All the Worlds a Stage

2011_2_25 All the World’s a Stage

There were two versions of the Globe Theater on the south bank of the river Thames. The first burned down due to an accidental fire in 1613 and the second was completed the next year, with some improvements, but on the same spot. The second Globe lasted 31 years when the theater-going fell into disfavor under the Puritan rule. It was then pulled down to make room for tenements. The modern replica of the Globe Theater was built very close to the original site.

In the prologue to “Henry VIII” Shakespeare calls the Globe “a wooden O.” Actually it was a timber-framed polygon with as many as 16 sides, which made it look like a oval in form from a distance. The Elizabethan Theater, unlike the modern theater, which is tied to scenes and technical machinery, was portable, self-contained, adjustable, and only needed an audience. The public stage was a spin-off of the common scaffold stage of street theaters of the medieval era. The area in front of the stage was called “the Yard.” Part of the audience saw the play from that perspective and they had to stand for the length of the play. Otherwise the audience sat in box seats arrayed in three levels in a circle around the three-sided stage.


Usually the stage was head high to allow for a working space underneath the floor; then the posts were covered with a drape so the theatergoer could not see beneath the stage. Since it was below the stage level it was referred to as “Hell,” and there was a trap door in the floor of the stage so “devils” could emerge from below. (In 18 plays Shakespeare used the Hell’s trap door only twice.) In likewise fashion the ceiling above the stage and the three-tired up-stage background was called “Heaven.” It was painted with blue sky, clouds, and yellow stars and sometimes in other theaters with a zodiac on the ceiling too. (They think it was painted by a itinerate Flemish painter.) If any one were to be interested in more detail of the components of the Globe Theater I would highly recommend THE GLOBE RESTORED by C. Walter Hodge who not only wrote the book, he illustrated it with some very fine pen and ink drawings.

The phrase “behind the scenes” will take on a new meaning when you study the composition of the old Globe Theater. The word “scene” comes from the Greek word “skene” which means tent or booth, again a reference to the smaller portable stage of the Middle Ages. The “proscenium” was the area in front of the scene. The back-stage area was called the “Tiring House.” The word ’Tiring’ actually was a reduction of the word ‘attire,’ and referred to the dressing rooms, storage and wardrobe.
Players entered the area from an outside door in the back. The up-stage façade was a vertical plane arranged with several levels. The first two were stacked on each other with six doors and windows. At floor level, right in the middle of the façade, was the “inner stage,” the main entrance and exit for the players, which was cover by a curtain. (In some Elizabethan theaters the inner stage was a double door made out of wood.) There were two additional wooden doors on each side of the main entrance or inner stage. Directly above it was the “upper stage,” a gallery or balcony above the inner stage, used as required by musicians, sometimes by spectators, and often as part of the play. It was flanked by two “window stages,” one on each side. In short, there was symmetry to these first two levels. Two more vertical levels extended above the inner and upper stages. The first was called the “top stage.” It was used mostly by musicians. (Symbolically, it could represent the perception of the Music of the Spheres, since there is a thread of Hermetic Philosophy clearly throughout the structuring of the Globe.) Above the top story was the super-celestial stage known as the “The Hut’ or “The Heavenly Throne.” This was a space equipped with machinery to lower divinities, if that was called for, through another trap door to the floor of the stage. According to Hodge the upper stages of Renaissance theaters had a tendency to “impart symbolic importance to vertical display.” There was, if you will, a climbing toward the uppermost level through 7 levels—from yard to hell to main floor to inner stage to upper stage to top story to heavenly throne. The number seven is a number sacred to Christianity and Hermetic Philosophy. Perhaps it was part of a kind of occult or hidden shorthand behind the invention of the structure of the Globe Theater. Another consideration in this regard is the stage faced east, just like the altar in Christian churches in Europe—toward Jerusalem. In other words, the construction and layout of the Globe Theater is what Paracelsus termed a VITA COSMOGRAPHICA, a diagram of the cosmos as a two-way street, God comes down from his Heavenly Throne and humanity endeavors to elevate itself to the Heavenly Throne. I would call that a HIEROGLYPH, a sacred reading of a hidden truth. Here is how Frances Yates put it in THEATER OF THE WORLD, her splendid book about the Globe Theater and its intellectual and Hermetic influences that informed the ideas behind its construction.

