A Sonnett upon the pittiful burneing of the Globe playhowse in London

Now sitt the downe, Melpomene,

Wrapt in a sea-cole robe,

And tell the dolefull tragedie,

That late was playd at Globe;

For noe man that can singe and saye

[But ?] was scard on St. Peters daye.

Oh sorrow, pittifull sorrow, and yett all this is true.

All yow that please to understand,

Come listen to my storye,

To see Death with his rakeing brand

Mongst such an auditorye;

Regarding neither Cardinalls might,

Nor yett the rugged face of Henry the Eight.

Oh sorrow, &c.

This fearfull fire beganne above,

A wonder strange and true,

And to the stage-howse did remove,

As round as taylors clewe;

And burnt downe both beame and snagg,

And did not spare the silken flagg.

Oh sorrow, &c.

Out runne the knightes, out runne the lordes,

And there was great adoe;

Some lost their hattes, and some their swordes;

Then out runne Burbidge too;

The reprobates, though druncke on Munday,

Prayd for the Foole and Henry Condye.

Oh sorrow, &c.

The perrywigges and drumme-heades frye,

Like to a butter firkin;

A wofull burneing did betide

To many a good buffe jerkin.

Then with swolne eyes, like druncken Flemminges,

Distressed stood old stuttering Heminges.

Oh sorrow, &c.

No shower his raine did there downe force

In all that Sunn-shine weather,

To save that great renowned howse;

Nor thou, O ale-howse, neither.

Had itt begunne belowe, sans doubte,

Their wives for feare had pissed itt out.

Oh sorrow, &c.

Bee warned, yow stage-strutters all,

Least yow againe be catched,

And such a burneing doe befall,

As to them whose howse was thatched;

Forbeare your whoreing, breeding biles,

And laye up that expence for tiles.

Oh sorrow, &c.

Goe drawe yow a petition,

And doe yow not abhorr itt,

And gett, with low submission,

A licence to begg for itt

In churches, sans churchwardens checkes,

In Surrey and in Midlesex.

Oh sorrow, pittifull sorrow, and yett all this is true.

John Taylor, the water-poet, has his epigram on the theme:

As gold is better that’s in fier try’d,

So is the Bankside Globe, that late was burn’d;

For where before it had a thatched hide,

Now to a stately theator ’tis turn’d:

Which is an emblem, that great things are won

By those that dare through greatest dangers run.

Ben Jonson, in his Execration upon Vulcan, writes as if he had been an eye-witness:

Well fare the wise men yet, on the Bank side,

My friends the watermen! they could provide

Against thy fury, when to serve their needs,

They made a Vulcan of a sheaf of reeds,

Whom they durst handle in their holiday coats,

And safely trust to dress, not burn their boats.

But O those reeds! thy mere disdain of them

Made thee beget that cruel stratagem,

Which some are pleased to style but thy mad prank,

Against the Globe, the glory of the Bank:

Which, though it were the fort of the whole parish,

Flanked with a ditch, and forced out of a marish,

I saw with two poor chambers taken in,

And razed; ere thought could urge this might have been!

See the World’s ruins! nothing but the piles

Left, and wit since to cover it with tiles.

The Brethren they straight nosed it out for news,

’Twas verily some relict of the Stews;

And this a sparkle of that fire let loose,

That was raked up in the Winchestrian goose,

Bred on the Bank in time of Popery,

When Venus there maintained the mystery.

But others fell with that conceit by the ears,

And cried it was a threatning to the bears,

And that accursed ground, the Paris-garden:

‘Nay,’ sighed a sister, ‘Venus’ nun, Kate Arden,

Kindled the fire!’ But then, did one return,

No fool would his own harvest spoil or burn!

If that were so, thou rather wouldst advance

The place that was thy wife’s inheritance.

‘Oh no,’ cried all, ‘Fortune, for being a whore,

Scaped not his justice any jot the more:

He burnt that idol of the Revels too.

Nay, let Whitehall with revels have to do,

Though but in dances, it shall know his power;

There was a judgement shewn too in an hour.’

The Puritans did in fact draw such morals as Jonson satirized. Prynne, for example, finds the hand of God in ‘the sudden feareful burning, even to the ground, both of the Globe and Fortune play-houses, no man perceiving how these fires came’.

