Your mouth is dry. Your chest is tight and your stomach is a knot of tension. For the hundredth time you check that your helmet’s on straight and you’re carrying the right halberd. You’re about to make your entrance on the Globe stage and open the play. You peek through the curtain . . .

Christ, there’s a crowd out there, well over two thousand of them, squashed into every nook and cranny. The galleries are crammed and the pit is a seething mass of apprentices and lawyers’ clerks pushing and shoving. The din is deafening and the air thick with excitement. It’s a hot summer afternoon and you feel the sweat trickling down your back under the heavy jerkin.

They’re all here to see the new play, Hamlet, by Master Shakespeare. He’s hot. His last few shows have smashed box-office records and blown Kit Marlowe out of the water. The racket is getting louder, the mob is becoming impatient—let’s get it on, the tension is killing. You peek out through the curtain again—the galleries are full of merchants, businessmen and their wives, lawyers and a fair sprinkling of courtiers, sitting on wooden benches. The galleries are more expensive: sixpence a pop compared with a penny to stand in the pit.

Someone else is peeking through the curtain too . . . Blimey, it’s the boss, Master Shakespeare himself. Is he nervous too? No—he’s counting the house! Always has a keen eye on the box office.

He’s playing ‘the Ghost’ in this one. He always likes to play the more dignified roles—kings, dukes and so on. He’s wearing a rather elaborate suit of armour and a long black cloak. His face is visible under the helmet. He seems pretty chuffed by the size of the house and very calm for a first performance.

He tips you a wink and a pat on the shoulder then goes to take his place. The bookkeeper, prompt copy in hand, gives you the stand-by. You are terrified of forgetting your lines. You’ve never seen the whole script; they say it’s too expensive to run off twenty copies, but the real reason is to stop you nicking it and selling it to a rival company. So all you get are your lines and your cues. At least there’s a storyboard pinned up backstage to remind you what scene comes next.

You lick your lips and try to relax your jaw, gripping the halberd tighter than ever. The bookkeeper raises his hand and gives you the go—you’re on! You step through the curtain onto the stage of the Globe and you’re almost overwhelmed by the sea of faces all around you, staring up from the pit at your feet, peering from the galleries on three sides of you. It’s a thrilling moment but the noise is still rumbling. It’s your job to shut them up, so you yell in your clearest voice, ‘Who’s there?’ and immediately the noise subsides—you could hear a pin drop. You spin around to confront the guy playing Francisco on the gallery above you, pointing his halberd at your chest:

Francisco: Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.

Barnardo: Long live the King!

Francisco: Barnardo?

Barnardo: He.

In a few moments, Horatio and Marcellus are on. We all wrap our cloaks around us and act like we’re shivering with the cold, and even though it’s a summer afternoon and the sky above our heads is a bright blue, the audience is in Denmark and it’s midnight. I take my exit and a few moments later a low bell rings from off stage. ‘Look where it comes,’ says Marcellus in a hoarse whisper and the Ghost paces slowly across the gallery overhead. A lot of this audience believes in ghosts, so we’re getting to them. A few older blokes in the pit cross themselves surreptitiously.

The crowd is with us all the way, utterly spellbound, and the scene finishes in a state of excitement, the actors scurrying away from the sinister battlements. As they exit through the door to the left of the stage there is a blare of trumpets, oboes and kettledrums, and the Danish court erupts onto the stage from the right-hand door.

The crowd applauds the spectacle of the brilliantly costumed courtiers and soldiers, and there are loud cheers for Dick Burbage, who’s playing Hamlet. He’s a great favourite, not just with audiences but with Master Shakespeare himself. He’s not a big man, but he’s charismatic—alert, quick-witted, agile and very natural. He doesn’t seem to be acting at all. He and Ned Alleyn are the two best actors in London, but Ned is more your old-style actor with a great ringing voice; they reckon you can hear him across the Thames.

Time for a small pot of ale before your next entrance; you can’t drink water out of the river, it’s filthy.

