Elizabethan+theatre+and+The+Globe+Theatre

The Globe Theatre was a theatre in London associated with William Shakespeare. It was first built in 1599. And it was also known as the Elizabeth Theatre. This is the drawing of the first Globe Theatre. Actually, nobody knew the location of the Globe theatre exactly in the history until 1989, a small part of the foundation of it, including one original pier base, was discovered beneath the car park at the rear of Anchor Terrace on Park Street. From that discovery, we could know the exact location of it, it is currently extending from the west side of modern-day Southwark Bridge Road eastwards as far as Porter Street and from Park Street southwards as far as the back of Gatehouse Square. The Globe's actual dimensions are unknown, but the evidence from scholarly inquiry over the last two centuries suggests that it was a three-storey, open-air amphitheatre approximately thirty metres in diameter that could house up to three thousand spectators. However, the uncovering of a small part of the Globe's foundation suggested that it was a polygon of twenty sides. At the base of the stage, there was an area called the pit, (or, harking back to the old inn-yards, yard) where, for a penny, people (the "groundlings") would stand on the rush-strewn earthen floor to watch the performance. Vertically around the yard were three levels of stadium-style seats, which were more expensive than standing room. A rectangular stage platform, also known as an 'apron stage', thrust out into the middle of the open-air yard. The stage measured approximately 13.1 metres in width, 8.2 metres in depth and was raised about 1.5 metres off the ground. On this stage, there was a trap door for use by performers to enter from the "cellarage" area beneath the stage. The Globe theatre could hold 1500 people in the audience and this number expanded to 3000 with the people who crowded outside the theatres. There were three sorts of people who came to watch the play, they are Royalty, the Nobel and the lower classes. For the actors, men and women attended plays, but often the prosperous women would wear a mask to disguise their identity. However, the Globe theatre didn’t exist for a long time, it was destroyed by fire unfortunately on 29 June 1613. And the second Globe theatre was opened on the same site by the next year. But like all the other theatres in London, the Globe was closed down by the Puritans in 1642. It was pulled down in 1644.