The Total Shakespeare Experience

Cheers! Keith here and one thing I've learned tonight after a visit to Shakespeare's Globe Theatre here on the South Bank of the Thames. I wouldn't have made a good "groundling."
That's what they called the common folk who attended the theater back in Shakespeare's time. They watched the play standing up while the more well-off patrons luxuriated in the box seats around the stage. And that's how I experienced the "Merry Wives of Windsor" tonight -- literally for as long as I could stand it.
Nothing against the play, a delightfully-played rumbustious comedy which explores themes of courtship, marriage, fidelity, deception and jealousy, and has one the Bard's most unforgettable characters, the rotund and pompous Falstaff.
The Globe's recreation of both the stagecraft and the ambience of Shakespeare's day is a great educational experience for the theater-goer. And the cast sets the mood for that from the start, with a little poem to gently warn the patron of basic theatre etiquette:

Welcome to our Elizabethan stage
Where flash photography is not the rage,
And all your devices to off be set,
Because electronics haven't been invented yet...

Unfortunately, there wasn't much they could do about the airplanes that occasionally flew over the open-roofed theater.
Actually, the ground-level view isn't all that bad unless you're height-impaired, and it's especially fun when the stage and the action project out into the audience for an up-close and personal view.
But on this night it was more than my 56-year-old legs could bear and by intermission, 90 minutes in, I was feeling the effects. So I made my way back to the flat, accompanied by several of my students, channeling some envy for those folks who had been able to sit down. And I left doing what I always do after I read about the Middle Ages (OK, so Shakespeare was a little after) -- I thanked the Lord above that I was born in the 20th century.
And strangely enough, I related this experience to my one visit to Wrigley Field in Chicago for a Cubs game back in 1999. Loved the history and the atmosphere, but the place could've use more bathrooms and more comfortable seats. All other things being equal, I'll take amenities anytime.
As I understand our playgoing schedule, we may see a production of "Hamlet" later on this semester at another theater. I'm looking forward to it, and I presume that it'll have a place for me to sit down, which is the way I'm sure the Bard would really have wanted it to be.