Gallery

Shakespeare's Globe (1599)

ProMax

This is the visual world of an Elizabethan playhouse the season the Globe opened on Bankside — a broadsheet playbill nailed to a post, black ink hand-pressed onto rag paper inside a ring of oak timber and lime plaster. The whole system is built from letterpress, not decoration: a centred stack of display lines shouting top to bottom, blackletter drop-initials, printer's flowers between the blocks, one oxblood rule struck across the top like a woodblock proof pulled slightly off-register. Type is period-correct Fell old-style, small caps doing the work headlines do today. Timber brown and plaster off-white ground the black; nothing is smooth — everything reads pressed-and-inked. It cries the play from the post: one sheet of paper doing the work of a barker's whole lungful.

Learn more about the Shakespeare's Globe (1599) style

  • OriginEngland — Bankside, Southwark and the London print shops around St Paul's
  • Period1576–1642 (Globe raised 1599; First Folio printed 1623)
  • DesignerWilliam Shakespeare · Richard Burbage · Isaac Jaggard · John Heminges · Henry Condell
  • MovementsEnglish Renaissance theatre · Lord Chamberlain's / King's Men · Early English letterpress and the woodcut playbill

Web examples

3

Slide examples

3