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Shakespeare's Globe
21 New Globe Walk
Bankside
London SE1 9DT
Box office +44 020 7401 9919
Updated 10 April
2008
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King
Lear
by William Shakespeare
23 April - 17 August 2008
Old King Lear, weary of royal duties,
decides to break up his kingdom, divide
it among his three daughters, and present
the largest part to the one who loves
him most. His two eldest daughters profess
their love extravagantly, but young
Cordelia refuses to flatter him. Enraged,
he banishes her to France. But the old
king’s rash generosity is cruelly
repaid. Cast out by his daughters onto
a bare heath during a pitiless storm,
Lear discovers too late the false values
by which he has lived and, devastatingly,
the suffering common to all humanity.
A Midsummer
Night's Dream
by William Shakespeare
10 May - 4 October 2008
Hermia loves Lysander and Helena loves
Demetrius – but Demetrius is supposed
to be marrying Hermia. When the Duke
of Athens tries to enforce the marriage,
the lovers take refuge in the woods
outside the city, and walk into the
midst of a dispute between the king
and queen of the fairies. And they are
not alone. So, too, does a group of
amateur actors rehearsing a play. Between
the angry fairies, the bumbling players
and the dazed lovers, flies Puck armed
with a love juice capable of making
anyone fall for the first person they
set eyes upon – no matter how
unsuitable.
The
Merry Wives of Windsor
by William Shakespeare
8 June - 5 October 2008
The fat knight Sir John Falstaff imagines
that Mistress Ford and Mistress Page
are both taken with him and so, attracted
as much by their husbands’ money
as their personal charms, he decides
to woo them both. But the women are
up to the old lecher’s tricks
and turn the tables on him with a series
of humiliating assignations, midnight
terrors and a very damp, extremely smelly
laundry basket.
Gutsy, colloquial and bustling with
vivid characters, The Merry Wives of
Windsor is a brilliantly constructed
farce and the only comedy Shakespeare
set in his native land. It is also the
ancestor of English bourgeois comedy
and gave birth to a tradition that reaches
down to the modern TV sitcom. The production
will make merry with the relationship
between the life of middle-class Elizabethan
England and the late medieval period
in which the play is set.
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