The court has exited, leaving Hamlet on his own with the audience. Peek through the curtain, see how he’s doing. The sea of faces is absolutely rapt and somewhat baffled. They knew they were coming to see Hamlet, which is an old story about a crazy, vengeful Danish prince. But here is Burbage being all melancholy and doubt-stricken, telling them that he thinks revenge isn’t such a good thing!

Something else is going on here; Hamlet is tapping into something deeper—the doubt and confusion of the audience and the time we’re living in. This isn’t medieval Denmark—this is England here and now, 1602; an England riven by religious doubt and sectarian hostilities, the new science and Protestant philosophy in a death struggle with ancient Catholic belief and practice. This is an age of terrorism, political assassination, police spies and brutal censorship: ‘Something is rotten in the State . . .’ And that’s why there are two thousand people crammed into the Globe Theatre this hot summer afternoon in 1602 . . .

Reality check

The scene above is not an attempt at a reconstruction. Rather, it’s an impression, a series of sensations that hit me when I stepped through the curtain onto the stage of the new Globe Theatre in London and felt the buzz of what it might have been like back then.

In an age without radio, television or newspapers, the theatre was where people went not only for entertainment, but to see the dilemmas, the controversies, the fundamental issues of the day acted out. Not everyone in the audience would have known how to read and write. But they knew how to listen. Their lives depended on it. In those tense times, you had to be careful what you said in the pulpit—you could be burned at the stake. You had to be careful what you published—you could have your hand chopped off. But in the theatre you could just get away with it. Set your plays somewhere remote in place and time, as Shakespeare frequently did, and you could comment on all manner of corruption and tyranny. You could say, ‘Something is rotten in the State . . .’—as long as you added: ‘of Denmark.’

On the day in 2005 when I visited the new London Globe, there was no sea of faces—the place was virtually empty, except for us, a small group of Australian actors. But I could imagine the place crammed with eager spectators and how ‘in your face’ they would be.

This Globe is much smaller than the original, which could accommodate close to three thousand. And it’s not yet as gaudy, though eventually it will be, when they finish painting the interior. Research suggests that the Globe was painted throughout in bright colours, wood emulating marble, with vivid tapestries. But the sensation of being on that stage, in that space, was revelatory and informative.

In 2005 the Bell Shakespeare Company was invited to take The Comedy of Errors to the Bath Shakespeare Festival, to perform in the beautiful Georgian Theatre Royal. On the way we had a few days in London and managed to score a tour of the Globe. The management and the artistic director, Mark Rylance, were hospitable and indulgent and allowed us to play on the stage. We ran the last scene of Comedy of Errors and were warmly applauded by a tourist party who arrived on cue.

The main discovery we made was how much you had to play to the audience—they were all around you and above and below; only occasionally could you turn to face your stage partner. And you had to keep on the move, making sure all parts of the house could hear and see you. Those who had seats behind the pillars must have been content to sit and listen. After all, they used to go to ‘hear’ rather than ‘see’ a play.

Nevertheless, the visuals were pretty spectacular—highly ornamental costumes, some of them specially made, many of them hand-me-downs from wealthy aristocratic patrons. Shakespeare knew the value of spectacle—dances, masques, battles, processions, coronations—and he kept the musicians busy.

There was virtually no attempt at authenticity in costume. That obsession with keeping things ‘in period’ didn’t happen until the nineteenth century with the conjunction of archaeology, medievalism and the picture-frame stage. If you have a picture frame you have to put something inside it.

The only surviving visual image we have of an Elizabethan performance was sketched during Titus Andronicus and shows the characters in basically contemporary Elizabethan costume—Aaron the Moor is blacked up and one of the actors wears a laurel wreath to give a hint of ancient Rome. But otherwise the plays were performed in what you’d call ‘modern dress’. With their talk of clocks and rapiers and ‘Popish tricks’ these were not ancient Romans but Elizabethan Englishmen and the plays were about themselves.

Sets were either nonexistent or as perfunctory as the costumes. A single tree designated a forest. The actors always told you where they were:

Hang out our banners on the outward walls . . .

This isle is full of noises.

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.

