The Globe at the 1934 Chicago World's Fair

FRANKLIN HILDY: In 1933, Chicago decided to have its Century of Progress exhibition. And they started this great, grand exhibition in Chicago and after the first season, they realized that it was too unrelentingly modernist and looking to the future. And so for the second season, they wanted to bring in some ties to the past, ties to history, and part of that was to create an English village. And as part of creating that English village, just as had been done in the 1912 Earls Court exhibition, they wanted to create a Globe theater. So they asked Thomas Wood Stevens to sort of take charge of that, and they created this Globe theater reconstruction and then they were faced with the problem—well, how do you bring in an audience that's here for the World's Fair to come in and see Shakespeare?

They decided what they would have to do is cut the plays down to like 45 minutes and then they did seven shows a day. And actually, when they went through the whole process they ended up, they couldn't cut them down as much as they thought, so they ended up running about 50 minutes. But they got a lot of text in that 50 minutes because they played them as Poel had suggested—without any scenery, with a quick overlapping of lines, with a rapid delivery. And it was amazingly successful. Something like 400,000 people came to see those shows over the course of that summer.