Shakespeare’s Globe was built from a playhouse in Shoreditch. On 28 December 1598, while their landlord was away for Christmas, the Burbage brothers and a carpenter took the building apart and later used its timber to build the Globe on the other side of the Thames.

London’s first playhouse

The building was called The Theatre. The actor and manager James Burbage put it up in 1576, on land in Shoreditch that he leased from a landowner named Giles Allen. Museum of London Archaeology describes it as London’s first purpose-built playhouse.

Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, played there from 1594. Shakespeare wrote and performed at The Theatre, and Romeo and Juliet was almost certainly first staged there, according to MOLA.

A lease that ran out

The lease was for 21 years. James Burbage died in 1597 before an extension was agreed, and Allen decided he did not want a playhouse on his land, according to the Folger Shakespeare Library. The company moved to the Curtain, a rented playhouse nearby.

The Burbages still owned the building, if not the ground. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust notes that Allen owned the land but not the materials The Theatre was built from, and the original lease let the Burbages remove what they had built.

Christmas 1598

On 28 December 1598, James’s sons Cuthbert and Richard Burbage, the carpenter Peter Street and a dozen or so armed men went to the site. They stripped off the roof and walls and took the frame apart, board by board.

Allen was spending Christmas in Essex. The Folger points out that the legend of a single night’s work is an exaggeration: a large, multi-storey playhouse would have taken several days to dismantle. The Thames that winter was described as “nigh frozen over”, and the timber was stored in a yard near Bridewell until the weather allowed building to start in Southwark.

The Globe, and a court case

The new playhouse went up on Bankside in 1599. Burbage named it the Globe, and Shakespeare’s Henry V, Julius Caesar and Hamlet were among the plays staged there.

Allen went to court. Records of a case brought in 1600 in the Court of King’s Bench show him suing Peter Street for trespass, for trampling his plants and for stealing The Theatre. Street argued that he had only been acting as Cuthbert Burbage’s servant.

The first Globe burned down on 29 June 1613, when a cannon fired during a performance of Henry VIII set fire to the thatch. The reconstruction that stands today opened in 1997, about a street away from the original site.

What is left in Shoreditch

MOLA archaeologists confirmed The Theatre’s location after digs in 2008 and 2009, on a disused warehouse site off New Inn Broadway. They found what is believed to be part of the inner wall of the polygonal building and the sloping gravel yard where audiences stood, along with a fragment of 16th-century pottery showing a man with a beard and ruff.

The Curtain, where the company played while it waited for the Globe, stood a few minutes’ walk away. Its remains are now the centre of the Museum of Shakespeare on Hewett Street.