C. Walter Hodges and Reconstructed Shakespearean Theatres

Late sixteenth and early seventeenth century London is an iconic place in the historical imagination. When reaching the city, travelers from Europe and elsewhere would have encountered a bustling metropolis that was increasing in size, prosperity, and importance. They also would have been immersed in a vibrant performance culture, anchored by the outdoor theatres, or playhouses as they were referred to at the time, which produced an urban cityscape different enough in appearance from cities elsewhere in Europe that it was consistently remarked upon. The most famous of these theatres is the Globe, the playhouse of which William Shakespeare was a shareholder and in which many of his plays were first performed.

After Shakespeare’s ascendance across the centuries to the apex of literary achievement, scholars, theatre makers, and many other parties became interested in somehow trying to resurrect the historical playing conditions in which he wrote and performed. In order to try to achieve this, it was argued that a Shakespearean playhouse, based on available records of the Globe and evidence of other auditoriums of the time, needed to be built.

The dream of reconstructing a Globe theatre that sought to utilize early modern materials and building techniques was realized on London’s Southbank in the 1990s with the building of Shakespeare’s Globe, which opened fully to the public in 1997, but ideas and plans for such an enterprise had been in place long before. Shakespeare’s Globe was the eventual product of the International Shakespeare Globe Centre, set up by American born actor Sam Wanamaker in 1970. Although Wanamaker is perhaps most famously associated with the reconstruction project, and his name is now given to the indoor theatre at the Shakespeare’s Globe complex, his work was not achieved in isolation, and his group wasn’t the only one trying to achieve similar aims.

One of the key figures in a variety of organizations that sought to build a replica of the Globe was the English artist and writer, C. Walter Hodges (18 March 1909-26 November 2004), whose works are archived at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Although he was best known for working on iconic English subject matter, he spent considerable time across the Atlantic in America. It was during a year in New York that he wrote and illustrated the children’s historical fiction book Columbus Sails, which was published in 1939. Across six decades, from 1935 to 1999, he wrote five books about the theatre, which was one of his primary passions.

Hodges produced many illustrations, in pencil, pen and ink, and watercolor, of English playhouses from the time of Shakespeare, as well as theoretical reconstructions of the theatres to be built for modern audiences. You may well be familiar with these images or recognize their look. The drawings in the Hodges collection, which he sold to the Folger in the 1980s, vary in size and style. Many are what we might think of as concept art, with intricate details and dazzling colors that seek to evoke the “feel” of a theatre from a particular perspective. Others are more technical, made with precise scales and measurements and demonstrate Hodges’s tireless and experimental reworking of the same core idea to different specifications. As a group, these sets of drawings are in many ways one of the most important cultural touchstones for our visual imaginings of playhouses. They also remain very popular choices for the covers of both academic volumes and general readership books on the topic of Shakespeare and the theatrical landscape in which he lived and worked.

I’d seen them reprinted plenty of times before coming to conduct research at the Folger but what struck me when encountering the originals was the drama and excitement of the images: the pen’s weblike movements, indenting deep into the paper; the questioning annotations about exact positionings, placements, and measurements. It’s this core excitement that continues to motivate many when they seek to reimagine and reconstruct the Globe and other theatres from the time of Shakespeare in different contexts around the world.

Perhaps my favorite series in the collection is those drawings Hodges completed at the invitation of Michigan native and theatre studies scholar Leonard Leone. These imagined a reconstructed Globe theatre on the bank of the Detroit River, proposing a new cultural centerpiece for the city. This was a serious and developed enterprise: in 1979, a group of scholars and practitioners gathered at Wayne State University to discuss the matter, working on the assumption that the end goal was to produce an actual building, not simply to fantasize about one. Because of the downturn in the auto industry and Detroit’s subsequent financial problems, the endeavor had ultimately fallen apart by the early 1980s. It is, however, a fascinating counter-factual to think about what would’ve happened to Shakespeare’s Globe in London had this project gone ahead. Would there have been competing Globes, both offering performances of early modern drama in variations of the so-called Original Practices initiative? Would the version in London have claimed greater legitimacy due its placement? (Although it, too, is not exactly where the original Globe was situated, even if it is in the right neighborhood).

One of the primary motivators for such projects was, and remains to a certain extent, the desire to make new discoveries or test hypotheses about how theatre might have been in the time of Shakespeare. It may come as a surprise that there could be anything new to say about the buildings themselves, but discoveries are ongoing, mainly as a result of a flurry of recent archaeological work. One of the most revelatory breakthroughs in recent years was made by archaeologists working on the Curtain Theatre, which opened about twenty years earlier than the Globe in 1577, across excavations between 2012 and 2016. This was that the Curtain was rectangular, rather than round. The discovery upended what had previously been considered fixed lore about these spaces: that they were polygonal, roughly circular, in shape. We are now confronted with a theatrical landscape in which rectangular outdoor playing spaces seem to have been as common or normative as polygonal ones.

Reconstruction projects, too, are evolving, taking on new forms. Over four decades after the symposium at Wayne State University in which Hodges was involved, a reimagined Globe Theatre has come to Detroit. This is the Container Globe, brainchild of music manager and entrepreneur Angus Vail, situated on the grounds of the former Herman Kiefer hospital in Midtown and made from repurposed shipping containers. The venue has hosted its first series of events across 2024 and was the home of Tec-troit electronic music festival in the same year. This project is simply one example of how these playhouses are consistently being remade and reimagined in the twenty-first century, created using different materials and producing performances for different demographics and communities. Although the Container Globe is very different in look and feel to the kind of building projects Hodges imagined on paper, his drawings continue to provide inspiration and provoke thought for those fascinated by Shakespeare’s London.