The Globe was at once rebuilt. It was open again by 30 June 1614, when John Chamberlain wrote to Alice Carleton that he had called upon her sister Williams, and found her ‘gone to the new Globe, to a play. Indeed’, he says, ‘I hear much speech of this new play-house, which is said to be the fairest that ever was in England, so that if I live but seven years longer, I may chance to take a journey to see it’. The manuscript continuator of Stowe, describing the end of the theatre, says that the rebuilding was ‘at the great charge of King Iames, and many Noble men and others’. The lawsuit documents contain no indication that any part of the burden fell upon any one but the ‘housekeepers’, who being bound under their lease to ‘mainteyne and repaire’ the house, resolved to ‘reedifie the same’. The first estimate of cost seems to have been about £700 to £800, for a levy of ‘50li or 60li’ was called upon each seventh share of the moiety. Witter was unable to meet this demand, and as he was also behindhand with his share of the ground-rent and other payments, Heminges resumed possession of the seventh and gave half of it ‘gratis’ to Henry Condell. By this time it had been ascertained that the re-edifying would be ‘a verie greate charge’, and Heminges claims that the re-edifying of Witter’s ‘parte’ had in fact cost himself and Condell ‘about the somme of cxxli’. This would mean a total cost of about £1,680. Heminges appears to have taken a sub-lease at 20s. a year from his partners of two small parcels of the land in 1615, and to have built on them a house, probably a taphouse, as a private enterprise.

Ostler died in December 1614, and Heminges took possession of his interest and drew the profits until October 1615, when his daughter Thomasina, Ostler’s widow, brought an action against him for them, the result of which is unknown. Shakespeare died in April 1616, and his interest, if not previously alienated, would have passed under his will, with other ‘leases’ to John and Susanna Hall. At some time earlier than April 1619, probably when he joined the company about 1616, Field was admitted to be a housekeeper, and the moiety was then divided into eighths instead of sevenths. In April 1619 Witter brought an action against Heminges and Condell in the Court of Requests, to recover the interest which he had forfeited at the time of the rebuilding. He estimated the present annual value of the seventh, which he had held, at £30 to £40, and in the course of the proceedings expressed his willingness either to pay a rent of £13 6s. 8d. for the half of that seventh which Heminges had not passed over to Condell, or, alternatively, to take the profits of the houses on the site, other than the theatre, and in return for those to become responsible for the whole of the ground-rents due under the principal leases. The defence consisted in a denial of Witter’s claim to benefit under the will of Augustine Phillips, and an assertion that, after Heminges had allowed him to draw considerable sums in respect of the share, he had deserted his wife, at whose death Heminges ‘out of charitie was at the charges of the buryeing of her’. The depositions of the witnesses, who included Thomas Woodford and one James Knasborough, are unfortunately missing. Ultimately Witter failed to proceed with his case, and on 29 November 1620 the Court gave judgement for the defendants.

