Shakespeare's Globe Theatre burned to the ground
On this day · 29 June 1613
A stage cannon during 'Henry VIII' set the thatch alight, and within hours London's most famous playhouse was ash.
On June 29, 1613, during a performance of Henry VIII at London’s Globe Theatre, a stage cannon fired to announce the king’s entrance at the end of Act 1. Burning wadding caught in the thatched roof, and within roughly an hour the open-air playhouse — home to Shakespeare’s company — burned to the ground.
Remarkably, no one died. A contemporary letter records that the only casualty was a man whose breeches caught fire, doused, the story goes, with a bottle of ale.
The blaze “consumed the whole house and all in less than two hours,” one eyewitness wrote.
The company rebuilt quickly, reopening by 1614 with a safer tiled roof in place of thatch. The fire is one reason so few original Globe-era documents survive — and a vivid reminder of how gunpowder and stagecraft once shared the same theater.
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