The stage itself had a hangover of the old medieval pageants: the ceiling was painted with celestial signs and, in the gallery above, angels and gods appeared. Beneath the stage was hell; devils, ghosts and witches appeared through the trapdoor. Men stood in the middle, between heaven and hell, negotiating with both.

This open, empty, non-specific space made for great speed in performance. You walked out one side and walked in the other—you were somewhere else, from Rome to Egypt in a twinkling. You were wherever you said you were:

What wood is this before us?

The wood of Birnam.

What country, friends, is this?

This is Illyria, lady.

And you could be inside one moment, outside the next, or inside and outside at the same time. Hamlet is inside the castle at the end of the play scene, when Polonius accosts him. Pointing at the open sky above the Globe stage, Hamlet says, ‘Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in the shape of a camel?’ And the whole audience would have looked up to check it out.

All this mobility of playing was lost in the nineteenth century with the proscenium-arch theatre and curtains constantly being raised and lowered so that sets could be changed around—so unnecessary and so redundant when Shakespeare was painting the scenery for you. What painted set could live up to the words: ‘How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank’?

With the audience wrapped around you, the Globe has a curiously intimate feel, something the original shared, despite being so much bigger. You didn’t have to shout or declaim to be heard (and, unlike the modern Globe, there were no aircraft overhead). So the action hurtled along, no time lost in scene-changes, the actors speaking quickly and clearly, always on the move. When Shakespeare referred to ‘the two hours’ traffic of our stage’ in the prologue of Romeo and Juliet he meant it. Plays started around three in the afternoon and finished at five, no interval.

It would seem to have been Shakespeare’s (and others’) practice to write out the whole play of his imagination and then cut it down to a performance script two hours long. The stage-keeper would have the original, while the actors’ individual parts along with their cues would be copied out and given to them. A script by Shakespeare or Jonson or Marlowe was money in the bank and, since there was no copyright, anybody could put it on. But some actors sold off their individual parts along with a garbled version of as much of the play as they could remember.

When the play was eventually published for sale, once the company had thoroughly exploited it, it was the entire original, not the cut-down performance script, that was published.

We get a good snapshot of Elizabethan actors at work watching the Athenian mechanicals rehearse Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Peter Quince casts the actors, hands them their parts with their cues, then plays director-cum-stage manager. We get another insight when Hamlet (as author) teaches the actors how to play their roles—‘Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you’—and launches into a very perceptive critique of what constitutes good and bad acting.

All these thoughts were rattling around my head as I stood on the stage of the new Globe and examined its backstage areas and dressing (attiring) rooms (or ‘tiring house’, as Shakespeare called them). I had a flashback to one of my earliest Shakespearean raptures, when, as a schoolkid, I saw Laurence Olivier’s movie of Henry V and decided I was going to be an actor and do Shakespeare for the rest of my life. I fell in love with the whole package—those quaint little medieval sets and knights in armour, the heroic speeches on the battlefield and so on—but what thrilled me most of all was the opening of the movie, set in the Globe Theatre. The film may look a bit quaint sixty years on, but I think Olivier got a pretty good feel of the old Globe—the palpable excitement, the newness of the whole thing, the lively interaction between actors and audience, the thrill of exotic language and flamboyant acting. It seemed to be the best kind of theatre that could be. It was free of affectation and pomposity. It bridged the gap between popular entertainment and ‘high art’ with nonchalant ease. It was the kind of theatre I wanted to be part of, wanted to create.

Looking back over fifty years I guess that has been a constant in the work I’ve done, either acting or directing: that desire to make ‘high art’ accessible and popular. It’s also about the importance of conserving something so precious, so inspiring, as well as a strong conviction that Shakespeare has to be acted—it’s of limited value sitting on the library shelf. Director Peter Brook once compared theatre to a piece of coal: you can lecture about it, theorise about it, but it only comes to life when you put a match to it.

The art of writing lines, replies which express a passion with full tone and complete imaginative intensity, and in which you can none the less catch the resonance of its opposite—this is an art which no poet has practiced except the unique poet, Shakespeare.

Søren Kierkegaard in Gross (ed.), After Shakespeare