[3][4] Conveniently within the "entertainment ghetto" already established at Southwark,[5] it was being offered for rent by Thomas Brend, who was a neighbour to John Heminges and Henry Condell, actors with the Chamberlain's Men.

[18] With the onset of more favourable weather in the following spring, the material was ferried over the Thames to reconstruct it as The Globe on some marshy gardens to the south of Maiden Lane, Southwark.

While only a hundred yards from the congested shore of the Thames, the piece of land was situated close by an area of farmland and open fields.

[23] Dover Wilson, however, defers the opening date until September 1599, taking the "wooden O" reference to be disparaging and thus unlikely to be used in the Globe's inaugural staging.

He suggests that the account of Thomas Platter, a Swiss tourist, describing a performance of Julius Caesar witnessed on 21 September 1599, tells of the more likely first production.

[24] The first performance for which a firm record remains was Jonson's Every Man out of His Humour—with its first scene welcoming the "gracious and kind spectators"—at the end of the year.

[33][34] At the base of the stage and surrounding it on three sides, there was an area called the yard, the name deriving from the old inn-yards,[35][36] where, for a penny, people (the "groundlings") would stand on the rush-strewn earthen floor to watch the performance.

[44] It seems likely, however, that the link between the supposed motto from Petronius and the theatre was made only later, originating with the industrious early Shakespeare biographer William Oldys, who claimed as his source a loaned copy of the Harleian Manuscripts to which he once had access.

This was repeated in good faith by his literary executor George Steevens, but the tale is now thought "suspicious", with Oldys perpetrating a "hoax on his credulous public".

[45] The Shakespearean editor Edmond Malone took Oldys's conjecture further, by reporting that the motto was on the theatre's flag of a globe of the Earth on the shoulders of Hercules.

[46][47] Another allusion, familiar to the contemporary theatre-goer, would have been to Teatrum Mundi ("Theatre of the World"), a meditation by the twelfth-century philosopher John of Salisbury, in his Policraticus, book three.

[49] Shakespeare's complaint in Hamlet (act 2, scene 3) likening the child actors of the Blackfriars Theatre stealing the Globe's custom as "carrying off Hercules […] and his load too" alludes to the metaphor.

[51] G. B. Harrison, in his introduction to an edition of As You Like It (Penguin Books, 1953), perceives that Jaques is making reference to the Globe Theatre's motto in his "All the world's a stage" speech (act 2 scene 7).