In December 1598 William Shakespeare
was an actor and playwright with the Lord Chamberlain's Men based at The Theatre. The Theatre was near Finsbury Fields
in Shoreditch nearly a mile north of the City of London, and was in fact the first durable building designed
for presenting plays in London. It had been built by James Burbage in 1576,
and when he died he left it to his sons Richard and Cuthbert. The land on which the Theatre was built had been leased
for twenty-one years from Giles Allen. Allen now refused to renew the lease.
The Burbages leased some land on the other side of The River Thames at Bankside. On the night of December 26th
1598 the Burbages, some associates and about a dozen labourers dismantled The Theatre, and transported the timber across
the river to the Bankside site. It was a particularly cold December, and The Thames was frozen over. They may have
slid the timbers across the river rather than facing the expense of London Bridge tolls or hiring boats (wherries).
Allen was furious and the ensuing court case went on for years. Meanwhile the timber was used to build a brand
new theatre called the Globe playhouse.
To help finance the construction, the Burbages sold shares in the building to members of the company, and Will
Shakespeare was one of the five sharers. It was here that Shakespeare's greatest plays
Hamlet, Othello
and King Lear and many more were performed for the first time. Richard Burbage, the greatest actor of the age played
the lead in most of them.
In 1613 during a performance of Shakespeare
and Fletcher's Henry VIII the firing of a stage cannon caused the thatched
roof to catch fire, and the playhouse was burned to the ground. The Globe was rebuilt the following year (with
a tiled roof) on the same foundations as the original building, and continued in use until 1644,
though Shakespeare never wrote for the new
playhouse. It was this second
Globe that Wenceslas Hollar drew in 1634. The drawing at the head of the page is adapted from Hollar's.
Links
Internal
Original Globe
The story
of how the original Globe came to be built
The building
- a plan and what the Globe may have looked like
My list of recommended books about the Globe, Rose and other playhouses of the time may be found in the
Globe Playhouse section of the Well Furlong
Book Shop. If you so wish, you may go on to buy
many of the volumes in our Book Shop directly from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.
