IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 306

By the final decade of the sixteenth century, London possessed a flourishing commercial theatre, yet almost none of it stood within the City's jurisdiction. The civic authorities, uneasy about large crowds, disorder and the spread of plague, discouraged playhouses and at times prohibited them, so the entrepreneurs who built and managed theatres looked for ground beyond the City's control. They found it in Southwark, on the southern bank of the Thames, among inns, bear-baiting rings and brothels, beyond the reach of the Lord Mayor. Among the playhouses already standing there were the Rose, which Philip Henslowe had built in 1587, and the Swan, erected a few years afterwards. It was there, in 1599, that the Globe was constructed.

The new playhouse reused the fabric of an older one. The Theatre, which had opened in Shoreditch in 1576, was the first permanent playhouse in England, and James Burbage, the actor-manager who built it, had leased the land on which it stood for a term of years; when that lease expired his company fell into dispute with the owner of the ground. In the winter of 1598–99, while the landowner was away, the players took the building apart. The timber was carried across the Thames and raised again as the frame of the Globe, a few hundred metres from the river.

The Globe was a polygonal building of timber and plaster, open to the sky. Around the yard rose three tiers of galleries, and the stage, which projected into the yard, was sheltered by a canopy carried on two pillars. Behind the stage stood a wall with at least two doors, and above it a balcony that could serve as a town wall, a ship's deck or the battlements of a besieged city. Estimates of its capacity range from two thousand to more than three thousand spectators, though nobody can be certain: the building has not survived, and no plan or measured drawing of it has come down to us, only panoramic views of the Bankside skyline.

Going to the theatre was inexpensive, but not trivial. A spectator paid one penny to stand in the yard at the foot of the stage, and a further penny or two for a place on a bench in the galleries. Performances began in the afternoon, so that they could be illuminated by daylight, and a flag raised above the building announced that a play would be given that day. There was no scenery in the modern sense; a few portable properties and a painted canopy above the stage were considered sufficient.

The Globe was home to a company of shareholders as well as to hired actors. The Lord Chamberlain's Men had been formed under the patronage of a court official, and Shakespeare, who acted occasionally but chiefly wrote, held a share in the profits. Those shares were worth possessing: the leading actors were part-owners of the building and took a proportion of the takings, which in a successful week could be considerable. When James I came to the throne in 1603 the company passed under the patronage of the crown and became the King's Men, performing at court as well as at the Globe, and boys and young men took the female roles, since women were not employed on the public stage.

The first Globe lasted fourteen years. On 29 June 1613, during a performance of a play about Henry VIII, a cannon fired as part of the entertainment set light to the thatch. According to a letter written within days, the audience escaped unhurt, though one man's breeches caught fire and were extinguished with ale, and the building burned to the ground in about an hour. It was rebuilt on the same foundations. This time the roof was made of tiles, and the second Globe was larger and more richly decorated than the first, its timberwork carved and painted.

The second Globe had a shorter life. In 1642, with civil war under way, Parliament ordered the theatres closed, and in 1644 the Globe was pulled down to make way for tenement housing. Its story might have ended there had not Shakespeare's plays, printed and reprinted, kept the name alive.

The modern Globe is the work of Sam Wanamaker, an American actor and director who settled in Britain and was shocked, on visiting the site, to find nothing but a commemorative plaque. From the 1970s he campaigned and raised money for a reconstruction, and building began in the 1990s. Wanamaker did not live to see it finished: he died in 1993, and the theatre opened in 1997, a few hundred metres from the original. It was built with an oak frame and a thatched roof, which required a special exemption from the fire regulations that have prohibited thatch in London since the Great Fire of 1666.

No one can say exactly what the first Globe looked like. The reconstruction was informed by two principal sources: the excavation of the Globe's foundations in 1989, which revealed the dimensions of the ground plan, and a contract of 1600 for another playhouse, the Fortune, which specifies in detail how it was to be built. Even the plays performed in the Globe's first seasons are a matter of inference rather than record, since the surviving documents tell us who acted and who was paid, but rarely what was staged. The Globe was, above all, an entrepreneurial venture.

