Globe Theatre, London

The wooden O

The Globe was built in 1599 in Southwark, across the river from the City of London, by Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, partly from the salvaged timbers of an earlier theatre they had dismantled and carried across the Thames.

It was a polygonal open-air playhouse about 30 metres across, holding perhaps 3,000 people. The prologue to Henry V, probably one of its first productions, asks the audience to forgive so great a story crammed within "this wooden O."

Groundlings and galleries

A penny bought standing room in the open yard, where the "groundlings" watched the stage from the bare earth, rain or shine. More money bought a bench in the roofed galleries.

Plays were staged by daylight in the afternoon, with rich costumes but almost no scenery; the words did the scene-setting. The audience was loud, mixed across classes, eating and drinking and heckling: far closer to a modern football crowd than to a hushed theatre.

Burned, rebuilt, reborn

On 29 June 1613, during a performance of Henry VIII, a stage cannon misfired and set the thatched roof alight. The Globe burned to the ground in about an hour, with, it is said, no injuries beyond a man whose burning breeches were put out with a bottle of ale.

It was rebuilt in 1614, then closed by the Puritans in 1642 and pulled down. In 1997 a faithful reconstruction, "Shakespeare's Globe," opened near the original site, and audiences again stand in the yard to watch the plays by daylight.