He married Catherine of Aragon who bore him a daughter, Mary.

He asked the Pope for a divorce to marry his pregnant mistress Anne Boleyn.
He broke with Rome when the Pope refused and declared himself ‘Supreme Head of the Church of England’ with the Act of Supremacy (1534).

He dissolved the monasteries, taking their wealth.

Ireland remained a Catholic country.
Anne Boleyn gave him a second daughter, Elizabeth.

She was executed for treason in 1536.
Henry went on to have four more wives and one son, Edward, later Edward VI, from Jane Seymour.
Mary I
The daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon.

She refused to abandon the Catholic faith.

She tried to restore England to papal obedience.
She married the Catholic Philip of Spain.
The burning of Protestants earned her the nickname ‘Bloody Mary’.
She died without an heir.

Her Church of England restored the country firmly to Protestantism.
She was unmarried and used this as a political weapon.

She said that ‘the Queen was married to her people’ and became the ‘Virgin Queen’.

The first opened in 1599 and was built by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the company that William Shakespeare wrote for and part-owned.

We think that the first play Shakespeare wrote for the original Globe was Julius Caesar in spring 1599. Later that year he also wrote As You Like It and made a start on Hamlet. Over the next fourteen years Shakespeare wrote some of his greatest plays, including Twelfth Night, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. Other playwrights wrote for the Globe during this time too, including Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton and John Fletcher.

In 1613, during a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII (co-written with Fletcher), a mis-fired prop canon caused the thatch roof to catch fire. The entire theatre burnt down within two hours, according to eyewitness reports (miraculously, no one was killed). The company rebuilt the Globe in a year – with a tiled roof. The second Globe operated until it was closed down by parliamentary decree in 1642.

In 1609 Shakespeare’s company started performing in the indoor Blackfriars playhouse as well as the Globe. It was here that Shakespeare conceived his final great plays, including The Tempest.

The current Globe Theatre opened in 1997, after many years of campaigning by the founder of the Shakespeare’s Globe Trust, Sam Wanamaker.

Shape is an icosagon, a 20 sided polygon.

Can hold 1,570 people, 700 standing and the rest seated.

The twelve signs of the zodiac are painted on this roof over the stage (which we call ‘The Heavens’).

Built from oak beams, lime-plaster walls and a water-reed thatched roof.

The only thatched-roof building in London.

We had to fight for special permission to have our thatched roof, as there has been a law against thatched buildings in London since the Great Fire of 1666!