Globe Theater

In his play Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare obliquely references, through the character Ulysses, the theater that forever is linked to his name, “Take but degree away, untune that string,/ And hark what discord follows. Each thing meets/ In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters/ Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,/ And make a sop of all this solid globe . . .” (TC 1.3.109-13). This statement, framed against the backdrop of the cosmos, sets the theater up in general, and the Globe in particular, as a microcosm in itself. As Levin puts it, the Globe was “an artistic replica of the whole human condition” (7). Although my visit to this microcosm was through a reproduction of the original theater, the Globe still remains a key element in understanding British cultural life. This journal will focus on the function and importance of the original Globe as Shakespeare would have known it in the Elizabethan era.


The building of the Globe begins with what was called simply the Theatre by the owner, James Burbage, which began in the spring in 1576. The area that Burbage settled on to build the Theatre in The Liberty of Halliwell (called ‘”Liberty” because it was an area licensed by the Mayor of London for theatres and other entertainment venues) was wholly unremarkable in its time; Schoenbaum relates, “The Liberty, which took its name from an ancient holy well, had belonged to a Benedictine priory. The convent was now dissolved: the well, decayed and filthy, replenished a horsepond; and the property came within the jurisdiction of the Crown. Around the well stood undeveloped land, except for a few derelict tenements, a crumbling barn, and some gardens. Here, on a small parcel of vacant ground between the tenements and the old brick wall of the precinct, Burbage’s workman began building . . .” (132).

The Globe itself was built in 1599 with the ruins of the torn-apart Theatre: “The timber from the dismantled Theatre [was] ferried across the river to Bankside, where they erected a new playhouse more splendid than any London had yet seen. This they called the Globe” (Schoenbaum 208). Historically, the first recorded performance at the Globe was Julius Caesar. Although no one really knows what the Globe looked like, it is traditionally thought to have been built, like its predecessors, in the theatre-in-the-round style, in which three wooden tiers of seats allow for near 360 degree views of the stage. The top gallery consists of a thatched roof called a tectum, while the center of the top is completely exposed, which means, as I found out during A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that during a rainstorm the people standing under the hole—called “groundlings”—have no protection from the storm other than what poncho or rain gear they bring themselves. Unlike our time, where sitting close to the stage at a performance is seen as a great privilege that costs a subsequent great amount of money, the wealthy patrons in Shakespeare’s time showed off by sitting high in the tiers—the higher you sat, the better off you were known to be. The cheap “seats” bought you a bit of standing space in front of the stage.

From 1599 to 1608 or 1609 the Globe playhouse was the home of the Chamberlain-King’s company and the only theater where it publicly presented its plays in London. The company, to which Shakespeare belonged, changed their name to the King’s men from the Lord Chamberlain’s upon the death of Queen Elizabeth. Despite this small change, the company experienced the remarkable success in the Globe that has come to signify an entire art. As Beckerman puts it, the construction of the Globe “initiated a glorious decade during which the company achieved a level of stability and a quality of productivity rarely matched in the history of the theater" (Beckerman ix). And remarkably, considering how very little we have by way of actual documents and resources from the Globe and its surrounding activities, it is this stability and quality that has ensured the Globe’s indelible mark upon Western civilization.

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Works Cited

Beckerman, Bernard. Shakespeare at the Globe: 1599-1609. New York: Macmillan, 1962.

Levin, Harry. “Introduction.” The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd Ed. Baker, Herschel, et al., eds. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. 1-25.

Schoenbaum, S. William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.

“Troilus and Cressida.” The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd Ed. Baker, Herschel, et al., eds. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.