Historically Informed Experience

The role of music at Shakespeare’s Globe has radically evolved since its opening in 1997. What began as a scholarly embrace of historically informed performance (HIP), yielded to modern instrumentation, and eventually, to electronic lights and sound. What have we learned about Shakespeare and the actor-audience relationship over these profound changes? How have the practitioners evolved to meet the challenges of new leadership? What is the purpose of Shakespeare’s original architecture without his seventeenth-century toolkit? This chapter charts the changing of ‘authenticity’ from its devotional Original Practices through modern experimentation, using the inexhaustible lessons of Shakespeare’s spaces to vouch anew for live music in twenty-first-century Shakespeare everywhere.