My feet are sore; my knees are tired. Luke and I spent Sunday puzzling through London’s maze of indistinguishable street names – Highbury Place, Highbury Park, Highbury Crescent, Highbury Hill, Highbury Grange, Highbury Terrace, Highbury Terrace Mews, Highbury Station Road – I’m amazed we made it out alive. Eventually, we escaped the Highburys and arrived on the south bank of the Thames, where we visited the Tate and toured the Globe Theatre.
View of the Thames, South Bank
As a wee lad, I spent a summer or three at an oceanography camp on the Thames – not this Thames, the other Thames, in Connecticut, which rhymes with “maims,” what we Americans gleefully do to other nation’s proper nouns (see Interlaken, New York). The one in Connecticut had more squid.
Pacing the yard of Shakespeare’s Globe, I had trouble diagnosing my emotions. Any writer must feel a potent combination of awe and intimidation in the spiritual presence of the enigmatic lord of the written word. Awe and intimidation I felt, as well as a dollop of incredulity at our tour guide’s phrase: “authentic reproduction.”
Shakespeare’s Globe
The original Globe burnt up in a special effects mishap in 1613, and its replacement (which outlived the Playwright) was torn down by my ancestors, the angry Puritans, in 1644. Shakespeare’s Globe, as we know it today, wasn’t built for another three hundred years and change. Yet even under the oxymoronic eves of this “authentic reproduction,” a couple hundred feet from the site of its predecessors, one still feels proximity to legend.
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