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Contents  The Life and Times of William Shakespeare

The Globe Theatre of 1999

The new Globe Theatre, 200 metres from its original site and after almost 400 years, was officially inaugurated by the Queen on Thursday 12 June 1997. Its opening season ran from 29 May to 21 September 1997 and every summer it will offer performances of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries on the type of stage they were originally written for; many of them in authentic Elizabethan clothing.The late Sam Wanamaker, an American actor, was responsible for the Globe's modern reconstruction. When he visited London in the late 1940s, he was disappointed to find nothing marking the site of the original Globe Theatre. He eventually came up with the idea of reconstructing The Globe in its original location. Progress was slow however. The Globe Playhouse Trust was not founded until the 1970s but the actual construction of the new theatre did not begin until the 1980s. Wanamaker, in partnership with American financial backers wheedled the British into rebuilding the Bard's theatre. They used the same techniques that were used in construction during the late sixteenth century. The design of the new Globe Theatre is a 20-sided roofless theatre with a whitewashed, half-timbered thatched roof crown. The plays are staged in much the same way as when Shakespeare's troupe produced them, however with modern accoutrements that we all today take for granted.

Traditional building materials and techniques were employed throughout the construction with compromises being made to modern building codes. For instance, the theatre's straw thatch roof had to be coated in a special fire-protective liquid. The Globe is the first thatched-roof building to be built in London since the Great Fire in 1666. A mix of plaster and goat hair, which acts as a binding agent, forms the outer skin of the theatre. This is exactly as the craftsmen of Elizabethan England would have prepared it. The complex incorporates a shop, a riverside pub, educational facilities and a piazza which will give audiences an excellent view across the River Thames. The stage is roofed and thatched. The back wall (Frons Scenae) is fixed, highly decorated and elaborately carved in an early classical style with three openings. Huge oak pillars are painted to look like marble - one on each side of the stage - supporting the Heavens: the coffered and painted canopy over the stage. 

New Globe Theatre of 1999

After the ground was broken the construction workers cleared the site, dug a hole 13 metres deep and proceeded to construct the massive 'diaphragm' wall needed to keep out the water of the Thames. Once the wall was complete the project ran out of money. Administrators quickly realised that it wasn't feasible to get all the money they needed to build the theatre outright so they came up with the idea called 'direct build': as the money came in, they would construct different parts of the theatre phase by phase. This meant that the construction process was slower than normal, but the benefit was that the developers could show their sponsors exactly what they had paid for.

Key Dates:

Wenceslas Hollar's `Long View of London' (1647) showing London Bridge with the panorama of London stretched out behind and Southwark Cathedral in the foreground

The New Globe Theatre Web Site

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