A medieval stained-glass window is not a picture hung on a wall but a membrane of glass, lead and iron filling an opening in stone. Its purpose was to admit light and, at the same time, to instruct. In an age when most people could not read, the windows of a cathedral carried the stories of scripture and the lives of the saints, and a preacher might point to them while explaining a text. The craft was specialised and highly skilled, and the surviving windows of Chartres and Canterbury are the work of workshops whose methods can be reconstructed from the glass itself and from a few written sources.

The glass itself began in the forest. A medieval glasshouse was a temporary structure of timber and clay, built where wood, sand and bracken were plentiful and abandoned when the local fuel was exhausted. The raw materials were crushed sand, which supplies silica, and the ash of burnt beech wood or bracken, which supplies the alkali that allows the mixture to melt at the temperature of a wood-fired furnace. The result is known as forest glass, a potash-lime-silica glass. Iron, present as an impurity in the sand, gave it a greenish or brownish tint, which is why much medieval glass has a warm, smoky appearance.

Colour was introduced into the molten glass before it was blown, by adding small quantities of metal oxides to the crucible. Cobalt produced the deep blues for which the period is famous; copper, fired in the right conditions, produced a ruby red; manganese gave a purple that could be varied in tone. Because these colours were inherent in the material, they could not be applied afterwards. Each colour required its own crucible, and a workshop producing a large window therefore worked through many batches rather than a single melt. Ruby was the most expensive. To avoid a solid sheet of it, glaziers employed flashed glass: a gather of pale glass was dipped into a crucible of red, so that the finished sheet carried only a thin skin of colour that could be partly ground away.

The molten glass was then flattened by one of two methods. In the cylinder method, the glassmaker blew a long bubble, swung it to lengthen it and opened the end; the cylinder was then split along one side and laid flat, where it opened into a rough rectangle. In the crown method, a bubble was opened and spun rapidly, so that centrifugal force spread it into a disc. Neither gave an even surface, and the thickness of a medieval sheet varies across its width.

Design began not on the glass but on a whitewashed table, on which the glazier drew the full-size cartoon: the complete design, with the position of every piece and every lead line marked out. The glass was laid over the drawing and cut to fit. Cutting was done not with a wheel, as it is today, but by running a red-hot iron along the intended line and then cooling the glass, so that thermal shock propagated a crack; the edges were afterwards trimmed with a tool called a grozing iron, which nibbled away the surplus. The technique left a slightly uneven edge, still visible in medieval panels.

Once cut, the pieces were painted. The commonest pigment was grisaille, iron oxide ground with a flux, brushed on to draw features, folds of drapery and shading, and then fired in a small kiln until the paint fused with the surface of the glass. Because the paint was in effect a thin layer of glass, it survived as long as the glass itself. In the early fourteenth century glaziers acquired a second pigment, silver stain: a compound of silver applied to the outside of the glass and fired, which produced a translucent yellow ranging from pale lemon to deep amber. Silver stain could be laid on white glass or over an existing colour, and it greatly extended the palette.

The painted pieces were joined with lead. Each piece was fitted into the groove of an H-section lead came, a strip of lead whose cross-section grips the glass on both faces; the cames were then soldered to one another where they met, forming a panel rigid enough to be lifted. A large window was made as a series of such panels, held in place by iron armatures: horizontal bars, sometimes called saddle bars, set across the opening and tied back to the surrounding masonry. The iron took the load of wind and weather, so that the fragile glass carried little weight of its own. A twelfth-century treatise attributed to a monk known as Theophilus describes these procedures and remains the fullest technical account to survive.

Medieval glass has not come down to us unchanged. Exposed to centuries of rain, the glass corrodes: alkali is leached from the surface, which becomes pitted and opaque, and a crust may form that obscures the paint beneath. The lead oxidises and loses strength, the putty that seals the edges dries and cracks, and earlier repairs have introduced glass of a different composition. Conservation therefore begins with recording. Panels are photographed, drawn and analysed before anything is moved, and where possible rehung with a protective sheet of clear glass outside them, ventilated so that the original surface stays dry. The aim is to slow decay, not to restore an appearance the window may never have had.