In October 1624 died John Underwood and left a share in the Globe in trust for his children to Condell and others as his executors. It must be supposed that he had succeeded to Field’s eighth, when the latter left the King’s men in 1619. Condell himself died in December 1627 and left his interest to his son William until he should have made £300 out of it, and thereafter to his widow. Heminges died in October 1630, and his interest passed to his son William as his executor. During the last years of their lives Heminges and Condell, following out the policy of absorption which has already been illustrated, appear to have acquired in one way or another the whole of the shares formerly held by Shakespeare, by Basil Nicoll and John Edmonds as successors of Sly, and by Underwood. This fact emerges from the records known as the Sharers Papers, which start with a petition from Robert Benfield, Eliard Swanston, and Thomas Pollard, then important members of the King’s company, to the Lord Chamberlain in 1635, to be admitted to shares as ‘housekeepers’ in the profits of the Globe and the Blackfriars. The allegations show that the Globe had been ‘formerly’ divided into sixteen shares, of which eight were held by Cuthbert Burbadge and Richard Burbadge’s widow Winifred, now Mrs. Robinson, in her own right and that of her son William, four by Mrs. Condell, and four by William Heminges. Afterwards Joseph Taylor and John Lowin were allowed to acquire shares, and later still the remaining Heminges interest was ‘surreptitiously’ purchased by John Shank. At the date of the petition, therefore, the Burbadges held seven shares, Mrs. Condell two, Shank three, and Taylor and Lowin two each. The case furnishes valuable information as to the organization of the theatre, and as to the division of outgoing and profits between the housekeepers and the actors as such. It is pretty evident that by 1635 the Globe took a secondary place to the Blackfriars in the economy of the King’s men. Shank admitted that he had bought a two years’ term of one Globe share in 1633 and a one year’s term of two more in 1634, together with interests in the Blackfriars, and seems to have thought that the £506 which he gave was full value for the purchases. The Burbadges protested against being called upon to part with any part of their property to ‘men soe soone shott up’ and not having the ‘antiquity and desert’, which had customarily been looked for in housekeepers. In support of their plea they recalled the early services of their father in the building of theatres and the claims of their family to profit by ‘the great desert of Richard Burbadge for his quality of playing’. They suggested that ‘makeing the leases for twenty-one yeeres’ to their fellows, whose widows or children subsequently alienated the profits from the company, had been their ‘destruction’. The Lord Chamberlain, however, directed that the Burbadges should transfer two shares and Shank one to the three petitioners, ‘at the usual and accustomed rates, and according to the proportion of the time and benefit they are to injoy’. This the order states, in the case of the Globe, as five years. Probably there is an error here. The terms bought by Shank were to expire in 1635, but at the time of the petition a suit was pending in the Court of Requests for the confirmation of a ‘lease paroll’ from Sir Matthew Brend for a further nine years from 25 March 1635. The original lease of 1599 from Nicholas Brend was for thirty-one years and would have expired in 1629. But on 26 October 1613, when the rebuilding of the theatre was in hand, a fresh lease extending the term to 1635 had been granted by Sir John Bodley as trustee for Nicholas’s son Matthew, who was then a minor. Not content with this, the syndicate had procured a promise of a further extension to 1644 from young Matthew himself, which he now repudiated. I think that Bodley must have taken the opportunity in 1613 to raise the ground-rent from £14 10s. to £20. A draft for a return of new and divided houses, made for the Earl Marshal in 1634, has the following entry:

‘The Globe play-house nere Maid lane built by the company of players, with the dwelling-house thereto adjoyninge, built with timber, about 20 yeares past, upon an old foundation, worth 14li to 20li per ann., and one house there adjoyning built about the same tyme with timber, in the possession of Wm Millet, gent., worth per ann. 4li [In margin, Play-house & house, Sr Mathew Brend’s inheritance].’

A corrected return of 1637 runs:

‘The Globe play-house nere Maide lane built by the Company of Players with timber about 20 yeares past uppon an old foundacion, worth 20li per ann. beinge the inheritance of Sr Mathew Brand, Knt.’

The petitioners in the Sharers Papers declare that up to Lady Day 1635 the rent for the Globe and Blackfriars together was not above £65. The original rent of the Blackfriars was £40, but this also may have been put up on the expiration of the first lease in 1629. The Court of Requests finally confirmed the extension of the lease to 1644, apparently at a still further increased rent of £55, as Shank states the combined rent of the two houses as £100. The Globe was ‘pulled downe to the ground, by Sir Matthew Brand, on Munday the 15 of April 1644, to make tenements in the room of it’; that is to say, immediately upon the expiration of the nine years’ term from Lady Day 1635 contemplated in the Sharers Papers.

