I do not think old Will had this in mind when he named his theatre down on the banks of the Thames but I showed my children the Globe Theatre in all it’s glory on our digital globe – Google Earth!
As an introduction to the playwright and his works (we are looking at Macbeth over the next 2 weeks) I used GE to explore Stratford and look at his birthplace, then we zoomed over to the banks of the Thames in London to explore the great Globe Theatre. Using the 3D models in Google Earth 4 we were able to really get a good understanding for what the building was like – and is like today I suppose as it has been carefully restored.
The children were naturally highly motivated and they loved the fact that we could even see little model people in various thespian poses on the actual model stage! One child even asked me what the play was they were doing!
I think I will use a tag related search in Flickr to get some current photos of the theatre too. And perhaps gather together the Shakespeare resources I find useful and post them up soon.
[Thanks to Frank at the Google Earth Blog for the image]