A year before the lease ran out, James Burbage, who had built the Theatre, realised that he would need to find a new home for his company. He bought some tenements in Blackfriars and converted them into an indoor playhouse. Unfortunately, the neighbours objected to living next door to a playhouse and, in November 1596, over a hundred of them sent a petition to the Queen's Privy Council, calling for Burbage's venture to be stopped. The Privy Council accepted the plea. James Burbage, who now had his money tied up in a building he could not use, died a month later.

In 1597, after the lease expired, Giles Allen evicted the Lord Chamberlain's Men. For the next two years, Burbage's sons, Richard and Cuthbert, tried unsucessfully to persuade Allen to renew their lease. Meanwhile the Lord Chamberlain's Men had to play in rented premises at the Curtain, in Shoreditch. This was much inferior to the Theatre, which stood nearby. Every day the company could see their old playhouse, which was now in "dark silence" according to Edward Guilpin, writing in 1598. It was a cruel reminder of what they had lost.

In late 1598, the Burbage brothers came up with a plan. They rented a new plot of land in Bankside, taking out a 31-year lease. During the Christmas holidays, while Giles Allen was away in the country, they hired a carpenter, Peter Street, to take the Theatre apart, timber by timber. They took the timbers by cart down to the river, and carried them under cover of darkness across London Bridge to Bankside, to build a new playhouse.

Giles Allen was furious when got back to town and saw that the Theatre had vanished. He took the Burbages to court to sue them for trespass, demanding £800 in damages (including two pounds for "trampling of the grass"). Allen lost his case.

William Shakespeare
attributed to John Taylor
Date: c.1610
Medium: oil on canvas, feigned oval
Measurements: 552mm x 438mm
On display at the National Portrait Gallery

The new playhouse

The design of the new playhouse was determined by the size and number of the oak timbers of the Theatre. Like the earlier building, it was a 20-sided polygon, around a 100ft across, with galleries on three levels. The spaces between the timbers were filled with panels made of thin strips of wood, called lath, plastered with a mixture of lime, horsehair and sand. The roof was thatched. This was much cheaper than a tiled roof, but it would eventually prove to be a fire hazard.

The Burbages shared their building costs with five members of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, including William Shakespeare, who were called the ''sharers''. The brothers kept half ownership of the building, while the other half went to the sharers. Future profits were split 50:50 between the owners and the rest of the company, with the owners' half being equally divided in turn between the Burbages and the sharers.

The playhouse was named the Globe, a word which had entered English less than 50 years before, referring to spherical models of the earth. The name was explained in a painted sign showing Hercules, the legendary strongman, holding a Globe on his shoulders. There was also a Latin motto: ''Totus mundus agit historiem'' (All the world plays the actor). In As You Like It, one of the first successes of his new playhouse, Shakespeare paraphrased the Latin motto as, ''All the world's a stage; and all the men and women merely players.''