The precise locality of the Globe has been matter of controversy. The various contemporary documents already quoted place it beyond doubt in Surrey, and ‘on the Bankside’, a term which must certainly be taken to cover, not merely the row of houses looking directly upon the river, but also the whole of the western part of Southwark lying behind and south of these. With somewhat greater minuteness, the parish of St. Mary Overies is specified in the lawsuit of Allen v. Burbadge, and the parish of St. Saviour’s in the Fortune contract. There is no inconsistency here. The two ancient parishes of St. Mary Magdalen and St. Margaret on the Hill were amalgamated under the name of St. Saviour’s at the Reformation. I do not know that the ancient boundaries are upon record. The Rose stood in what had been St. Margaret’s, and one would therefore expect to find the Globe nearer than the Rose to the old priory church of St. Mary’s. In the Privy Council order of 1604 the situation is described as ‘in Maiden lane’, and in the return to the Earl Marshal of 1637 as ‘nere Maide lane’. But, apart from the difference between ‘in’ and ‘nere’, Maiden Lane is a fairly long thoroughfare, and so far as these indications are concerned, the Globe may have been either to the north or the south of it. Local tradition, as elaborated by Southwark antiquaries, has been inclined to put it to the south, within the area occupied by what was formerly Thrale’s and is now Barclay and Perkins’s Anchor Brewery, of which Maiden Lane, now Park Street, forms the northern boundary. The main reason for this is the inclusion within the brewery of the course of a passage known as Globe Alley, which ran west from Deadman’s Place in a parallel line to Maiden Lane for about 360 feet and then turned northwards for another 100 feet until it debouched into the Lane. So far as measurements go, Globe Alley might be the venella of the 1599 lease. The name first appears in the St. Saviour’s token book for 1614, where it is applied to houses formerly described as Brand’s Rents, and from 1613 onwards as Sir John Bodley’s Rents. Land south of Maiden Lane certainly formed part of the Brend estate, and a plot of it conveyed by Sir Matthew Brend to one Hilary Memprise in 1626 was bounded on the south by a sewer dividing it from the Bishop of Winchester’s park, and on the north by ‘the alley or way leading to the Gloabe Play-house commonly called Gloabe Alley’. A century later, property acquired for the brewery in 1732 is similarly described as ‘fronting a certain alley or passage called Globe Alley, in antient times leading from Deadman’s Place to the Globe Play-house’.

It was certainly a belief in the Thrale family that the site of the theatre itself had passed into their hands. Mrs. Piozzi, Johnson’s friend, who married Henry Thrale in 1763, left the following autobiographical note of her residence in Southwark between that date and her husband’s death in 1781:

‘For a long time, then—or I thought it such—my fate was bound up with the old Globe Theatre, upon the Bankside, Southwark; the alley it had occupied having been purchased and thrown down by Mr Thrale to make an opening before the windows of our dwelling-house. When it lay desolate in a black heap of rubbish, my Mother, one day, in a joke, called it the Ruins of Palmyra; and after that they laid it down in a grass-plot. Palmyra was the name it went by, I suppose, among the clerks and servants of the brewhouse.... But there were really curious remains of the old Globe Play-house, which though hexagonal in form without, was round within.’

Dr. Martin seems to think that the lady’s recollection was confused and that the garden called Palmyra stood on the east of Deadman’s Place opposite to Globe Alley. But, according to Concanen and Morgan it was ‘on the opposite side of the street’ to the brewery. However this may be, there are other notices which show that, however complete the demolition of 1644, the theatre or part of it was still regarded by tradition as standing a hundred years later amongst the tenements by which it was replaced. In 1787 the brewery was purchased by Barclay and Perkins, and the conveyance recites amongst other property a plot of ground between Globe Alley and a common sewer, from which had been cleared in 1767 some ‘ruinous and decayed’ tenements formerly occupied in 1715 by John Knowles and others. This is probably the clearance referred to by Mrs. Piozzi. Under Acts of 1786 and 1812 Globe Alley was closed, and it is now covered over within the brewery precinct. Horwood’s map of 1799 shows the eastern end already obliterated. The western end is called Globe Walk, and to the north of it is Globe Court, perhaps representing the space cleared in 1767.

