Take a Virtual Tour of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London

The sto­ry of the Globe The­atre, the ances­tral home of Shakespeare’s plays, is itself very Shake­speare­an, in all of the ways we use that adjec­tive: it has deep roots in Eng­lish his­to­ry, a trag­ic back­sto­ry, and rep­re­sents all of the hodge­podge of Lon­don, in the ear­ly 17th cen­tu­ry and today, with the city’s col­or­ful street life, min­gling of inter­na­tion­al cul­tures, high and low, and its delight in the play and inter­play of lan­guages.

“The first pub­lic play­hous­es,” notes the British Library, “were built in Lon­don in the late 1500s. The­atres were not per­mit­ted with­in the bound­aries of the City itself”—theater not being con­sid­ered a respectable art—”but were tol­er­at­ed in the out­er dis­tricts of Lon­don, such as South­wark, where the Globe was locat­ed. South­wark was noto­ri­ous for its noisy, chaot­ic enter­tain­ments and for its sleazy low-life: its the­atres, broth­els, bear bait­ing pits, pick­pock­ets and the like.”

The Globe began its life in 1599, in a sto­ry that “might be wor­thy,” writes the Shake­speare Resource Cen­ter, “of a Shake­speare­an play of its own.” Built from the tim­bers of the city’s first per­ma­nent the­ater, the Burbage, which opened in 1576, the Globe burned down in 1613 “when a can­non shot dur­ing a per­for­mance of Hen­ry VIII ignit­ed the thatched roof in the gallery.” With­in the year, it was rebuilt on the same foun­da­tions (with a tiled roof) and oper­at­ed until the Puri­tans shut it down in 1642, demol­ish­ing the famed open-air the­ater two years lat­er.

In a twist to this so far very Eng­lish tale, it took the tire­less efforts of an expa­tri­ate Amer­i­can, actor-direc­tor Sam Wana­mak­er, to bring the Globe back to Lon­don. After more than two decades of advo­ca­cy, Wanamaker’s Globe Play­house Trust suc­ceed­ed in recre­at­ing the Globe, just a short dis­tance from the orig­i­nal loca­tion. Open­ing in 1997, three-hun­dred and fifty-five years after the first Globe closed, the new Globe The­atre recre­at­ed all of the orig­i­nal’s archi­tec­tur­al ele­ments.

The stage projects into the cir­cu­lar court­yard, designed for stand­ing spec­ta­tors and sur­round­ed by three tiers of seats. While the stage itself has an elab­o­rate paint­ed roof, and the seat­ing is pro­tect­ed from the weath­er by the only thatched roof in Lon­don since the 1666 Great Fire, the theater’s court­yard is open to the sky. How­ev­er, where the orig­i­nal Globe held about 2,000 stand­ing and 1,000 seat­ed play­go­ers, the recre­ation, notes Time Out Lon­don, holds only about half that num­ber.

Still, the­ater-goers can “get a rich feel for what it was like to be a ‘groundling’ (the stand­ing rab­ble at the front of the stage) in the cir­cu­lar, open-air the­atre.” Short of that, we can tour the Globe in the vir­tu­al recre­ation at the top of the post. Move around in any direc­tion and look up at the sky. As you do, click on the tiny cir­cles to reveal facts such as “Prob­a­bly the first Shake­speare play to be per­formed at the Globe was Julius Cae­sar, in 1599.”

If you don’t have the lux­u­ry of vis­it­ing the new Globe, tak­ing a tour, or see­ing a per­for­mance lov­ing­ly-recre­at­ed with all of the cos­tum­ing (and even pro­nun­ci­a­tion) from Jacobean Eng­land, you can get the fla­vor of this won­drous achieve­ment in bring­ing cul­tur­al his­to­ry into the present with the vir­tu­al tour, also avail­able as an app for iPhone and iPad users. This inter­ac­tive tour super­sedes a pre­vi­ous ver­sion we fea­tured a few years back.

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