" Can this cockpit hold/The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram/Within this wooden O the very casques/That did affright the air at Agincourt? " So speaks the Chorus in the prologue to William Shakespeare’s Henry V. For the audience — as many as several thousand — who crammed into the newly built Globe in 1599 to see the play, all the world might be a stage, but Shakespeare’s " wooden O " was their fantasy world, a place where " God for Harry! England and St. George! " would beat the French every time, where Harry would win Katherine and everyone could have a good cry over Falstaff. Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film of Henry V, shot to conjure a Globe production, created a fantasy world where the English could beat the Germans every time. Drawing on the Globe’s sister playhouse, the Rose, the 1999 film Shakespeare in Love created a fantasy world where Gwyneth Paltrow became the Bard’s beautiful, talented, and loving companion; it won the Oscar for Best Picture.

Theatergoers have always had a fascination for stages that shut out the real world. But there’s a special fascination for the circular (more or less) playhouses of Shakespeare’s day, as if they represented some lost shangri-la of theatergoing experience. This vision is centered in the last decade of the 16th century, before Shakespeare’s palette darkened, before the mother goddess Elizabeth withered and died and was replaced by stern father figure James. Although there were outdoor playhouses both north of the City (the Theatre, the Curtain, the Fortune, and the Red Bull) and south of the Thames (the Rose, the Swan, the Globe, and the Hope), it’s the ones by the river that have caught the contemporary imagination. And in that imagination, they stage all Shakespeare all the time: no Christopher Marlowe, no Ben Jonson, no Thomas Dekker.

There are some 10 versions of an Elizabethan playhouse around the world; the most famous is the recently rebuilt Globe in London, a hundred yards or so from the original site. Now Tina Packer’s Shakespeare & Company is proposing to build a " Rose Playhouse USA " on its 63-acre property in Lenox, " an English timber-frame, plaster, and thatch structure built by world-renowned craftspeople using traditional tools and building methods, " and to surround it with a " Rose Village " that would incorporate " exhibition spaces, cafés, and artisans’ shops. " The research phase of the project was completed last fall; the building phase is scheduled to begin in 2005. By then, Shakespeare & Company will need to raise some $30 million. To that end, it has created " Designing the Rose, " an informational exhibit that will be up at the Boston Architectural Center through June 1, after which it may move on to other centers of potential support like New York and Washington.

The real Rose was, of course, a messier affair than the neat model that Shakespeare & Company is giving us (and that we want to be given). Philip Henslowe built it in 1587 at the corner of what was then Rose Alley and Maiden Lane. It may have taken its name from Rose Alley; yet a " rose " was also a lady of the evening, and there was no shortage of brothels in Southwark. There is evidence that Henslowe’s Rose did not originally have a permanent stage; perhaps it was also used as an arena. It saw Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta and possibly Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. The three parts of Henry VI appeared at the Rose; Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, and Titus Andronicus may have as well. But plague closed the London theaters in June 1592, and when they reopened, in 1594, Shakespeare and Henslowe had parted company, Shakespeare going to the Theatre in Shoreditch, where many of his best-known plays debuted: Richard III and II, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, Henry IV 1 and 2. (Juliet’s " A rose by any other name would smell as sweet " may be an allusion to leaving the Rose and going to the Theatre.) In 1599, after a dispute with their ground landlord, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men returned to Southwark and built the Globe a few yards southeast of the Rose, on the other side of what is now Southwark Bridge Road. The Globe was bigger, and it had Shakespeare’s plays. The Rose was dismantled in 1605.

At the BAC, " Designing the Rose " comprises two 32-foot-long panels set back to back plus two models and two videos running concurrently on TV monitors. The first panel traces the history of Henslowe’s Rose via period maps, architects’ drawings, and photographs from the 1989 excavation that uncovered partial foundations of both the Rose and the Globe, with accompanying texts. The Rose is revealed to have been a 14-sided, three-tiered polygon about 72 feet in diameter, " its timber-frame structure covered with a skin of lime-washed plaster, its roof a thatch, apparently of wheat. " The capacity is estimated at 1100 in the galleries and 500 in the yard; to create better sight lines for those standing in the rear, the yard was sloped seven degrees down to the stage. There are reproductions of the Fortune contract and the famous sketch of the Swan that for years graced the covers of Pelican Shakespeare editions. We’re reminded that the Elizabethan notion of a " play " could take in " interludes, comedies, tragedies, jigs, rope dancing, juggling, prize fights, demonstrations of sword play, foot tours, bear baiting, even trials of wit. " The panel sections are crowned overhead by relevant quotations from the Bard’s works (and a couple from Marlowe’s). It’s a handsome piece of work marred by the occasional obscurity (Rose Alley and Maiden Lane left unmarked on one drawing, John Norden and John Cholmley left unidentified).

The second panel outlines the aims of the Rose Playhouse Project, including a history of Shakespeare & Company, a description of its Lenox property, and details ( " roof construction, " " sectional derivation, " " sellynge the frame, " " making a timber frame, " " hand-turning the balusters, " etc.) on how the new Rose would be constructed. One model is a skeleton of two of the theater’s 14 bays; the other shows the new Rose with its Village. There’s a 10-minute video in which Tina Packer explains the project and its goals; another TV monitor shows artists’ renderings of the various elements.

What " Designing the Rose " doesn’t explain is whether a Rose Playhouse USA will truly reproduce the experience of going to the Elizabethan Rose, or even whether that’s a consummation to be wished. In theory, the Elizabethan amphitheater — with its minimal sets and costumes, its natural lighting, the absence of sound amplification, and a stage that thrust the actors into the audience — put the emphasis on the playwright’s lines. In practice, as Hamlet’s charge to the visiting troupe reminds us ( " But if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines " ), Elizabethan playwrights were frequently at odds with the actors, who not only chewed the author’s scenery but sometimes fashioned their own.

The irony of our identification of Shakespeare with the Globe is that in 1599 the Lord Chamberlain’s Men wanted to move to the indoor Blackfriars theater; only after opposition arose in the Blackfriars community did they erect their second choice in Southwark. Shakespeare & Company’s 450-seat Founders Theatre is a rough approximation of Blackfriars (which Shakespeare’s company leased in 1608 so as to be able to perform indoors and at night). Last summer there, the company gave us a disco-boogie Macbeth and a Henry V in clown noses and with its four-corners-of-the-British-Isles scene deracinated, so it’s hard to know what level of authenticity we could expect from " Rose Playhouse " presentations. Are S&C’s actors good enough to give us " naked " Shakespeare? Will the economics of building and maintaining the project dictate a steady diet of Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Will we ever see Troilus and Cressida on the Rose USA stage? Or for that matter The Jew of Malta, or the anonymous Arden of Feversham, or Jonson’s Sejanus? And will a Rose Village that S&C assures us won’t turn into King Richard’s Faire really attract thousands of tourists each year?

William Dudley’s reconstructive cutaway illustration of the original Rose, with its red-and-white-rose flag (the badge of Elizabeth’s grandfather Henry VII) flying over head and its assorted animals and artisans outside, is a thing of beauty. And given that the new Frank Gehry hall at Bard College cost $68 million, perhaps $30 million isn’t too much for a project that’s already funded vital research into what Shakespeare’s Rose was like. But Henry V’s humorous reference to the company’s new digs as a " cockpit " reminds us that it’s what you do that counts, not where you do it.