What do a reliquary set with the gouged-out eyeball of a Catholic priest, foot-high platform shoes, and a narwhal tusk have in common? The perhaps surprising answer is that they are all things that would have been known to the audience that packed the Globe Theater to see the plays of William Shakespeare 400 years ago.
Today, they are among the objects that have been gathered together at the British Museum for its magnificent new exhibition Shakespeare—Staging the World, which aims to present the world as the playgoers of London circa 1612 would have experienced it. The silver reliquary containing the right eye of the Jesuit priest Blessed Father Edward Oldcorne, which was collected at his execution at Worcester in 1606, brings a gruesome layer of resonance to the famous lines from Lear when Gloucester is blinded by Cornwall, “Out vile jelly! Where is thy lustre now?” Today this scene is a ghoulish coup de theatre; in 1612, it would have been a moment alive with the frisson of contemporary politics.
Gouged-out eyeballs were not exactly an everyday occurrence, but they were an unavoidable fact of life for the playgoers who flocked across London Bridge to Southwark, then the theatrical and red-light district of the capital. The playhouse, the “Magic O,” was a place where in the absence of newspapers, let alone the Internet, the populace could make sense of the brave new world around them
The Lyte Jewel (left); Richard III (Courtesy of the British Museum(left); Courtesy of Society of Antiquaries of London-British Museum)
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The Lyte Jewel (left); Richard III (Courtesy of the British Museum(left); Courtesy of Society of Antiquaries of London-British Museum)