On the assumption that the theatre stood in Globe Alley, there has been divergence of opinion as to the precise part of the Alley in which it stood. Mr. Rendle fixed on a spot on the north side, about 80 or 100 feet from the Deadman’s Place end. To this he was guided, partly by a further local tradition, according to which the site was occupied successively by a meeting-house and a windmill, and partly by an argument derived from the entries in the St. Saviour’s token-book for 1621. Here, under the heading ‘Sir John Bodley’s Rentes’ are recorded in succession about ten names. Then comes a new heading, differently written, ‘Gloab Alley’, then two more names, then in the margin of the page the word ‘Gloabe’. This Mr. Rendle took to mean that the Globe was about twelve houses from the east end of the alley. If this is an indication of the site of the Globe at all, which is a mere conjecture, I should myself draw the inference that it stood, not twelve, but two houses from the end of the alley, and that a part, if not the whole, of Bodley’s Rents was outside the alley. And why should the enumerator be supposed to have worked from the east, rather than from the north end of the alley? Dr. Martin, in fact, turns Mr. Rendle’s argument round in this way, and uses the token-book to support a theory which places the theatre south of Globe Alley, just at the angle where it turns to the north, and 360 feet, instead of Mr. Rendle’s 80 or 100 feet, west of Deadman’s Place. Here it appears to be located in a borough history of 1795; and is certainly located in more than one early nineteenth-century plan. Dr. Martin has attempted to obtain confirmation of this siting from an investigation of the brewery title-deeds. From 1727 onwards the history of the angle site is clear. In that year it was transferred, subject to a mortgage, by Timothy Cason and his wife Elizabeth, heiress of the Brend estate, to certain parishioners of St. Saviour’s. Upon it was built the parish workhouse referred to by Concanen and Morgan. This stood just at the outer south-west angle of Globe Alley, which Dr. Martin conceives to have been occupied by the theatre. In 1774 a new workhouse was built, and the site of the old one bought by the Thrales. It was conveyed with the rest of the brewery to Barclay and Perkins in 1787, and was then described as the ground ‘on which lately stood all that great shop or workhouse formerly used for a meeting-house’. Dr. Martin thinks that this forgotten meeting-house may have been confused in local tradition with that further to the east along Globe Alley. Dr. Martin suggests that the property transferred by the Casons in 1727 is to be identified with that described in a deed executed by the same persons in 1706, of which a copy is also to be found amongst the brewery title-deeds, as consisting of tenements built ‘where the late play-house called the Globe stood and upon the ground thereunto belonging’. If this were so, he would of course have proved his point. The deed of 1706 seems to have been a family settlement covering various fragments of Brend property in Southwark, which had only just been brought together in the hands of Elizabeth Cason. The Globe site had been settled by Sir Matthew Brend in 1624 upon his wife Frances as a jointure. She died in 1673, and it then passed as a jointure to Judith, wife of Sir Matthew’s son Thomas and mother of Elizabeth, under a deed of 1655 in which the reference to ‘the late play-house called the Globe’, repeated in that of 1706, first occurs. Judith Brend had died in 1706.

As a matter of fact, it is almost impossible to reconcile the Southwark tradition that the Globe stood on the south of Maiden Lane, either in Mr. Rendle’s or in Dr. Martin’s interpretation of it, with more than one bit of evidence which we owe to the research of Professor Wallace. The first of these is the lease of 1599 itself, as recited in the pleadings of Ostler v. Heminges. This states quite clearly that the leased plot abutted on a piece of land called the Park ‘super boream’ and on Maiden Lane ‘versus austrum’, and it is difficult to take very seriously either the Latinity which makes ‘versus austrum’ mean that the leased plot was on the south, or the suggestion that the draughtsman was working carelessly from a plan which had the south instead of the north of the plot at the top of the sheet, and got the points of his compass wrong. I daresay that such things do sometimes happen in conveyancer’s offices, but it is hardly legitimate to call them in aid as a canon of interpretation. No doubt it is tempting to identify the piece of land called the Park with the Bishop of Winchester’s park, which lay at a reasonable distance to the south and not to the north of Maiden Lane, but after all this must once have extended nearly up to the Bankside, since Maiden Lane itself is known to have been cut out of it, and it is not at all improbable that some little strip of land retained the name. It can only have been a very little one. The lease describes the Globe site as consisting of two plots lying apparently on opposite sides of a way or alley (venella) by which access was obtainable to them. One of these, that next the Park, had been the gardens of Thomas Burt, Isbrand Morris, and Lactantius Roper. It was 220 feet in length and lay between the garden of John Knowles on the east and John Cornish on the west. The southern plot, bounded by Maiden Lane on the south, had similarly been the gardens of John Roberts and Thomas Ditcher. This was only 156 feet long and 100 feet deep, and lay between the gardens of William Sellers to the east and John Burgram to the west. Now the whole space between Maiden Lane and the Thames is only from 200 to 350 feet at various points, so that there could not have been room for much of a ‘park’ between the Globe site and the Bankside houses.

The evidence of the lease is confirmed in various ways by the records of presentments made by the Commissioners of Sewers for Kent and Surrey against negligent occupiers in this marshy neighbourhood. The most important entry is one of 14 February 1606:

‘It is ordered that Burbidge and Heminges and others, the owners of the Play-house called the Globe in Maid-Lane shall before the xxth day of Aprill next pull vp and take cleane out of the Sewar the props or postes which stand vnder their bridge on the north side of Mayd-lane vpon paine to forfeit xxs.’

