Week 3 in Review

Monday night we joined an enthusiastic crowd at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre for one of the final stagings of an unforgettable show, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Reconceived by director Kathryn Hunter, with two actors playing old and young Pericles, the genial Patrice Naiambana playing Gower as an African tale-teller, a small, versatile band whose sounds ranged from Afro-Caribbean to Eastern Mediterranean, and an acrobatic cast that swung from ropes to perform shipwreck during the storm scenes, it was an engrossing, funny, and powerfully moving production. As groundlings, we stood in the midst of the action. Click here for exerpts of student reviews of the play.


Wednesday morning, having read excerpts from Sir Francis Drake’s voyage around the world (1577-1580), the Maritime London group met in Southwark at the Golden Hinde, a scale replica of Drake’s vessel. Built in the 1970s and filmed in Japan in Shogun, this ship has also circled the globe—presumably via the Panama Canal, not Cape Horn. In the ship’s relatively small size (102 feet in overall length, 20 feet at the beam, the gun-deck only some four feet tall), we were impressed by the grit and tenacity of Elizabethan mariners—not to mention their short stature! After a free-flowing tour, we held our class session in the Great Cabin, where the gentlemen and officers would have gathered for meals and pastimes.




Thursday morning, the entire group met Carol Machin, the former AHA London site-director now teaching the “British Art & Architecture” class, for a tour of Westminster Abbey. It has been the site of coronations since William the Conqueror’s in 1066, as well as many important funerals, including Princess Diana’s in 1997. The Abbey is crowded with the tombs and monuments of English monarchs and luminaries from Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I to Sir Laurence Olivier and Dame Peggy Ashcroft. This year marks the 1000th anniversary of the birth of Edward the Confessor, the Abbey’s founder, enshrined just behind the high altar.

More photos from week 3:

Globe Theatre, following Pericles
Golden Hinde: 1...2...3...4