As you may already know, all theaters (and the vast majority of commercial establishments) in the United Kingdom have been forced to close due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
So many museums, theaters and cultural institutions have taken the initiative to offer free cultural content online.
Shakespeare’s Globe in London is one of the great cultural institutions that has joined this initiative.
Shakespeare’s Globe is a replica of The Globe theatre, which staged many of William Shakespeare’s original plays in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
The current theater dates back to 1997 and is a very faithful replica of what the theaters of the time are believed to have looked like. Every year about 6 plays are performed between the months of April and October. Most of the plays are by Shakespeare and are almost always performed in period costumes and in the original language.
In the theater there are a number of chairs, but most people go to see the play standing in the central patio, as was done at the time. So going to see a play at Shakespeare’s Globe in London is the closest you can get, in our opinion, to the real experience of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater.
And now we have the opportunity to have this experience without leaving home. Shakespeare’s Globe has decided to make some of its productions completely free on YouTube. The Globe has many recordings of its different theater productions and you can access them, to watch them online, for a fee. Most of the works in their repertoire are still paid for, but they have made 6 completely free, to the delight of theater lovers during confinement.
The works are not all available at the same time. They will be added one by one over a period of two weeks. That is to say, for 2 weeks you can see a work, which is then removed and replaced with a different one that will also be there for 2 weeks.
To start, until Sunday, April 19, you have the opportunity to see the first of them, a production of Hamlet.
The 6 plays that will be available are:
Hamlet (2018) from Monday, April 6 to Sunday, April 19.
Romeo and Juliet (2009) from Monday, April 20 to Sunday, May 3.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2013) from Monday, May 4 to Sunday, May 17.
The Two Noble Relatives (2018) from Monday, May 18 to Sunday, May 31.
Winter’s Tale (2018) from Monday, June 1 to Sunday, June 14.
The Merry Wives of Windsor (2019) from Monday, June 15 to Sunday, June 28.
The works are in English, but on YouTube you have the option to put the ‘captions’ and choose Spanish for the subtitles. Please note that there will be some errors in the translation, but in general it is well understood. And for those of you who want to practice English, you can of course choose English subtitles and enjoy the English of Shakespeare’s time!
The works can be seen completely free of charge, without restrictions, although the Globe is asking that whoever can make a donation to help this great theater institution that, like many others in the world of the arts, is being greatly affected by the situation we are experiencing.
