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Globe Theatre

Globe Theatre: the Basics

The theatre known as Shakespeare's Globe, at Bankside on the south bank of the Thames, is a re-creation on the site of the original, where the playwright's own company, the King's Men, once set up camp. It was the brainchild of US actor and director Sam Wanamaker, opening in 1997, and is closely modelled on its Elizabethan forebear.

The Globe silhouette
In the "wooden O", as Shakespeare called it in the Prologue to Henry V, spectators were either seated in covered galleries rising in tiers around the stage, or stood in an open-air pit in front of it. Known as the "groundlings", the standers had a close-up view of the action, from where they would call out their approval or disapproval of the actors.


The theatre that rose on this site was put up hastily over Christmas 1598, using timbers from an earlier venue in Shoreditch, after a dispute had arisen with the owner of the land on which it stood. It was at Bankside, throughout the next decade or so, that most of Shakespeare's major works were first staged by the King's Men, making it the most important building in the history of the English theatre.