A few things to consider…

Today’s Globe has a capacity of more than 1,500 people, 500 of them standing in the yard at the actors’ feet, many of them close enough to reach out and touch. The layout of the theatre, with the yard and the three galleries of seating around it, mean that a large audience is packed into a surprisingly small area – unlike any large-capacity theatre, there isn’t a seat at the Globe more than 19m from the front of the stage; so it’s a large crowd, but unusually intimate too, and the high density of the audience (the number of people per square yard of floor space) give it an intensity, an energy, quite unlike a more spacious auditorium.

Now, usually when you go to the theatre the lights go down, the audience settles, and the lights go up on the stage, and that’s where you focus your attention; not so at the Globe. The whole interior is lit equally (usually by natural daylight), audience and stage alike. This "shared daylight" means that the audience can see each other, but also that the actors can see the audience – they can see them react, can see all too clearly if they’re not all that engaged, they can look individual audience members in the eye.

In the shared daylight the audience is more aware of each other, which heightens their reaction to the performance. Instead of seeing the play as an individual, personal experience (me sitting in the darkness, and over there a brightly lit spectacle), plays at the Globe are experienced collectively – in that sense it’s much more like the experience of being at a football match, where your experience is largely shaped by the experience and enjoyment of those around you. When Globe audiences laugh, they laugh uproariously, as a crowd; when the mood of a scene turns on a sixpence and suddenly there’s a poignant moment, the instant holding-your-breath silence in the Globe yard might just be the quietest silence you’ve ever heard.

The audience are very aware of each other, and responsive to each other; but the open roof means they’re aware of external factors too. The lighting on the stage changes when a cloud passes in front of the sun, or shifts as evening draws in; the groundlings are at the mercy of rain and snow; nowadays there’s the added effect of low-flying aircraft buzzing noisily above their heads. The audience in any case are particularly vulnerable to distraction – with so many things to see around them, with the rest of the audience to watch as well as the performance, including 500 people standing, shifting a little from leg to leg as the play drifts towards act five and they begin to tire… And then it might be raining… Ask any actor who’s played the Globe and they’ll tell you – the audiences are exciting, powerful, responsive, but these elements of the architecture mean they’re hard work too…

And it’s not just the audience response; the actors’ performances are shaped by the architecture too – their voices, for one thing, have a quite different acoustic to adapt to. The two pillars on the stage that hold up the "heavens" (the canopy roof above the stage) means that there is no single spot on the stage where an actor can be seen by every member of the audience. This doesn’t just mean that actors are constantly kept moving, but also that great emphasis is placed on ensuring you’re clear and audible, even if you’re not visible. There are references in Shakespeare’s day to audiences "going to see a play", but also sometimes to audiences "going to hear a play". The word "audience", indeed, refers to an experience where hearing is the primary sense, not seeing.

Shakespeare's vision

So – that’s a view of the Globe today. But why does all this matter? Perhaps it matters mainly because understanding these conditions, the experience of play-going at the Globe today, helps us to understand the sort of theatrical experience for which Shakespeare’s plays were purpose-written, and in turn to understand the plays themselves and the craft behind them.

Shakespeare was a man of the theatre, himself an actor as well as a writer, and a man who well understood the quirks of his venue and what would and wouldn’t work well in it. And he wrote accordingly. He wrote a balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet because he knew the play would be acted on a stage with a balcony. He wrote scenes that use trapdoors in the stage (Hamlet and the gravediggers), or thunderstorm effects (the stormy weather in King Lear) because he knew the playhouses could do such things. They were tools he’d used before. But when Ophelia drowns, Shakespeare has someone come on stage and tell us she’s drowned, rather than writing a scene that shows it, because frankly he had to know that nothing in the Globe’s special-effects armoury could convincingly do large amounts of rushing river-water on stage… (Nowadays, of course, every film you watch of Hamlet has the speech as a voice-over and can’t resist showing you scenes of Ophelia drifting downstream with flowers in her hair…)

When an actor speaks a soliloquy in a spotlight in a darkened theatre, they’re isolated, talking to themselves. But at the Globe – these characters’ first dedicated home – a soliloquy reveals itself as a moment for the character to address the audience directly, to make eye contact, to – as Hamlet often does – ask the audience a question. And other characters with great soliloquies – Richard III, Iago in Othello, Edmund in King Lear, gain a sort of complicity with the audience (so many of us packed in closely around them, all visible to them) that’s hard to recreate when we’re sitting out here darkly in our plush velvet seats, and he’s over there on the stage lit in a single spotlight. And the Globe reminds us that this is the actor-audience relationship for which these characters were written.

A rediscovery

This sort of revelation has come from practical exploration of playing at the Globe today – the jokes which have been lost for 400 years and are suddenly revealed because they only work in such a place, and the mastering of the audience with brilliantly juxtaposing moods which is so striking in an audience with the energy of the Globe’s – these things truly help to understand what it was that Shakespeare was up to…