The second Globe remained in operation and intact until the 1640s, when it was pulled down by the new Puritan regime. And that was that, for more than 300 years.

Until 1949, when American actor and director Sam Wanamaker came to England, and made a beeline for the site of the Globe, to see whatever monument there was for this most important of theatres. When he reached the site, however, all he found was a plaque, blackening on the wall of a brewery. He resolved immediately that the Globe deserved better – it deserved a working theatre, a whole international centre dedicated to exploring and celebrating Shakespeare in performance, and he was the man to do it.

From dream to reality

The idea had taken root in Wanamaker’s mind, and 20 years of busy acting work in the States did nothing to dislodge it. So in 1969, when he was again in London, he began his work in earnest. He established the Globe Playhouse Trust to steer the reconstruction of the Globe, using (as far as possible, as far as was known) only the materials and techniques that would have been used in Shakespeare’s day. Crucially this wouldn’t be a museum-piece, but a unique working theatre, in which plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries (and ours) would be performed and re-discovered. Coupled with it would be an education centre, and exhibition centre, a library (and shops, restaurants… At one point there were plans for a hotel too, and a pub…). Wanamaker was nothing if not ambitious.

Through the 1970s and 1980s there followed planning wrangles with the resistant local council, legal wrangles of all kinds, and a massive fund-raising struggle. It has been said that Wanamaker was one of those people who was able to persuade anybody to donate to his project, but the task was immense, nonetheless. Building the theatre as he and his architect Theo Crosby had envisioned it was to be a costly endeavour.

Wanamaker and Crosby worked tirelessly at their dream and gave decades of their lives for it. When the theatre opened in the summer of 1997 the delight was mixed with sadness, for neither had survived to see the celebrations. Wanamaker had died in 1993, with the building work begun – he had not seen the theatre built, but had by then at least known for sure that after all those years of uncertainty it was going to happen; Crosby had died the following year.

On the opening night it was left to actress Zoë Wanamaker to fill her father’s place and speak the famous lines from the new oak stage, under the new thatched roof. The lines had been written by Shakespeare four centuries earlier for that same stage, in his prologue to Henry V, and they are his description of the magical transformations that take place at the Globe:

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention.
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene.
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash’d in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire,
Crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that hath dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object. Can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! Since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work…