specified in the 1613 contract for the Hope theatre (ES 2: 466–8), in which the Swan is several times mentioned as a model – as it may well have been for the Globe. And when the Globe burned down that year, it was noted that there were only “two narrow doors” by which to escape (Gurr, 2009, 203–4).
The fact that the staircases needed to be tiled and enclosed with plaster confirms that they were on the outside of the building. How, precisely, they afforded access to the various parts of the playhouse is a matter for some conjecture. It was, presumably, possible to pay a penny and pass without climbing through to the pit, a place for open standing, with no shelter from the elements. It might equally be possible to gain access to the stairs and move up, paying either a total two pence for access to the “two penny rooms” or three pence for the even more comfortable “gentlemen’s rooms.” What is least clear is the status of and access to the lowest of the three storeys of galleries. The Fortune contract is quite explicit that only the “gentlemen’s rooms” and the “two penny rooms” are to be sealed with “lath, lime and hair” – presumably leaving parts of the galleries, both there and by implication at the Globe, less comfortably furnished and possibly without seating.
Indeed, Dekker, in the epilogue to Satiromastix (performed at the Globe in 1601) is quite explicit that some of the galleries were used for standing rather than sitting, though he does not specify which they were. His Tucca calls on one section of the audience to “bear witness, all you gentle‐folks (that walk i’the galleries)” and finally bids them “Good night, my two penny tenants. Good night” (Epilogus 5–6, 31–4). This seems to suggest that a second penny at the Globe at that date got you entry to covered space where you might walk, though it might not guarantee you seating. If so, it differed from the Fortune, the contract for which explicitly requires seating throughout the galleries: “with necessary seats to be placed and set as well in those rooms [i.e. the gentlemen’s and two penny rooms] as throughout all the rest of the galleries of the said house.” Dekker does, however, confirm in the same play that there was seating in some Globe galleries, since Horace is told that henceforth he “shall not sit in a gallery, when your comedies and interludes have entered their actions and there make vile and bad faces at every line” (5.2.298–300).
As recently as 1596, William Lambarde had suggested that the best accommodation at the Theatre only afforded “a quiet standing,” with no mention at all of seating. The 1600 Fortune contract is the first document to specify seating in all the galleries, though it seems also implicit in Platter’s account of payment penny‐by‐penny. Between the refurbishment of the Rose in 1592 (see p. 62), the building of the Swan in 1595, the Globe in 1599, and the Fortune in 1600, there seems to have been a competitive drive for each new building to be grander and better fitted than its predecessor – we see it explicitly in the Fortune contract’s stipulation that it shall mostly be like the Globe, but with tiled roofs and “scantlings … larger and bigger in assize than the scantlings of the timber of the said new erected house called the Globe.” (And did the Globe have any equivalents of the satyrs adorning the main posts of the stage?)
Possibly the Globe was caught betwixt and between in respect of the accommodations on offer, retaining standing in some galleries but not others. If so, the likeliest candidates for covered standing room would include (if they were not indeed restricted to) the lowest level of them. The Van Buchell drawing of the Swan shows two sets of steps from the pit to the lowest gallery, one clearly‐marked “ingressus” (see Frontispiece). The affinity of the pit with the lowest gallery might have made them extensions of one another, with the audience standing in both but perhaps being prepared at times to pay an extra penny for protection from the elements. This would, however, have created an oddity when first entering the playhouse: having to choose between paying two pennies for covered standing – or exactly the same amount for the seated comfort of a “two penny room.” Why not take the comfort?
There are, however, other possibilities. One is that there was seating in all the galleries, but that some people chose to stand and walk about some of the time rather than to sit. In the Fortune, the galleries other than the gentlemen’s and the two penny rooms were not partitioned, so that it would have been possible to walk around three‐quarters of the inner circumference of the playhouse, seeing the stage – and the audience – from various perspectives. In that scenario the two options simply catered to different tastes – the one to gregarious types (on the whole, perhaps more likely to be young men) who welcomed the opportunity to walk about and socialize in the lower gallery. Tucca’s salute to his “two‐penny tenants” that “walk in the galleries” suggests that it was, to say the least, a distinctive section of the audience, one that perhaps kept the players on their toes. The other option catered to those (including, we might suppose, well‐bred young ladies) who preferred both comfort and private space to themselves.
Each of these scenarios does rather suggest that the entrances to the Globe dictated what was essentially a two‐tier system, lower and upper, each of which offered a basic facility and an enhanced one – on the one hand, pit and “standing gallery,” or on the other two penny rooms and gentlemen’s rooms. Andrew Gurr sees in all this a marked social stratification of the audience in a “vertical divide” throughout the theatre: “the lowest of the three tiers of gallery was associated by its ingressi with the lowly in the yard, whereas the upper levels welcomed the gentry and richer citizens with their cushions” (2009, 205). The lords’ rooms offered another level of distinction altogether.