Shakespeare's Globe Theatre: The Wooden O

Why is it significant?

Stand before the lime-plastered walls and thatched water-reed roof of Shakespeare's Globe on Bankside. Run your hand along one of the heavy English green-oak timber posts: you are standing before the only thatched-roof building permitted in London since the Great Fire of sixteen sixty-six.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand before the lime-plastered walls and thatched water-reed roof of Shakespeare's Globe on Bankside. Run your hand along one of the heavy English green-oak timber posts: you are standing before the only thatched-roof building permitted in London since the Great Fire of sixteen sixty-six. Opened in nineteen ninety-seven through the relentless passion of American actor Sam Wanamaker, it is a meticulous recreation of the original playhouse built here in fifteen ninety-nine.

Shakespeare famously called this circular playhouse a Wooden O in the prologue to Henry the Fifth. In Tudor times, up to three thousand spectators packed into the yard and galleries. Groundlings paid a single copper penny to stand in the open yard in the mud and rain, munching on hazelnuts and oranges while shouting approval or heaving rotten fruit at actors.

In June sixteen thirteen, during a performance of Henry the Eighth, a theatrical cannon fired from the roof misfired, setting the original dry thatch roof ablaze. The theater burned to the ground in less than an hour! Miraculously, no one was killed, though one unfortunate spectator's breeches caught fire and had to be smothered with a flagon of bottle ale.

Walk onto the silver pedestrian deck of the Millennium Bridge.