that's too long for a play.

I’m currently working on a term paper about Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 novel The Blazing World. On top of being a ground breaking piece of feminist literature considering by many to be the first English work of science fiction, The Blazing World also happens to be a homoerotic self-insert dystopia AU where the main character is sooo hot and smart that the emperor immediately falls in love with her. And I do mean IMMEDIATELY. I’m not saying this as a joke or to devalue The Blazing World, I’m saying it because it’s true.

So I guess the moral of the story is to remember that all literature has value, and all literature came from somewhere. Today, I’ve spent several semesters and countless hours studying The Blazing World. In 359 years, someone might do that same for ACOTAR. So read closely, read everything, and before you start a moral panic about how booktok is ruining literature or turn your nose up at pretentious doctoral students who are a little too into British Romantic poetry, remind yourself that Dickens used to publish chapters chapter by chapter in magazines before he knew how the story was going to end, just like 15 year old girls ok wattpad.

Oh, it’s even better than that.

What happened was the lease to The Theatre (actual name) was coming to an end, and the asshole landlord Giles Allen refused to extend it. He even tried to argue that since he owned the land, he also owned The Theatre itself (see: asshole).

So the Burbages and/or Shakespeare came up with a very clever solution: While they did not own the land The Theatre was on, they did in fact own The Theatre itself. So they hired people to dismantle The Theatre in Shoreditch on the sly and take the pieces to set up a new one in Southwark.

Across the Thames River.

In the winter when the Thames was frozen solid.

During Christmas.

The plan was successful, and they reconstructed their new playhouse by the summer of 1599: The Globe, now famous for being the home of Shakespeare’s later plays, from Henry V or Julius Caesar on.