Talk about bringing down the house. On 29 June 1613 the Globe Theatre in London went up in flames when a cannon misfired during a performance of Henry the Eighth. Amazingly, nobody was killed, and the only injury was a man whose burning breeches had to be put out with a bottle of ale.
A new theatre was built on the site the following year and continued to stage plays until the Puritans came in to spoil all the fun in 1642. The theatre was closed and pulled down around 1644 to make room for tenements. The remains of the original Globe are currently located mostly under a listed building, which couldn’t be torn down, so the rebuilt, modern-day Globe, which opened in 1997, is located about 230 metres from the original site.
