Today a New Globe theater is situated on the banks of the Thames. On 19th September 1999, Shakespeare's Globe theater complex on the south bank of the Thames in London will fully open, 500 years to the day since the first recorded performance of a play at the original theater.

The Globe's first performances included productions of Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear. Shakespeare created his plays with his unique venue in mind. After an absence of nearly 400 years from London's theater scene, Shakespeare's Globe rises again on the South Bank of the Thames River. Recreating this jewel in the crown of Elizabethan theater was a 27-year epic adventure of dreams and disasters, starring the late American actor Sam Wanamaker. Wanamaker, in partnership with American financial backers, wheedled the British into rebuilding the Bard's theater. They used the same techniques that were used in building the theater in the late sixteenth century. The design of the New Globe Theater is a 20-sided roofless theater with its whitewashed, half-timbered thatched roof crown. The plays are staged in much the same way as when Shakespeare's troupe produced them without sets, decor, microphones or spotlights.

The original Globe Theater was built in 1599, on a site in Shoreditch, North London. The value of the land increased the rent astronomically, to a level which the Globe's company could no longer afford. However, the company did own the wood from which the theater was built. In the winter after the rent increase, members of the company dismantled the building piece by piece, shipped it across the Thames to Southwark on the south bank, and reassembled it there.

Shakespeare's colleagues were ahead of their time. The Globe was one of the earliest prefabricated buildings. The prefabrication method, where the pieces of the building are crafted away from the site and shipped there for assembly, was the technique used to rebuild the theater today. Southwark Council initially granted the land to build the project at the beginning of the 1980's, but political wrangles resulted in a court battle when the council reneged on the deal.

Traditional building materials and techniques were employed throughout the construction, with compromises to modern building codes and ordnances. For instance, the theater's straw thatch roof had to be coated in a special fire-protective liquid. The Globe is the first thatched-roof building to be built in London since the Great Fire in 1666. A mix of plaster and goat hair, which acts as a binding agent, forms the outer skin of the theater. This is exactly as the craftsmen of Elizabethan England would have prepared it. The complex incorporates a shop, a riverside pub, educational facilities and a piazza which will give audiences one of London's most breathtaking views across the River Thames.

After the ground was broken, the construction workers cleared the site, dug a gigantic hole 50 feet deep, and proceeded to construct the massive "diaphragm" wall, needed to keep out the river water. Once the wall was complete, the project ran out of money. Backers quickly realized that it wasn't feasible to get all the money they needed to build the theater at the outset, so they came up with the idea called "direct build": as the money came in for the different parts of the building, they would build the part phase by phase. This meant that the construction process was slower than normal, but the benefit was that the developers could show their sponsors exactly what they had paid for.

The first performance in the New Globe was given on June 14, 1996, the late Sam Wanamaker's birthday.

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In the amphitheatres like the Globe, Groundlings - who stood - paid one penny. An extra penny got them into the first or lowest gallery. Another penny got them into the Gentlemen's Room, where they could have a cushion.

More about the original audience?

http://www.calvin.edu/academic/engl/346/proj/lew/debweb.htm 

 For 6 pence, you could sit in the Lord's Room, on the balcony at the back of the stage and be seen as well as see the actors from very near. In the indoor theatres, the cheapest seats were six pence: they could hold far less people (300 to 600).

 

Up to 3000, 1000 of whom stood (the groundlings, or stinkards).