The Globe burns during Henry VIII

Some fires are remembered for what they consumed. A smaller number are remembered for what was saved by the person who first understood what was burning. The man who has spent a life staging the spectacle is also the man who knows, before anyone else in the house, how a wisp of smoke from a paper wad behaves in summer thatch.

THE PLAYWRIGHT AT FORTY-NINE

William Shakespeare of New Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, has had his name on title pages for two decades and his share in the Globe since the company raised it out of Burbage's old Shoreditch timbers in 1599. He is forty-nine, a gentleman of Warwickshire by purchase, a playwright by trade, a shareholder by canny husbandry. Last year he handed most of the writing to John Fletcher, the younger man the company has chosen to inherit the chair. The new piece, All Is True, is their joint work, a chronicle of Henry the Eighth in the manner the public still wants: pageantry, fall of favourites, the King in masque costume crossing into Wolsey's hall. The cannon, the chambers as the bookkeeper calls them, are written into the stage direction. They have been fired in this house a hundred times without incident.

THE TWENTY-NINTH OF JUNE

The afternoon is hot and dry, the wind off the river from the south-east, the kind of weather a thatcher learns to mistrust. The yard is full by two. The galleries above are heavier than usual; the play is new and London has come for it. Shakespeare sits high in the upper tier on the south side, the script bound in two parts laid across his knee. He marks Fletcher's hand here, his own there, the seams already invisible to anyone but the two writers. From the gallery he can see the whole O of the house: the painted heavens above the stage, the tiring-house door, the prompter's stand behind the arras, the groundlings packed shoulder to shoulder in the pit.

The first act is twenty minutes in. Henry crosses to Wolsey's banquet in masque. The first chamber fires cleanly, a clean concussion that rolls round the timber. The second fires, and from the eaves above the south gallery a thin spiral of smoke climbs against the boards of the heavens, the colour smoke is when paper wadding has caught and not flame.

A SECOND OF TIME ABOVE THE SOUTH GALLERY

He has seen this smoke before, in the rehearsal yard, in the old Theatre at Shoreditch, in a dozen country halls on tour. Paper wadding lodged in dry straw does not announce itself. It smoulders for a count of minutes, then takes the thatch in a ring. The wind is southeasterly; the fire will run west along the gallery and up to the painted firmament. Beneath him, perhaps a hundred and twenty people are leaning forward to watch a king dance. If the play does not stop, the gallery burns with the audience still in it. He can shout from where he sits and a dozen heads will turn; the rest will think a drunk has lost his temper at the play. He has no authority in this house except through the men on the stage. The actors must stop the play, and the actor who can stop it is the one wearing the King's robe.

He stands. The script slides from his knee to the bench. He goes down the gallery stair at the speed a man of forty-nine should not go down a stair, two flights, the rail rough under his hand, the smell of the smoke not yet on the lower tier. Through the tiring-house door behind the painted hanging. Burbage is at the stage-left exit in his Henry costume, waiting on his cue. Heminges has the prompt-book. Shakespeare says, low, in the voice that carries the length of a tiring-house without reaching the stage: the thatch is alight, the south gallery, stop the play, get them out.

BURBAGE WITH THE PAIL

Richard Burbage looks at him for the space of one breath. He has known this man since they were both boys at the Theatre. He does not ask. He sets down the property sword, lifts a pail of small ale that stands by the prop table for the players' thirst, and walks through the painted hanging onto the stage with the pail still in his hand. For two beats the yard takes it for business: the King has come back in, with a pail, some new conceit of the masque. Then Burbage raises his free hand for silence, in the gesture he uses for the soliloquies, and speaks in his playing voice, the voice that has carried Hamlet and Lear to the topmost gallery. Gentlemen, the house is alight. Out, please, out.

They go. There is some pushing at the south stair where the smoke has begun to drop. Mr Dudley of Dover, a gentleman of the audience, finds his breeches afire on the way down and quenches them with a pot of bottle ale, a detail Sir Henry Wotton will commit cheerfully to a letter. The thatch takes in a full ring within four minutes of Burbage speaking. The frame goes in twenty. Inside an hour the wooden O that has housed Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth is timber and ash on the Bankside ground, and not one body lies in it.

THE LETTER TO SIR EDMUND BACON

Three days later, on the second of July, Sir Henry Wotton sits down in his lodging and writes to Sir Edmund Bacon a description that will outlive every other account. He calls the burning the fatal period of that virtuous fabrick, notes that nothing did perish but wood and straw, and a few forsaken cloaks, and records that one man's breeches were set on fire and put out by the benefit of a provident wit, with bottle ale. The phrasing is the phrasing of a court diplomat amusing a friend; the facts beneath it are the facts of an evacuation that worked. No woman lost. No child lost. No groundling crushed at the gate. A theatre on the ground, and an audience walking home along Maiden Lane with the smell of burnt thatch in their clothes.

THE RETURN TO STRATFORD

The company rebuild within the twelvemonth, on the same footprint, this time under tile. Shakespeare does not write for the new house. All Is True is his last play, and he closes the London chapter at the close of the season. He goes home to New Place, to the gardens and the malt store and the daughter married to a physician, and lives there as a country gentleman of Warwickshire until the twenty-third of April 1616, fifty-two years and three days from his baptism at Holy Trinity on the twenty-sixth of April 1564. The plays travel without him. Heminges and Condell, the men who were at the prompt-book and the tiring-house door, gather the scripts seven years after his death and put them between boards as the Folio of 1623. The Globe burned. The thatch burned. The forsaken cloaks burned. The plays did not, because the man who knew what the smoke meant came down the stair in time, and the man in the King's robe carried a pail of ale onto the stage and broke the spell on the house.

CODA

The decisive moment in a playhouse is not the one written into the script. It is the one a shareholder sees from the back of the gallery and recognises before the audience does, because he has spent his life among players and thatch and the small mechanics of illusion. A new Globe stands on Bankside today, tiled, faithful in its timbers, open to the same southeasterly wind. In its tiring-house a pail of water sits beside the prop table by standing order of the house, and the chambers, when they are fired, are fired into the open air.