This is endorsed ‘done’, but another order of the same day requiring the same men to ‘well and sufficientlye pyle boorde and fill vp viij poles more or lesse of theire wharfe against theire said Play-house’ needed a repetition on 25 April before it received attention. Earlier records, before the Globe came into existence, relate to some of the garden-holders named in the lease. A plot of John Bingham or Burgram abutted on a Maiden Lane sewer in 1596, and this is probably identical with the ‘common sewer leading from Sellors gardin to the beare garden’, which William Sellers and others were ordered to cleanse on 5 December 1595. Certainly the bear garden was to the north and not the south of Maiden Lane. There was also a sewer bordering upon the park, and on this Jasper Morris and Thomas Burt had encroached in 1593.

The old maps, as usual, do not give much help when it comes to a pinch, although the balance of their authority, for what it is worth, seems to me to be in favour of a northern site. Mr. Hubbard, calculating from Visscher’s map, would put the Globe on the site of the present Central Wharf, 15 feet south of the Bankside houses and 136 feet west of Bank End, and therefore not very near Maiden Lane at all. I do not think that he sufficiently recognizes the imperfections of the maps from a surveyor’s point of view. I doubt whether more is to be got out of them than that the Globe stood more to the east and probably more to the south than either the Hope or the Rose.

The foregoing paragraphs show the state of the controversy when the body of this chapter was written. Since then Mr. Braines has taken up the investigation where it was left by Dr. Martin, with the help of the brewery title-deeds and many other documents bearing on the distribution of tenements in Maiden Lane and Globe Alley over more than a century. It now seems clear that, in view of the known history of properties north of Maiden Lane, there is no room for the Globe plot there, that this plot did pass from the Casons to the workhouse and ultimately the brewery, and that it did lie at Dr. Martin’s angle site, being indeed precisely located on the map by Concanen and Morgan’s description of 1795. We must therefore assume that the points of the compass were, as Dr. Martin conjectured, inverted in the lease of 1599, east with west and north with south, and that the Globe company maintained a bridge over the sewer on the opposite side of Maiden Lane to the theatre, for the convenience of visitors coming down Horseshoe Alley from the river. The venella of 1599 must have been a westward extension of Globe Alley, afterwards disused.

Some notion of the structural character of the Globe may be gleaned from the builder’s contract for the Fortune in 1600. The Globe was then the last new thing in theatres, and in entering into his agreement for the Fortune with Peter Street, the builder of both houses, Henslowe was careful to specify that the Globe should be taken as the model, alike as regards the arrangement of the galleries and staircases, the contrivances and fashioning of the stage, and all other minor points not particularly indicated. The only alterations of design set out in the agreement were that the scantlings or standard measurements of the timber should be rather stouter than those of the Globe, and that the main posts of the stage and auditorium should be shaped square and carved with figures of satyrs. It is probable, however, that a more important difference is passed without notice. The Fortune was rectangular; the Globe was almost certainly round. The reference to a circular house in Henry V and A Warning for Fair Women, both plays of about 1599, may indeed belong to the Curtain rather than the Globe, but there are similar references in E. M. O. (1599) and in The Merry Devil of Edmonton (1608), which are certainly Globe plays, and there seems no reason to doubt that the Globe is represented by the cylindrical buildings, windowless below, windowed and of narrower diameter above, which are shown in the maps of the Hondius group and in the background of Delaram’s portrait of James I. A few details are furnished by the various narratives of the fire of 1613. The roof was thatched, whence arose the accident. The walls were of timber, for nothing was burnt but wood and straw. The building was ‘flanked with a ditch, and forced out of a marish’. It had a stage-house ‘round as taylors clewe’, and carried a silken flag. There were two narrow doors, and hard by stood an alehouse. The new Globe built after the fire was tiled for greater safety. In other respects there was probably no great change. The building is described in 1634 as of timber, upon an old foundation. The maps, if they can be trusted, figure it as polygonal, rather than strictly round. No doubt it was round inside; an ‘amphytheator’, it is called in Holland’s Leaguer. The Sharers Papers of 1635 mention the tiring-house door, at which money was taken. James Wright tells us that it was a summer house, large and partly open to the weather, and that the acting was always by daylight. Malone conjectured that the name ‘Globe’ was taken from the sign, ‘which was a figure of Hercules supporting the Globe, under which was written Totus mundus agit histrionem’. I do not know where he got this information.