Somewhere in the world, at almost any hour, someone is being interviewed about the past. A local historical society records a retired teacher's memories of a village school; a national archive films a survivor of a massacre; a university project collects the recollections of women who worked in wartime factories. The impulse behind all of this is partly a matter of arithmetic. The generation that fought in the Second World War is now very old, and the last people with direct experience of the First World War have died. When a witness dies, a particular way of describing a strike, a funeral or a journey by sea disappears with them, and no document can restore it. That sense of irreplaceable loss explains why recording projects have multiplied so quickly — and why the argument about what they are actually worth has become sharper.

The strongest argument for oral history is that written records were made by the people who could write, and for most of the past they were a minority. Accounts of ordinary life — of domestic service, factory work, farming, childbirth, migration — are thin in archives kept by governments, landlords and employers, which tend to record the poor as a problem to be managed rather than as people with something to say. Testimony redresses the balance a little. In the United States in the 1930s, interviewers employed by a government programme travelled the country to record the memories of people who had been born into slavery; some two thousand accounts survive, and they describe not only the brutality of the system but also its daily routines, songs, food and family arrangements. Sixty years later, a foundation set up after the film Schindler's List began recording interviews with survivors of the Holocaust, eventually gathering more than fifty thousand testimonies in dozens of languages.

Against this, critics point out that memory is not a recording device. Remembering is an act of reconstruction: the brain reassembles an event each time it is recalled, filling gaps with what it expects, with later knowledge and with material supplied by other people. The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus showed in the 1970s that the wording of a question can alter what a witness reports, and later research has demonstrated that confident and detailed accounts may be wholly false. Nor is the effect confined to small details. In one well-known experiment, people were persuaded, with a little prompting from a relative, that they had been lost in a shopping centre as children, and several described the event in vivid detail.

Even a witness who is doing their best to be accurate is answering inside a social situation with its own pressures. The questions put to them determine what can be answered; a schedule that asks about working conditions and not about religion will produce testimony about work. Interviewees also respond to what they believe the interviewer wants, and to the reputation an event has acquired since it happened. One historian who interviewed Australian veterans of the First World War, and compared what they told him with accounts they had given years earlier, found that men who had once spoken with bitterness now described the same years in terms of national pride, as the public meaning of the war in their country changed. Their memories had not simply faded; they had been reorganised around a different story.

There are also practical and ethical difficulties, which the enthusiasm of funders rarely acknowledges. Recording is cheap; transcribing, indexing and preserving are not, and a collection that cannot be searched is of limited use. Tapes and early digital formats decay or become unplayable, so archives must keep migrating their holdings to new media. Consent raises harder questions. A witness may agree to be recorded without understanding that the file will be online for ever, or that it will be quoted in a newspaper; an interviewer may reopen a trauma in order to capture it and then leave, with no further contact. Who owns a life story — the teller, the archive or the public that paid for it?

It is tempting to conclude that if enough interviews are collected, the past will be preserved. It will not. Selection begins before the recorder is switched on: someone decides which witnesses matter, what to ask them, and which minutes of a three-hour conversation to keep. The result is not a portrait of a period but a set of highly specific accounts shaped by the questions of the moment. Nor do recordings replace documents. A tax register and a memory are different kinds of evidence, and the historian's task is to set them against each other rather than to prefer one.

My own view is that the recording should continue, and that it should be done more carefully than it often is. Testimony is not a substitute for evidence; it is evidence, of a particular kind, and it should be treated as such — corroborated where corroboration is possible, and interpreted with an awareness of who asked the questions and why. Interviews should preserve the interviewer's questions as well as the answers, since the shape of a conversation is itself historical. And the strongest case for recording is not that memory is accurate but that it is irreplaceable: the idiom, the jokes, the way a job was actually done. Those are lost for good when the last person who knew them stops speaking.