Rebuilding Shakespeare’s theatre (and how to show your workings)

Abstract

This is an attempt to use—and assess the usefulness of—PowerPoint as a means of presenting research which involves a high degree of visual imaging. Working from the only available 17 th century sketch of Shakespeare’s second Globe playhouse, the research project attempted to theorise the architectural structure of the sketched building, and then use computer-aided design to build and test the validity of that theorised structure. When the resultant artifact was then compared with the original sketch, the congruences and discrepancies were very interesting. Powerpoint (which I generally loathe and detest when used inexpertly in lecturing) turns out to be a reasonably flexible tool for presenting this sort of research.