The Globe Theater

Although Shakespeare's plays were performed at other venues during the playwright's career, the Globe Theatre in the Southwark district of London was the venue at which the Bard's best known stage works (including his four great tragedies) were first produced. The Globe was built during Shakespeare's early period in 1599 by one of his long-standing associates, Cuthbert Burbage, the brother of the most famous Shakespearean actor of the Elizabethan Age, Richard Burbage. In 1597, Cuthbert Burbage inherited …

…in semi-retirement at Stratford-on-Avon where he would die three years later at the age of fifty-two. The Globe was reconstructed in 1614, with tiles replacing flammable straw on its partial roof. In 1642, however, a quarter-century after Shakespeare's death, a new, Puritanical and decidedly anti-theater regime assumed power in England and closed down all of the country's theaters. Two years later, Cromwell's round heads tore down the Globe, leveled the site and constructed tenement housing upon it.