Globe Theatre

Heritage listing

Details The monument includes the surviving remains of an Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre believed to be the Globe Theatre. The Globe, built in the spring of 1599, was the third such theatre on historic Bankside, following the Rose of 1587 and the Swan of 1596. A lease on the Globe estate and the cost of construction was divided, one half provided by Cuthbert and Richard Burbage, and the other half by the actors John Heminges, William Kempe, Augustine Phillips, Thomas Pope and William Shakespeare. The Globe was constructed by a carpenter, Peter Streete, utilising timbers from the Theatre which had been built in Shoreditch in 1576 by the Burbage family, and dismantled in 1598. The Globe, described in the prologue to Shakespeare's Henry V as "this wooden O", is considered to have been either circular or polygonal in shape. This view is supported by a drawing of London's Bankside area made in the 1630s by the German Wenceslaus Hollar, published in 1647 which shows such a round structure, identified as the Globe. This external shape is a reflection of the internal organisation of the theatre which took the form of a central circular area comprising stage and yard both enclosed by galleries, the latter probably rising in more than one tier. The site is also known to have had a thatched roof and two doors. Spectators would have been accommodated both in the galleries and the central yard. The first Globe caught fire and burned down following the discharge of a cannon during the first performance of Shakespeare's Henry VIII on the 29th June 1613. The Globe was rebuilt in 1614 at a cost of 1,400. It was owned again by a similar partnership although the builder of the second Globe is unknown. This second Globe was built on the foundations of the first and it is presumed to have

From the Historic England List Entry under OGL v3.