WHEN THE PLAYER who enacted Prospero in 1611 (or thereabouts) famously recited the expression "the great globe itself" in The Tempest (act 4, scene 1), his audience was aware that the subject of Shakespeare's phrase was at least doubly denotative: planetary in its habitual, most sweeping sense, but insularly provincial in the context of that London production, pointing to the famous polygonal edifice on the south bank of the Thames that Shakespeare called the "Wooden O," wherein that actual performance was taking place: the Globe.