There’s already a Shakespeare quiz at TriviaPark.com, so today’s question may have to fit in somewhere else. It concerns an event that to Will Shakespeare would have been both a drama and a tragedy. Find out more, as we play…
Guess the catastrophe
William Shakespeare’s professional home for most of his career was The Globe, a celebrated London theater that unfortunately did not outlast even him. It met its demise in 1613, three years before Shakespeare’s own death. How was The Globe destroyed?
- Collapsed: the upper stands gave way when a record crowd rioted during a dull show
- Demolished: to build a luxury villa, Rochester Hall, on the same site
- Incinerated: when cannon-fire used in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII ignited the straw roof
- Torn apart: by a Protestant mob outraged by supposed ‘code-words’ in certain plays
The Globe was a famous theater even before it went up in flames — fortunately without loss of life — owing to a misfiring stage cannon. Since then, its association with Shakespeare, and the fact that tantalizing details of its construction remain undiscovered, have made it legendary. The building is known to have been many-sided, since it formed an approximate circle, but the exact number of sides is unknown. Inside, the stage projected forward into the audience so that the actors were partly encircled by the roofless section around the stage from which the ‘groundlings’ watched the play. The groundlings had the cheap seats, except for the seats: they had to take their Shakespeare standing up. Covered balconies or galleries provided more comfort for those who could pay, while the really well-to-do might take their ease upon the stage itself. After its destruction, The Globe was rebuilt on the same site, only to be destroyed a second time to make way for tenements. That came after Parliament, in Puritan hands, ordered the closure of all play-houses in 1642.
