Reconstructing the peculiar kind of theatre for which Shakespeare wrote his plays, which was unique to his time, has been a matter of recurrent interest both to scholars and to directors and actors of the plays. More than thirty theatres with pretensions to being a replica of the Globe (with, of course, varying degrees of accuracy) have been built since 1820. All of these projects suffered from the inadequacy of the information about the original theatre. Until 1989 the only evidence was a few inaccurate seventeenth-century pictures and the few references to features of the theatre that re…
