Episode Details

On June 29, 1613, a theatrical cannon fired during Henry VIII set the Globe's thatched roof ablaze and burned the greatest venue in the world to the ground, with the only injury being a man whose breeches were doused with a bottle of ale. This episode strips away centuries of polish to tell the gritty story of the building, starting with the midnight heist of December 1598 when the Burbage brothers and carpenter Peter Street dismantled The Theatre in Shoreditch beam by beam while landlord Giles Allen was out of town.

Drawing on legal depositions, Tudor carpentry treatises and the 1989 archaeological dig, the conversation covers the actor-owned syndicate that gave Shakespeare a 12.5 percent stake, the timber revetment that lifted the building above the Southwark marsh, the twenty-sided polygon behind the wooden O myth, the layer of hazelnut shells left by groundlings, the trapdoor to hell and the painted heavens above the stage, and how those physical conditions shaped the writing itself. It ends with the 1614 rebuild, the 1642 Puritan closure and the demolition for tenement housing.

• Mortise-and-tenon joints and how a whole amphitheatre was taken apart in the dark
• Why a joint-stock company of actors changed the stakes of Elizabethan theatre
• Engineering a dry platform on a flood-prone site 100 yards from the Thames
• The 1989 excavation: straight foundation lines and a floor of nutshells
• The invented Latin motto, the Hercules flag and how destruction fed the myth