GLOBE THEATRE

famous London theatre in which the plays of William Shakespeare were performed after 1599. It was built by two brothers, Cuthbert and Richard Burbage, who inherited its predecessor, The Theatre, from their father, James. The latter theatre had closed, ostensibly for good, in 1597, and the owner of the land on which it stood threatened to pull the building down once the lease expired. The Burbages and their associates anticipated the threat, however, and in late 1598 dismantled The Theatre and carried the materials to Bankside (a district of Southwark stretching for about half a mile west of London Bridge on the south bank of the River Thames), where the Swan and the Rose theatres already stood. To the east of these, they reassembled the timbers from the old theatre, calling the new building, which was probably completed by the autumn of 1599, the Globe Theatre. Half the shares in the new theatre were kept by the Burbages. The rest were assigned equally to Shakespeare and other members of the Chamberlain's Men (the company of players who acted there), of which Richard Burbage was principal actor and of which Shakespeare had been a leading member since late 1594. Information about the physical arrangement of the Globe is largely a matter of conjecture. It is thought to have been cylindrical in shape, with a thatched gallery roof. It is known that the Fortune Theatrebuilt in 1600 for a rival company, the Admiral's Menwas modeled on the Globe. In 1613, during a performance of Henry VIII, the thatch of the Globe was accidentally set alight by a cannon, set off to mark the king's entrance onstage in a scene at Cardinal Wolsey's palace. The entire theatre was destroyed within the hour. By June 1614 it had been rebuilt, this time with a tiled gallery roof and a circular shape. It was pulled down in 1644, two years after the Puritans closed all theatres, to make way for tenement dwellings. In 1970 the American actor Sam Wanamaker established the Shakespeare Globe Playhouse Trust. Seventeen years later a groundbreaking ceremony was held on a Bankside site near that of the original Globe, and in 1989 the foundations of the original building (now buried beneath a historic 19th-century building) were discovered. Although only a small percentage of the original theatre could be examined, the discovery of these foundations enabled scholars to make certain design adjustments. By referring to a number of extant Elizabethan buildings for clues to the structure, style, interior, and roofing, scholars and architects completed the design of the Globe Theatre reconstruction. Using traditional methods and materials, with only a few concessions to modern fire regulations and the like, builders completed work on the new Globe Theatre in the mid-1990s. Performances of various types have been held since the late 1980s, and a regular season was inaugurated in 1996. The new Globe is part of a larger complex of buildings known as the International Shakespeare Globe Centre.