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The design of the Globe Theatre was largely copied from its predecessor the Theatre. The Theatre was the first building designed for the presentation of plays. Before this temporary platform stages were erected in inn yards and town squares, in schools and colleges, and in private houses, and were used by small groups of travelling players to perform their plays.
James Burbage's Theatre marked the beginning of professional theatre in England and provided a model on which every theatre built in London during the next 50 years would be based. The Theatre incorporated the best features of the impromptu inn-yard theatres including the paved open-air courtyard, the platform stage jutting into the yard and the balcony above it, the tiring-rooms behind the stage, and the tiers of galleries.
Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries these things were gradually adapted to serve different needs, and can all be witnessed in the architecture of the Globe.
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