A hundred yards or so southeast of the new Globe Theatre there is a vacant lot surrounded by a corrugated-iron fence marked with a bronze plaque as the site of the original Globe Theatre of 1599. A little closer to the new Globe one can peer through dirty slit windows into a dimly lighted space in the basement of a new office building, next to London Bridge, where about two-thirds of the foundations of the Elizabethan …showed first 75 words of 1611 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1611 total…Pyramus and Thisbe, sometimes he laments the transience of theatrical illusion as Prospero does, and sometimes he mocks his audiences for failing to enter into the artificial reality of the creative imagination. But all his oblique comments on performance in his theatre show a relatively crude and limited performance on the actual stage contrasted with the powers of imagination, in the playwright's words and the audience's reception, to create understanding and moral regeneration through illusion.