During a performance of Shakespeare's Henry VIII (then titled All Is True), a special-effects cannon meant to mark the king's entrance fired a wad of burning material that lodged in the thatched roof. Within an hour the entire wooden theater had burned to the ground. Remarkably, no one was seriously injured, save for a man whose breeches caught fire and were reportedly doused with a bottle of ale.
The Globe had stood on the south bank of the Thames since 1599, home to the King's Men and the plays of William Shakespeare, by then in the twilight of his writing career. On the afternoon of June 29, the company staged Henry VIII, a play notable for its use of real cannon fire to announce the monarch's arrival at a masque. It was a cheap theatrical trick that had worked before, but this time a spark caught in the theater's thatched roof, one of the few thatched structures still permitted within London's fire-conscious city limits.
Eyewitness accounts, including a letter from Sir Henry Wotton, describe the fire spreading with astonishing speed, the flames feeding on the dry, tarred timbers until the entire building collapsed within an hour. The audience, absorbed in the play, at first mistook the smoke for part of the show. Amazingly, the packed theater emptied without a single reported death.
The Globe's owners, including Shakespeare himself as a shareholder, rebuilt it within a year, this time with a tile roof to prevent a repeat disaster. That second Globe stood until the Puritans demolished it in 1644. The fire remains one of the most vivid, almost absurd disasters in theatrical history: a play about royal spectacle destroyed by its own special effects.
Key people: William Shakespeare, Henry Wotton