Culture, Education and Theatre: The Globe Theatre’s Discourse on Climate Change

Abstract The Globe Theatre in the United Kingdom (the UK) is a world-renowned theatre associated William Shakespeare. It is considered a cultural landmark, which stages, mainly, the famous plays by Shakespeare and, often, provides a modern interpretation of them. One of the contemporary readings of Shakespeare’s legacy involves the theme of climate change in the Globe’s theatrical production. By staging Shakespeare’s plays in a new, climate change-related way, the Globe exhibits its educational function, which consists in raising the audience’s awareness of the issue of climate change. The Globe’s approach to the issue of climate change, however, is not well-researched. In this light, the aim of the present paper is to examine the Globe Theatre’s climate change discourse in order to uncover its possible connections to raising climate change awareness among its audiences. To this end, a quantitative methodology is used in the paper in order to investigate a corpus of climate change-related texts written by the Globe Theatre’s staff. The quantitative methodology, which is based upon the calculation of word frequencies, has uncovered the Globe Theatre’s discursive focus on the issue of climate change. Specifically, the results of the study indicate that the Globe Theatre regards climate change as a universal issue, which is communicated by the Globe Theatre to the general public in an attempt to raise people’s awareness of this issue. The findings point to the Globe Theatre’s educational, humanistic and universal approach to the issue of climate change that, just like the legacy of Shakespeare, transcends the national boundaries.