“The painting of the ‘heavens’ in Burbage’s theater, with its images of the signs of the zodiac and of the planets, would have been a matter of great importance. For, apart from their practical use as cover and for acoustics, the ‘heavens’ emphasized and repeated the cosmic plan of the theater, based on the triangulations within the circle of the zodiac. They showed forth clearly that this was a ‘Theater of the World,’ in which Man, the Microcosm, was to play his parts within the Macrocosm.”

Which brings me to my drawings and what I call THE HIEROGLYPHIC THEATER, for I have intuitively evolved a concept and method similar to the emblematic method so popular during the Renaissance. After a search of 5 years I came up with my own version of VITA COMOMGRAPHICA. To quote John Blofeld, an authority on Tibetan Buddhism, the challenge is “to create mental symbols related to spiritual goals,” images the Tantric practitioners calls a “yantra,” a visualization that can summarize in two-dimensional form a cosmic diagram, which is what the Globe Theater does in three dimensions. One of the better-known yantras is the Tibetan WHEEL OF LIFE; a series of concentric circles jammed packed with Buddhist’s symbols and beliefs. Such images are objects for contemplation, a starting point, again to quote Blofeld, “to transfer the force of desire to the symbol so that the desire is concentrated directly on the goal. If the adept is accomplished in the art of visualization, there will be not be much element of make-believe, for he will have learnt to produce mental creations which are more real to him than the ordinary objects of his environment.” I have chosen to call my images hieroglyphs, would-be sacred symbols with hidden meanings, and the entire series of drawings THE HIEROGLYPHIC THEATER.

After I quit teaching I spent 5 years searching for a way to describe a transformational experience I had had in the late sixties. Around 1973-1974 I settled into an approach I was happy with. In 1975 I wrote my first book, PRIMUS ROTA, which I self-published and privately distributed to 5 western sates. Remembering the Renaissance theater had a tendency “to impart symbolic importance to vertical display,” my pen and ink drawings favored a vertical format divided into three horizontal levels.




In the drawings I used a vertical format that divided into three registers or levels. I thought of the levels as a tripartite division of reality, roughly considering the lower level the material world; the middle level was that of the psyche; and the topmost level was the spiritual realm. Water and the desert came to represent the lowest level; the middle level could be represented in a variety of ways; and a bird in flight or a mandala in a midnight sky represented the topmost level most of the time. The theater idea is evoke by the use of a platform, if you will, a proscenium, with most of the narrative imagery and action taking placed on staging platform. It was like a world apart yet fixed within a cosmos in which it played a vital role. The divisions between the levels were not hard and fast; more like subtle and blend at the borders. To use an image from Carl Jung, they constituted a UNUS MUNDI, one World.

About two years after I started using the tripartite hieroglyphic approach, I came across a picture of the Serekh Motif, an ancient Egyptian emblem that was common on royal residences in the Early Dynastic Period. It was an image on a stela with a tripartite hieroglyphic arrangement that surprised me when I fist saw it. It was obvious I was not the first to think of the idea, to say the least. The Egyptians beat me by 5,000 years! Here is what it looks like. On the bottom level was a panel that described a hall of a typical Egyptian temple columns that gave you a sense of spatial depth. It was meant to suggest the world of space and time. It would equate with my lower material level. The middle register had, again something typically Egyptian, contained the image of an animal, a snake, said to be a cobra. I equated the cobra with my level of the psyche, and inevitably with KUNDALINI, with SERPENT POWER, with a special form of healing energy, with self-knowledge and individuation. The top most register had another and larger animal, a falcon, representing the God Horus, originally a solar deity, an animal representation of the living kings of Egypt. He was one of oldest gods of the nation, as his presence on the Serekh Motif indicates.

When I first read the books of Frances Yates, BRUNO AND THE HERMETIC TRADITION, THE ART OF MEMORY, and THE THEATER OF THE WORLD I was thrilled to find such a kindred spirit and her discourse on the symbol-rich background to The Globe Theater taught just how a ‘hieroglyph’ worked and how I might create some myself. Like with the Globe Theater I put my actors on the stage between the darkness of hell and the glories of the Heavenly Throne.

As Shakespeare wrote “All the world’s a stage.” And when Ben Jonson saw the charred remains of the first Globe Theater after the fire, he exclaimed, “See the World in ruins!”