The compass of the Globe2009

Shakespeare's Globe Theatre on the Southwark bank of the Thames had a tiny physical compass but it contrived to encompass a wide world and wealth of meaning, comic and tragic. Shakespeare named it 'This wooden O', for it had a circular, almost cup-like, shape with steep sides where two galleries held an eager audience and the stage projected far into the circled arena below them. Above the stage was a curtained balcony for scenes of love or sorrow as in Romeo and Juliet or announcing the death of Falstaff to the Eastcheap throng below.