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literary–lagged behind developments on the Continent. The great English architects Inigo Jones (1573-1652) and Christopher Wren (1632-1723) would later transform the London cityscape with monumental successes typified by Jones’s Banqueting House at Whitehall or Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, completed in 1622 and 1720 respectively, but it is evident from contemporary depictions such as John Norden’s Civitas Londini (1600) that Elizabethan London was still aesthetically medieval, dominated by the gothic Old St. Paul’s in the City, and the Church of St. Saviour's on the south side of the river (see fig. 6).47 _{The Renaissance historian Frances Yates, in her book entitled}

Theatre of the World (1969), demonstrated that we need not infer an ignorance of Vitruvian theories of proportion and symmetry from the absence of impressive new structures in Elizabethan England. Yates identifies the Tudor “Renaissance Man” John Dee (1527-1608) as a proto-architect in England at a time that had long been seen as devoid of cultural interest in neoclassical theory, given the perception of England as “a provincial backwater so far as the new architecture was concerned” (21).48 _{In 1570 Dee wrote a preface to the first English} translation of the works of the Greek mathematician Euclid,49 _drawing heavily on both Vitruvius and Alberti, and Yates highlights the significance of this publication:

Nearly fifty years before Inigo Jones, the ‘Vitruvius Britannicus’, began belatedly to initiate neoclassical building in England, John Dee was teaching the middle-class Elizabethan public, through his popular Preface, the basic principles of proportion and design, and demonstrating that all the mathematical arts subserve Architecture as their queen. (21)

47 _{Old St. Paul’s was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 and replaced by Wren’s grandiose,}

domed baroque cathedral that still stands today.

48 _{OED provides an obscure source from 1563 as the earliest recorded sixteenth-century}

instance of “architect” that also matches its primary definition of “master builder” (“architect, n.” OED). Bowsher and Miller add that James Baret’s Alvearie dictionary of 1580 “shows clearly that the word ‘architect’ had not yet been assimilated into the English language” (108).

49 _{Euclid (ca. 300 BC), Greek mathematician known for his great work Elements of}

Dee’s famous library catalogue of 1583 confirms his knowledge of Vitruvius via the works of Alberti and Barbaro.50 _{His “aspiration towards} total knowledge” enabled Dee to amass the largest collection of books and manuscripts in Elizabethan England, while his eminence is underlined by his role as advisor to the Queen herself (Sherman 871).

The suggestion here is not that Shakespeare and his sharers built the Globe playhouse as a conscious response to neoclassical theatre architecture on the Continent, or even as an intentional realisation of the Vitruvian theatrum mundi conceit. For one thing, the Globe was based at least in part–at very least in its framing timbers–on James Burbage’s Theatre in Shoreditch, which predates Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico. Burbage was no classically informed architect in the mould of Palladio; he had served as an apprentice joiner in London and later turned actor with the Earl of Leicester’s Men. Burbage and his brother-in-law John Brayne successfully initiated the transition from late-medieval drama and itinerant playing to the culture of theatrical enterprise and public amphitheatres in Renaissance London, as I outline in the following chapter. It was an ambitious and costly undertaking, but Burbage’s lofty aspirations and self-confidence are evidenced by the fact that he had assured Brayne “that the cost of erecting the play-house would not exceed £200, and after it had already cost £500, urged that ‘it was no matter’, and that the profits ‘wold shortlie quyte the cost unto them bothe’” (ES 2: 387). We must reasonably assume that the structure of the Theatre, on which the Globe would be based, was determined by commercial factors–chiefly the need to accommodate as many patrons as possible–rather than the classical unities studied and adhered to by Palladio.

The assumption by Yates “that Burbage knew something of Vitruvian theory as propagated by Dee,” and her suggestions “that Burbage might have consulted Dee himself about the design; or that Dee himself was really the designer” of the Theatre (125-26) are interesting yet conjecturable, and have not been borne out by subsequent scholarship and archaeological work on Elizabethan playhouse remains. The early playhouse was most likely a rather contingent combination of the features of the existing animal-baiting houses on Bankside with those of the inns and courtyards used for playing before it became an institutionalised pastime. The overwhelming majority of London buildings at that time were built in the vernacular tradition by local

50 _{The catalogue was published fully indexed in 1990 by the Bibliographical Society}

craftsmen, and design was not usually motivated by aesthetic concerns or architectural ambition (Bowsher and Miller 108).51 _{Nonetheless, I} hesitate to dismiss out of hand the theories advanced by Yates, since the decision by Burbage and his associates to name this new venture The Theatre implies an awareness of the classical roots of their vocation. Certainly the principles of Vitruvian architecture–not least the relationship between circle and square–and the details of their dissemination and currency in contemporary learned society, as discussed above, allow us to discount the notion that a rectangular stage in a round auditorium was an awkward “square peg in a round hole,” irrespective of what the builders intended.52