This book describes the theatres of the time of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson in the light of the contemporary architectural thought and building design. John Orrell incorporates recent discoveries about the structure of theatres such as the Red Lion playhouse (1567), the Christ Church Theatre, Oxford (1605) and the Paved Court Theatre, Somerset House (1632) in a re-examination of old assumptions about their design and origins. Orrell shows that the first public theatres, exemplified by the Globe on the Bankside, were fully realised architectural ideas, not ad hoc improvisations. Indoor...

The English stage of Shakespeare's day was a place superbly fitted for the rhetorical drama of the times; by the Restoration it had been replaced by a kind of playhouse better suited to the 'Scenes and Machines' which dealt in spectacles. The seventeenth century was therefore a crucial one in the history of the stage, yet concrete evidence of the playhouses constructed during this time has been scarce and elusive. The best of it lies in the drawing which Inigo Jones, Surveyor of the King's Works, and his pupil, John Webb, made for a succession of playhouses and Court theatres. Jones was...

This book is about the size, the shape and the architectural nature of the Globe playhouse of Shakespeare's time, the most important theatre in English history. The design of the second Globe, and by extension the first, has been a subject of keen debate for many years, fostered by recurrent attempts to reconstruct the playhouse, both in London and Detroit. Professor Orrell here offers fresh ways of looking at some well-known documents and newer evidence. By using detailed diagrams and seventeenth-century panoramas, the author is able to establish the accuracy of Hollar's famous 'Long View'...

The English stage of Shakespeare's day was a place superbly fitted for the rhetorical drama of the times; by the Restoration it had been replaced by a kind of playhouse better suited to the 'Scenes and Machines' which dealt in spectacles. The seventeenth century was therefore a crucial one in the history of the stage, yet concrete evidence of the playhouses constructed during this time has been scarce and elusive. The best of it lies in the drawing which Inigo Jones, Surveyor of the King's Works, and his pupil, John Webb, made for a succession of playhouses and Court theatres. Jones was...