Shakespeare's Globe

Two theatres

The open-air Globe Theatre is the building everyone pictures: a twenty-sided timber amphitheatre with a thatched roof over the galleries and nothing at all over the yard. Beside it, and far less known, is the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, an indoor theatre of about three hundred and forty seats, lit by more than a hundred beeswax candles on six chandeliers that can be raised and lowered during a performance, with sconces round the walls and shutters at gallery level that can be opened to let in daylight.

Its brick shell was built in the 1990s as part of the original complex and then stood unfitted for the best part of two decades. The interior was designed by Jon Greenfield with Allies and Morrison, fitted out from October 2012 at a cost of about seven and a half million pounds, and opened in January 2014 with Webster's The Duchess of Malfi.

It was very nearly called the Inigo Jones Theatre, and the reason it is not is worth knowing. The design draws on a set of drawings found at Worcester College, Oxford in the 1960s and long attributed to Jones; in 2005 they were redated to about 1660 and reattributed to John Webb, who had been his assistant. The theatre is therefore not a reconstruction of any particular playhouse but what the Globe calls an archetype of the indoor theatres of the period.

The Playhouse programmes its main season from October to April, but neither house now keeps to the old seasonal division, and performances and tours run at both through much of the year.

Wanamaker, and the dates that get conflated

The reconstruction was the work of Sam Wanamaker, the American actor and director, who founded the Shakespeare Globe Trust about 1970 and spent the rest of his life raising money for it. He was born in Chicago in 1919 and died on 18 December 1993, before the theatre was finished.

Three dates are routinely run together. A performance was given on the reconstructed stage in 1993, in German, while the building was still going up. Workshops and performances were held on it from 1995. And the completed theatre was formally opened in June 1997, with Henry V, by Elizabeth II.

What the reconstruction rests on

No drawing of the original Globe's interior survives, so the building is an argument from evidence rather than a copy. The most important single source is a sketch of the Swan, a neighbouring playhouse, made about 1596 by a Dutch visitor, Johannes de Witt. Even that is at one remove: de Witt's own manuscript is lost, and what survives is a copy made by a friend in a commonplace book, which lay unnoticed in a Dutch university library until 1880. It shows a stage pushed out into the yard, a tiring house behind it with a turret flying a swan flag, and the galleries round, with Latin labels naming the parts. Its reliability has been attacked and defended by scholars for well over a century and there is no settled view.

The rest came from Wenceslaus Hollar's view of Bankside of 1647, from the excavated foundations, and from argument. Theo Crosby of Pentagram was the architect, the historian John Orrell the principal adviser, and the shape was in the end decided by a vote: at a design seminar in 1992 the delegates chose Orrell's twenty-sided plan of about a hundred feet over an eighteen-sided alternative of ninety. Specialist carpenters built it with green oak, lime plaster and oak laths, in the manner of the period. The honest description is a reconstruction based on scholarship, with the scholarship contested — not an accurate copy, a claim the building cannot support.

The original site, and the Rose

The first Globe was built in 1599, burned down in 1613 when a cannon used for a stage effect set the thatch alight, and was rebuilt the following year. Parliament closed the theatres by ordinance on 2 September 1642 and the building was pulled down in 1644 or 1645; the precise date usually quoted rests on a pencil note written in the margin of an old book and is not reliable.

Its remains were found on 12 October 1989, during redevelopment, at the level of Park Street — several metres below Southwark Bridge Road, which is why older accounts name the wrong street. Two sections of foundation wall came to light, one of chalk and timber from the theatre of 1599 and one of brick and mortar from its replacement of 1614, along with a patch of floor and waterlogged timber. Most of the site lies under Anchor Terrace, which is itself listed, so no further excavation has been permitted: something like two per cent has been dug, and the outline is marked out on the surface instead. The reconstruction stands about two hundred and thirty metres away, one street nearer the river.

The same year produced a second and better-known rescue. The Rose, built for Philip Henslowe in or just after 1587, was found a short distance away, and a public campaign in the spring of 1989 led by Peggy Ashcroft, with Laurence Olivier, Judi Dench and Ian McKellen behind it, forced the developer to suspend the new building above the remains rather than destroy them. They survive in a chamber in the basement of the block that was built over them, kept under a few inches of water to stop the foundations drying and cracking, and have been open to the public since 1999. About a third of the site is still unexcavated, and it is on the register of monuments at risk. Between them, the Globe and the Rose are the only two places in England where the physical remains of a playhouse have been identified.

The yard, the galleries and the stage

The arrangement is the thing older accounts get wrong most often. The yard, the open area in front of the stage, is standing room and nothing else — about seven hundred people, with no seats of any kind. Those are the groundlings, a word that comes from Hamlet, and they stood in Shakespeare's day as they stand now. The benches are in the three covered galleries behind and above them. Any account that has visitors sitting on benches in the yard has the building inside out.

The stage is about forty-four feet wide and twenty-five deep, with a trap door and the open space beneath it used for entrances and effects. The house holds about one thousand five hundred and seventy in all. The original is conventionally said to have held three thousand, which is an estimate reached indirectly — from a remark about the Swan's capacity, and from measurements taken off the de Witt copy — and the figure has been disputed for as long as it has been quoted.

The thatch

London's building regulations have restricted thatch since the Great Fire of 1666, so the roof needed a special dispensation. It is Norfolk water reed, lined, treated with fire retardant and protected by sprinklers. The Globe describes it as the only thatched roof in the city, and also as the first permitted since the fire; the second claim is the Globe's own and could not be corroborated from any building or planning authority, so it is worth attributing rather than asserting.

How it is run

The Shakespeare Globe Trust is a registered charity, and the unusual thing about it is that it receives no regular public subsidy — it said in 2022 that it had then run for twenty-four years without any annual government or Arts Council money, living on tickets, tours, trading and donations. That model very nearly failed in 2020: a Commons committee recorded in May that the Globe was among the institutions warning of insolvency, and in October it took a grant and a repayable loan from the Culture Recovery Fund, the first government investment in the theatre since the lottery award of 1995. The indoor playhouse was converted into a broadcast studio while the houses were shut, and the Globe Theatre reopened in 2021.

Michelle Terry has been artistic director since 2018, the third in the theatre's history after Mark Rylance and Dominic Dromgoole, and the second to run it as an actor-manager. She is to step down at the end of 2027, after ten years, and no successor has been named. Her predecessor's departure was itself a public argument: the board announced in October 2016 that Emma Rice would leave in 2018, saying it wanted a return to staging in shared light without designed sound and lighting rigs, and the stated reason was disputed at the time.

Getting there

The address is New Globe Walk on Bankside. London Bridge, on the Northern and Jubilee lines, is the nearest Underground station at about nine minutes' walk; Blackfriars and Mansion House are about ten, and Southwark and St Paul's about fifteen. Blackfriars main line station has lifts from platform to street and comes out on the south bank. The Millennium Bridge lands about fifty metres from the theatre, which makes it the obvious crossing from the City and from St Paul's, and Bankside Pier is a few steps away.

Two things older accounts say should be ignored. There is no station called St Paul's Cathedral: the station is St Paul's, on the Central line. And the theatre is not opposite it — the two are on opposite banks of the Thames, fifteen minutes apart on foot by way of the bridge.

A permanent exhibition on the site covers the theatre's history and the business of putting on a play, with a replica stage area, costumes and properties to handle, and a working printing press; guided tours of the theatre generally include it. The Globe has also had an education department since 1989 and a touring arm.