June 29, 2011 05:00 AM
On June 29, 1613, staged cannon fire during a performance of “Henry VIII” ignited a fire that burned the Globe Theatre to the ground.
Original Globe Theatre Burns Down
The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, an acting troupe featuring playwright William Shakespeare, performed its plays at the Blackfriars Theatre, built in 1576 by troupe member James Burbage. However, in 1597 the landlord at Blackfriars ordered the troupe out, forcing them to construct a new playhouse.
James Burbage and his brother Cuthbert, citing a provision in their lease, were allowed to dismantle the Blackfriars Theatre and move its oak beams across the Thames River to Bankside, where the beams were used to construct the Globe Theatre.
Opened in 1599, the Globe was a three-story, open-air theatre that could accommodate 3,000 spectators. The stage, measuring more than 40 feet wide and 25 feet deep, stood five feet above the ground, rising above the central courtyard where about 1,000 “groundlings” watched the play. The stage was surrounded by a ring of balcony seating covered by a straw roof.
The first play performed at the Globe was Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.” Over the next 14 years, many of his most famous plays, including “Hamlet,” “Twelfth Night,” “King Lear” and “Macbeth,” would be performed there.
Learn more about the life and legacy of William Shakespeare in findingDulcinea’s five-part series “Shakespeare in the Limelight” or in the Shakespeare Web Guide.
Above the main entrance was a sign saying “Totus mundus agit histrionem,” which roughly translates as “all the world’s a playhouse” or “all the world’s a stage,” a reference to the line in “As You Like It.”
The Bankside neighborhood stood on the “wrong side” of the Thames, in an area “frequented by prostitutes, pickpockets and other unsavory people,” according to Cummings Study Guides. Nevertheless, the Globe attracted many of society’s elites to sit in its balconies.
“The Globe Theatre was a democratic institution, admitting anyone—whether a baron, a beggar, a knight, a candlemaker, an earl, a shoemaker, or a strumpet—if he or she had coin of the realm to drop in a box before entering,” writes Cummings Study Guides.
Productions of the era typically had “no backdrops, no lighting to speak of, horrible acoustics, and few if any props,” according to Absolute Shakespeare, but cannons were used occasionally. During a production of Richard III on June 29, 1613, the firing of a cannon ignited the straw roof, setting the Globe ablaze.
The troupe rebuilt the theater across the Thames, completing it a year after the original burned down. Having learned from the original’s fate, builders used tiles for the roof of the second Globe instead of thatched straw.
The rebuilt Globe operated until 1642, when the Puritans, believing theaters were places of “evil sin” rather than entertainment, shut it down, says Absolute Shakespeare.
Clemson University provides a virtual tour of what the original Globe Theatre would have looked like, including illustrations and a QuickTime movie.
The New Globe
Sources in this Story
- Shakespeare Resource Center: Shakespeare’s Globe
- Absolute Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre
- Cummings Study Guides: The Globe Theatre
- Shakespeare’s Globe: Rebuilding the Globe
American actor and director Sam Wanamaker visited the site of the original Globe in 1949, and was disappointed that there was no lasting memorial to Shakespeare.
In 1970 Wanamaker founded the Shakespeare Globe Trust, which in the 1990s constructed a replica of the Globe Theatre near its original site. It opened in 1997 with a production of Henry V, and continues to perform Shakespeare’s plays today.
The designers of the new Globe tried to remain as faithful as possible to the original design, cutting “green” oak using 16th-century techniques and constructing the roof with water reed thatch.
They did have to make some changes, however, to meet 20th century safety codes, and had to construct the interior with limited information on how it looked. The modern theater is “neither more nor less than the ‘best guess’ at Shakespeare’s theatre,” says the theater’s official site.
Visit the Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre Web site for a schedule of upcoming plays, information about the rebuilding of the theater and news releases.
