All the World's a Stage

I used to notice that tourists in Oxford frequently walked around with the same benign, smiling somehow patronising look; it fell, this look, indifferently, on everything. If the tourist saw some student riding past on an old rickety bike, coat tails flapping furiously in the wind, this look would appreciably ‘dilate’ with pleasure, for this lone cyclist had the magical charm of a postcard brought to life, and embodied for them the living quintessence of ‘Oxford’. All their preconceptions were returned to them in the bell and the whirr of wheels.

Now this benign, patronising look is also to be found on many of the audience's faces at the Globe theatre. This ersatz-Elizabethan mock-up, approximating to some incomplete and sketchy idea of the original, provides an anodyne facsimile of Elizabethan experience, from which the roughness, stench, and hazard have been removed. But what really repels is the audience. What are they smiling at, these people? Throughout the whole performance – though despair, or violence, or death or sex – the same look of benign reassurance. The reassurance is that everything taking place on stage takes place within their little fantasy frame. (And, perhaps, that they have been allowed inside the frame). What is staged here is not simply a play but ‘Shakespeare’. And just as every rickety bicycle, every tweed-jacketed young man, every college portal monotonously signifies ‘Oxford’ to the grateful tourist, so ‘Shakespeare’, to the thrilled spectator, is the inevitable referent of every speech.