Sam Leith Sam Leith

Life at the Globe

issue 12 January 2019

 
IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE
Merian Global Investors

The Globe was the occasion of drama before the first line was even spoken from its stage. In the snowy winter of 1598, three days after Christmas, Shakespeare and his colleague Burbage resolved a falling-out with the landlord of their then Shoreditch theatre in the liveliest way possible. Noting that the landlord owned the ground on which the theatre stood but not, technically, the theatre itself, they showed up mob-handed with ‘swords daggers billes axes and such like’, pulled the theatre down beam by beam, loaded it on to wagons and headed south.

What they assembled from the bric-à-brac the next spring, on a soggy bit of ground in Southwark, was the stage on which Henry V, Julius Caesar, Hamlet and King Lear were to be performed — and which would stand there until it burned down in 1613 during a performance of Henry VIII.

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