If it’s 29 June, it’s the 410th anniversary of the triumphant first (recorded) performance of Shakespeare’s penultimate play, Henry VIII (or All Is True) — or at least it was a success until the end of Act One, when the Globe burnt to the ground
Most of what we know about the incident comes from a letter politician Sir Henry Wotton wrote to colleague Sir Edmund Bacon, which says the play was “ſet forth with many extraordinary circumſtances of Pomp and Majeſty”, including the firing of stage cannon.
Today’s Globe website says they used gunpowder in the cannon,
held down by wadding. A piece of burning wadding set fire to the thatch. The theatre burned down in about an hour… By the next day two different songs had been printed about it.
Wotton says it was
thought at firſt but an idle ſmoake, and their eyes more attentive to the ſhow, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, conſuming within leſs than an hour the whole houſe to the very grounds.
There was, apparently, but one minor casualty:
(Yes, one man got his trousers set on fire and poured beer on himself to save the day)
Wotton thought it was hilarious, perhaps because he was
irked by common players depicting revered historical figures such Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey, and felt that Shakespeare and his theatre had got their just deserts.
One theory has it that “the shock of the fire destroyed Shakespeare’s health” — and, indeed, by the time the theatre was rebuilt (with a tiled roof), he’d written his last play (The Two Noble Kinsmen), sold his shares in the company, and moved back to Stratford — where he died two years later.
Then, in 1642, those joyless dicks the Puritans shut down all the theatres. The Globe gave way to flats, and was finally reconstructed in 1997 thanks to one man’s magnificent obsession.
