Shakespeare's Globe

• 1. Introduction

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  Shakespeare's Globe sits on the south bank of the River Thames in Southwark, London, and it exists because one man refused to accept that it couldn't. When the original Globe Theatre burned to the ground in 1613, it seemed like the end of a particular kind of theatrical magic. The timbers were gone, the thatched roof was ash, and the yard where thousands had stood together to watch Hamlet and King Lear was lost. What survived was a question: could that world be rebuilt? How faithful could a reconstruction really be, four centuries later? And who would care enough to spend more than two decades trying to find out?

• 2. The Original Theatre

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  The Lord Chamberlain's Men built the first Globe in 1599, and it was the house that Shakespeare wrote for. That theatre stood for only fourteen years before fire destroyed it during a performance in 1613. A replacement went up the following year in 1614, but that second building lasted only thirty years before it was demolished in 1644. What those theatres looked like in detail was never fully recorded, and by the time anyone thought to reconstruct one, the available evidence was fragmentary. Scholars knew that the original could hold around 3,000 spectators, a figure that would prove difficult to match. The building from which the 1599 Globe got much of its timber, known as The Theatre, became one of the key reference points for later researchers trying to piece together what the structure might have been.

• 3. Sam Wanamaker's Mission

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  Sam Wanamaker, an American actor and director, founded the Shakespeare Globe Trust and the International Shakespeare Globe Centre in 1970. His aim was specific: build a faithful recreation of the Globe as close as possible to its original location at Bankside. Many people believed that aim was impossible to achieve. The complications of a 16th-century design, combined with modern fire safety requirements, seemed to make a true reconstruction out of reach. Wanamaker and his associate Diana Devlin spent more than twenty years pushing back against that verdict. The project inspired similar ventures around the world, with Shakespeare's Globe Centres established in multiple countries as part of an international effort Wanamaker also joined. He did not live to see the theatre open.

• 4. Building in Oak

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  Historical adviser John Orrell led the research that ultimately shaped the new building's design. The design team included architect Theo Crosby of Pentagram, structural and services engineer Buro Happold, and quantity surveyors from Boyden and Co. Construction, building research, and historic design details were handled by McCurdy and Co. The building that eventually rose is constructed entirely of English oak, using mortise and tenon joints, with no structural steel involved. That makes it, in a meaningful sense, an authentic 16th-century timber-framed building. Its thatched roof has been described as the first permitted in London since the Great Fire of London in 1666, and sprinklers installed on the roof provide fire protection. In one practical compromise, the external staircases follow the 1614 rebuilding rather than the 1599 original, because those details were easier to incorporate. For practical reasons, the modern theatre seats 873 with room for an additional 700 standing groundlings in the yard, about half the capacity of Shakespeare's time.

• 5. Opening and Artistic Direction

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  The theatre opened to the public in 1997 with a production of Henry V, and has staged plays every summer since. Mark Rylance became the founding artistic director in 1995, and a long period of careful experimentation followed. Performances under his tenure were engineered to duplicate the original environment: no spotlights, no microphones, no amplification. Plays ran during daylight hours and in the evenings with interior floodlights only, and all music was performed live, most often on period instruments. Rylance was succeeded by Dominic Dromgoole in 2006. Emma Rice took over as the third artistic director in January 2016 and began experimenting with temporary lighting and sound equipment, but announced her resignation in October of that year. On the 24th of July 2017, Michelle Terry was named as her successor. Terry has since restored the original playing conditions.

• 6. The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

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  Adjacent to the main theatre stands the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, an indoor space that opened in January 2014. It is modelled on historic plans for a Jacobean-era indoor playhouse, possibly Blackfriars Theatre, and serves the Globe during winter months when the open-air amphitheatre is not in use. The space is lit by candles, recalling the atmosphere of a period indoor performance. The first production in the space's inaugural season to close out the Read Not Dead program was Robert Daborne's A Christian Turn'd Turk. Read Not Dead itself is a series of staged play readings that has been running since 1995, presenting works written between 1576 and 1642 by Shakespeare's contemporaries. In 2013, Read Not Dead performances took place at the Wilderness Festival and at the Glastonbury Festival.

• 7. Beyond the Stage

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  The Globe operates without any public subsidy and generates 24 million pounds in revenue per year. That financial independence has allowed the organisation to expand in several directions. In 2015, the Globe launched Globe Player, a video-on-demand service for watching productions on laptops and mobile devices. The theatre described itself at that point as the first in the world to offer its plays through such a service. Productions are also screened in cinemas as Globe on Screen releases, typically in the year following the live staging. Acting and design students from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in New Jersey study abroad at the theatre through the Rutgers Conservatory at Shakespeare's Globe, a longstanding partnership between the two institutions. The name change that cleared the way for the current branding happened in 1994, when a Shaftesbury Avenue theatre using the name Globe Theatre was renamed the Gielgud Theatre to avoid confusion.