Shakespeare's Globe: The Rebuild That Took Forty-Three Years

Shakespeare's Globe stands on the south bank of the Thames in Southwark, about 230 metres from the site of the original 1599 building. Approached from the river, it reads as a circular timber-framed playhouse with a white limewashed exterior and a thatched roof. The thatch is the giveaway. London has not licensed thatched buildings since the Great Fire of 1666. Every other building in the central city is roofed in tile, slate, lead, or modern membrane. This one was given a special dispensation by the City of London because the entire point was to reproduce, in physical detail, an Elizabethan playhouse. The thatch is the most visible piece of that commitment.

The building opened in June 1997. It took forty-three years of campaigning to be built. The campaigner died in December 1993.

How the rebuild started

Sam Wanamaker was an American actor born in Chicago in 1919, of Ukrainian-Jewish parents. He became a successful Hollywood character actor in the 1940s. In 1947 he was identified as a suspected communist sympathiser during the early phase of the Hollywood blacklist. The House Un-American Activities Committee was beginning its work. Wanamaker, anticipating that he would be called to testify, left the United States in 1949 and settled in London, where his name had not yet appeared on a British blacklist.

In his first months in London he walked down to Bankside, near the south end of Southwark Bridge, looking for the site of Shakespeare's Globe. The Globe of 1599 had been the most important theatre in the English-speaking world. Wanamaker, working in the West End and reading Shakespeare for his own performances, wanted to see what was there. What he found, on a brewery wall on Park Street, was a small bronze plaque about 30 centimetres across, marking the approximate site. There was nothing else. No museum, no theatre, no monument. The building Shakespeare had written for, performed in, and held a share in, had left no physical trace beyond a brewery's wall plaque.

The story has been retold many times because Wanamaker himself retold it, and because it is too narratively clean. But the underlying fact is correct: the Globe in 1949 was an absence, marked by a plaque, on an industrial street, with no public initiative to do anything about it. Wanamaker decided that day to rebuild it.

The forty-three years of campaign

The story of the campaign is mostly a story of fundraising and planning permission, both more boring than the building itself and both crucial to understanding how it eventually happened.

In 1970 Wanamaker founded the Shakespeare Globe Trust, the charitable vehicle that would acquire the site and raise the money. Southwark Council was generally supportive but the site was complicated. The land Wanamaker wanted was occupied by a working brewery. Acquiring the site required years of negotiation with Courage's, the brewery's owner, and with Southwark Council. The trust eventually secured a lease on a riverside parcel about 230 metres east of the actual Globe site, where the original building's foundations were buried beneath later structures and could not be exposed without major archaeology. The reconstructed Globe is on land near the original, not on top of it.

Funding came in pieces. Wanamaker personally raised perhaps half the eventual construction cost from private donors, mostly American. The British government and Arts Council were sceptical. The architectural establishment was divided. Wanamaker was repeatedly accused of building a theme park, a vanity project, an American's nostalgic fantasy. Conservation bodies questioned whether a building had to be "authentic" in any meaningful sense if no surviving Globe drawings existed. Theatre professionals questioned whether the building would work as a working playhouse or only as a museum piece.

The architect Theo Crosby led the design work from 1986 until his death in 1994. Crosby was the right person for the job: a South African-born modernist who became increasingly interested in historic timber construction in the latter part of his career. He led the research that resolved what the new Globe should look like.

The evidence problem

No architectural drawings of the 1599 Globe survive. The only known image is a small sketch labelled "The Globe" in a 1644 long view of London by Wenceslas Hollar, which was itself based on an earlier 1638 sketch. The Hollar long view shows a polygonal building with a thatched roof, but the angle is oblique and the detail is small. A second image, the so-called Hollar inkblot, shows the same building from a slightly different angle. Neither image gives ground plans, interior dimensions, or stage layout.

The other major evidence is archaeological. The foundations of the Rose Theatre, a nearby playhouse from 1587, were partially excavated in 1989. The foundations of the original Globe itself were partially excavated in 1989 during work on a car park near Anchor Terrace, before the site was sealed beneath new development. These excavations gave the design team measurements of polygon diameter, foundation thickness, and approximate stage footprint, but not the elevation, materials, or interior decoration. The reconstruction team had to extrapolate from what they knew.

