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I saw the Globe while it was still not complete. But it was already being used to perform Shakespeare's plays. Londoners and visitors are fascinated by these experiments. Even serious members of the ICOMOS International Wood Committee were caught up, and heckled the actor who addressed us from the stage.

This is an important experiment to reconstruct a cultural form from another time, not just to reproduce a building.

I'll quote Andrew Gurr:
Shakespeare wrote his plays not for print but to be staged at the original Globe ... Shakespeare's Globe was his hardware, and the play-scripts may be considered as almost the only surviving evidence of the software he wrote for that particular machine. It is difficult not to keep on making radical mistakes about what the software was designed to do until we have a clearer idea of the hardware it was designed to play on. That is the basic reason for trying to discover more about the Globe and how it worked.

(from the introduction to The design of the Globe, 1995).

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