The Globe Playhouse: Its Design and Equipment

ONE final area of the Globe Playhouse -- the superstructure or "heavens" constructed over the tiringhouse and outer stage -- remains to be considered. The Globe heavens was composed of three parts: an enclosed hut or loft corresponding to the "tower" of a modern theatre; a stage-cover or "shadow" (which entered our discussion of the music gallery); and the turret supporting the flagpole and the playhouse flag.

Contemporary views provide several illustrations of playhouse huts. The De Witt sketch of the Swan depicts a rectangular hut above the tiring-house, three-fourths as wide as the stage below, as deep apparently as the gallery frame, and one and one-half times as high as the man standing in its doorway. The hut is not placed directly over the frame, but is brought forward a few feet (its projection over the outer stage had to be great enough to allow for trapdoors in the overhanging portion of its floor). The hut is represented as having a gable roof of thatch, two windows facing the yard, a doorway in the visible end facing the "tectum" on the right, a flagpole and a flag with a large device of a swan upon it. If any part of the De Witt sketch is trustworthy, its representation of the hut should be, for, compared with the difficulty of depicting the curving galleries and the projecting stage with its forward columns, the drawing of the hut was a simple matter.

Except for Civitas Londini, early seventeenth-century views of the Bankside show a superstructure on top of every

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