Shakespeare's Globe Theater By Elizabeth Knapp

“All the world’s a stage,” says William Shakespeare, a famous playwright and poet. In the article, “Shakespeare’s Globe Theater,” by Elizabeth Knapp, the author describes how the Globe Theater reflected the customs of Elizabethan society.
During this time period, theater was highly regarded because of the Queen’s love for it. According to the text, “...a cannon fired during a performance of Henry V ignited the [theater’s] thatched roof… A year later, it was rebuilt, this time with a tile roof… The Globe continued to prosper as the center of cultural activity in London” (p. 10). The Renaissance, between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, was the time when culture was valued. All aspects of art and literature were valued. The Elizabethan Era was only a fraction of this movement - a fraction that valued theater above other aspects of culture. This is shown by how much the people cherished the Globe. Construction was extremely difficult in those days, but the theater was rebuilt in merely a year. The precautions taken by adding tile proved that they didn’t want to risk anything happening to the building, because it was so important to them and their

Knapp says, “[They] tailored their scripts to include low humor and vulgar jokes to appeal to the lower classes, action and plot development to interest the middle classes, and high-minded language and themes to please the upper classes” (p. 2). Playwrights had to construct the dialogue so it would appeal to people of various classes. The lower classes weren’t as educated or mature as the middle and upper classes, but the upper classes were more demanding than the lower and the middle. The middle classes wanted substance and plot, but the upper and lower classes were more interested in comedy and theme. Because theater was so important to Elizabethan society, the writers had to find a way to please