The First Globe Theater

The First Globe Theater
The Globe Theater was built around 1598 in London’s Bankside district. It was one of four major theaters in the area - the others were the Swan, the Rose, and the Hope. It was an open air octagonal amphitheater that could seat up to 3, 000 spectators. The theater was three stories high, with a diameter of approximately 100 feet. The rectangular stage platform on which the plays were performed was nearly 43 feet wide and 28 feet deep. The staging area housed trap doors in its floorings and primitive rigging overhead for various stage effects.

The original Globe theater was constructed by the Lord Chamberlain’s men, the acting group to which Shakespeare belonged. Before the Globe was constructed, they performed at the Blackfriar
Theater in the heart of London. But having a theater in the heart of London was a bad idea because the plague caused frequent closings. After a year of closure due to the plague, the company stripped the Blackfriar to its foundation and moved the materials across the river to the
Bankside. There, they proceeded to build the Globe.

Their decision to do this stirred up some controversy because the Blackfriar was leased to the
Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The owner, who had been away from London at the time that this was happening, filed a lawsuit against the company. But the company won the case and the theater.
The Globe was destroyed by fire in 1613 when , during a production of Henry VIII, a cannon was fired above the stage to signal some important business of the play. The wadding that stuffed the cannon, which was some form of heavy cloth, was ignited by the explosion and shot up out of the auditorium and landed on the dry thatch roof. The straw caught fire and in only minutes the entire building was consumed in flame. But amazingly, not one person was killed. Here is the first verse from a sonnet about the fire that destroyed the Globe Theater-

“A tearful fire began above,
A wonder strange and true,
And to the stagehouse did remove,
As rouns as tailor’s chew;
And burnt down both beam and snag
And did not spare the silken flag,
O sorrow, pitiful sorrow,
And yet all this true.”
The second Globe theater, which was rebuilt to be the most expensive and complicated in
England ever built, was completed before Shakespeare’s death in 1616.