Elizabethan playhouses
Purpose-built public playhouses placed a raised stage within a many-sided, open-air building. The yard gave standing spectators—the “groundlings”—a penny entrance, while galleries cost more. Performances usually began in the afternoon and used relatively little scenery.
The Theatre
James Burbage built The Theatre in Shoreditch in 1576. When a lease dispute ended its use, members of the company dismantled it in winter 1598–99, carried its timbers across the Thames and reused some of them for the Globe.
The Globe
The Globe opened on Bankside in 1599 as a polygonal open-air amphitheatre partly owned by company sharers. On 29 June 1613 a stage cannon fired during Henry VIII set the thatch alight. The building was rebuilt in 1614.
The indoor Blackfriars
Around 1608–09 the King’s Men began using Blackfriars as well as the Globe. Its enclosed space allowed evening-like effects, richer candlelit atmosphere and a smaller, more expensive audience.
How performances worked
Companies played without modern amplification. Music, costumes, rhetoric and the audience’s imagination created place. Female roles were played by boys or young men, a fact Shakespeare repeatedly uses through plots in which a male player embodies a woman who disguises herself as a man.
The Swan sketch
The de Witt/van Buchel image of the Swan, made around 1596, is the only surviving contemporary drawing of the interior of an Elizabethan public playhouse. It is invaluable, but should not be treated as a precise plan of every theatre.
Today’s Shakespeare’s Globe
A reconstruction near the original site, championed by the American actor Sam Wanamaker, opened in 1997. It offers an informed experiment in open-air performance rather than a claim to reproduce every historical detail perfectly.