Globe Theatre

The Globe was built out of an older playhouse. The Theatre, raised in Shoreditch in 1576 by James Burbage, stood on ground held on a 21-year lease, though the Burbages owned the building itself outright; when the lease ran out the landlord Giles Allen claimed the structure had become his. On 28 December 1598, while Allen was keeping Christmas at his country home, the carpenter Peter Street, backed by the players and their friends, took The Theatre apart beam by beam and carried the timbers to his waterfront warehouse near Bridewell.

With better weather the following spring the material was ferried across the Thames to marshy gardens south of Maiden Lane in Southwark, inside the entertainment quarter already established on that bank. The plot was let by Thomas Brend, a neighbour of John Heminges and Henry Condell, both actors with the Chamberlain's Men. The ground drained badly and was liable to flood at exceptionally high tides, so a raised bank of earth with timber revetments had to be made to carry the building above the flood level. The old timbers were reused, but the result was larger than the theatre it replaced rather than the Shoreditch playhouse simply set up again at Bankside. It cost £700.

The Globe belonged to actors who were also sharers in the Lord Chamberlain's Men. Of the six shareholders, Richard Burbage and his brother Cuthbert each held a double share, a quarter of the whole; Shakespeare, Heminges, Augustine Phillips and Thomas Pope held an eighth apiece, having between them bought out William Kempe, who had been intended as a seventh partner. As further sharers were added, Shakespeare's portion fell over the course of his career from an eighth to a fourteenth.

The building was probably complete by the summer of 1599, possibly in time for an opening production of Henry V with its line about the action crammed into a "wooden O". Dover Wilson read that phrase as disparaging and therefore unlikely in an inaugural staging, and put the opening later, pointing instead to the Swiss traveller Thomas Platter's account of a Julius Caesar he watched on 21 September 1599. The first performance for which a firm record survives is Jonson's Every Man out of His Humour at the end of that year, its opening scene welcoming the "gracious and kind spectators". Early work by Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker and John Fletcher was first staged here alongside Shakespeare's.

On 29 June 1613 a theatrical cannon set off during a performance of Henry VIII misfired and ignited the playhouse's wooden beams and thatch. One of the few documents surviving from the event records that no one was hurt except a man whose burning breeches were put out with a bottle of ale. A second Globe stood on the same site by June 1614, roofed this time in tile, at a cost of £1,400.

The Globe shut with every other London theatre at the outbreak of the First English Civil War, under an ordinance of the Long Parliament dated 2 September 1642. It was pulled down in 1644–45 to make room for tenements; the document usually cited for the demolition, dated 15 April 1644, is not reliable.

Where the playhouse had stood was not known precisely until 1989, when the Department of Greater London Archaeology uncovered a small part of the foundations, including one original pier base, beneath the car park behind Anchor Terrace on Park Street. The dig turned up a layer of nutshells pressed into the dirt flooring to form a new surface, and indicated a polygon of twenty sides rather than the round building drawn in Wenceslas Hollar's Long View of London from Bankside of 1647. Most of the remains lie under 67–70 Anchor Terrace, a listed building, so no further excavation has been permitted; the shape of what was found is replicated on the surface above. The site was designated a scheduled monument on 13 December 1989. A reconstruction named Shakespeare's Globe opened in 1997 with a production of Henry V, roughly 230 metres from the original theatre.