What they knew, in summary, was: the building was a polygon of probably twenty sides, roughly thirty metres in diameter, with three galleries of bench seating around a central open yard, a covered stage projecting into the yard, a thatched roof above the galleries, and an exposed open sky above the yard itself. Materials were oak frame, lath-and-plaster infill, and water-reed thatch. The stage and roof were painted with classical motifs of the kind that survive in other Elizabethan houses.

The reconstruction team made several specific decisions where evidence was ambiguous. They chose twenty sides over a smaller number. They chose painted "Heavens" above the stage, decorated with classical figures, because some painted Elizabethan stages survive at the Schloss in Gripsholm and at the Inigo Jones masquing house in Whitehall. They chose three galleries because the seating capacity of around three thousand recorded in contemporary accounts implied that floor count. They were transparent that these were choices, not certainties.

The actual construction

Construction was unusually slow and unusually traditional. The frame was assembled from green English oak, felled and worked on the site by carpenters trained in Tudor methods. No structural steel was used. The frame joints are mortise-and-tenon, secured by oak pegs called trenails, exactly as in 1599. Each oak post was hand-axed to its dimension before being raised into place. The lath-and-plaster panels between the structural members were applied in the historic manner, with riven oak lath nailed to the frame and lime plaster troweled onto the lath.

The roof was thatched with Norfolk water reed. Thatch was banned within the City of London by an act of 1212 and again, more aggressively, after the Great Fire of 1666. By the late twentieth century the prohibition had become absolute custom: no building inside central London had been thatched in two and a half centuries. The Globe team applied for a specific dispensation, which was granted on the condition that the thatch be heavily fire-protected: sprinkler runs were embedded under the reed, and the thatch is sprayed with fire-retardant chemical at intervals. The dispensation is unique. There is no other thatched building in the central London insurance area.

Construction began in 1993. Wanamaker watched the early framework rise. He died of cancer in December 1993, at the age of seventy-four. The frame was complete by 1995. The interior finishings were completed in 1996. The building opened with a production of Henry the Fifth in June 1997. Zoe Wanamaker, Sam's daughter, attended the opening.

How the building actually works as a theatre

The most useful piece of evidence about whether the rebuild succeeded comes from working in it. The Globe Theatre Company runs a full repertoire from April through October each year. Performances are open-air. The audience standing in the central yard, the "groundlings", pay five pounds for a standing ticket in 2026, deliberately kept at the lowest price band the theatre offers. Seated tickets in the wooden galleries run higher.

Rain does not stop performances. Sun does not stop performances. Wind does not stop performances. Pigeons crossing the stage do not stop performances. The actors work within these conditions and through them. Sound carries unexpectedly well in the wooden polygon: a normally pitched voice from the stage reaches the back of the upper gallery without amplification. Modern audiences are normally surprised by how well it works.

The complex also includes the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, an indoor candlelit theatre on the model of the Blackfriars (the indoor playhouse the King's Men used in winter from 1608). The Wanamaker opened in 2014. Performances are lit only by beeswax candles, exactly as Jacobean indoor theatre would have been. The candle lighting affects how scenes are staged, and several contemporary directors have observed that Shakespeare's later plays make different sense under candlelight than under stage lights.

The Globe Trust also runs an educational and research programme that has become a major centre for the study of early modern English performance. Academic conferences, actor training programmes, and rehearsal projects use the space year-round.

What this rebuild proves

The reconstructed Globe is not a museum. It is a working theatre. It happens to be a working theatre built to sixteenth-century specifications, with the seating, sightlines, acoustics, and performance conditions of an Elizabethan playhouse. The question Wanamaker spent forty-three years trying to get an answer to was: can a modern audience experience Shakespeare's plays under the conditions for which they were written, and does it change the plays? After three decades of operation, the answer appears to be yes, it can, and it does. Scenes that read flatly on the printed page work in the open yard at midday. Soliloquies played to a daylit standing crowd of nine hundred behave differently than soliloquies played to a darkened seated audience of nine hundred. The plays are different plays.

Whether that is worth the effort of the rebuild is a matter of opinion. But the rebuild itself, as a piece of late twentieth-century construction history, is one of the most committed exercises in physical historical reconstruction undertaken in modern Britain. Every joint is hand-cut. Every plaster panel is lime-bound. The thatch is the only one inside the M25 motorway ring. The whole structure is the work of one man's forty-three-year insistence that the building had to come back.

He never saw it open. His daughter did.