London -- A soft, wet breeze blows in from the Thames River as the master thatcher lays the Norfolk reed for the first thatched roof built in London for three centuries.
"Just thatching a roof, basically. They're all the same," says Jason Morley, 27, although he allows that "this one is kind of prestigious."
Indeed it is. It will be atop a re-creation of 17th-century London's famed Globe Theater, known around the world as the place where William Shakespeare's "Hamlet," "King Lear," "Othello" and "Macbeth" had their first public performances.
The reconstruction was the dream, and perhaps the obsession, of the expatriate American actor Sam Wanamaker. He died last December as the new Globe was taking shape. "When he arrived here in 1949, Sam came rushing down expecting to see the Globe," says Marina Blodget, Mr. Wanamaker's longtime friend and personal assistant. "And all he saw was that unfortunate black plaque."
A brewery had been built on the site of Shakespeare's Globe, and the only memorial was a small, sooty marker. The 17th-century entertainment strip with a half-dozen theaters, bear- and bull-baiting rings and the requisite houses of ill-repute had become a 19th- and 20th-century factory district.
Mr. Wanamaker decided then and there the Globe should be rebuilt. The new Globe rises about a hundred yards from where Shakespeare's plays were performed and where he acted, perhaps no more than adequately.
The thatched roof is emblematic of the devotion to faithful and accurate reproduction of Shakespeare's theater that the new Globe represents.
It will be the first such roof built in London since 1666, when the Great Fire almost destroyed the city, roaring through wooden buildings and across thatched roofs. Such roofs have been banned ever since.
This new one's being built under the close scrutiny of the Fire Brigade. It has been treated with fire retardant, it is being laid over a foil-faced fire board, and a sprinkler system has been installed.
aflead,.100l Shakespeare was a member and shareholder in the acting company that built the first Globe, in 1599. The timbers came from the first public theater in London, called simply The Theater, built in 1576, when Shakespeare was 12.
That theater, on the Southside of the Thames, burned down in 1613 when a spark from a stage cannon fired during a performance of "Henry VIII" landed on the thatched roof. Globe tradition holds the only casualty was a gentleman whose smoldering breeches had to be doused with a pint of beer.
After the first Globe burned down, a second was built -- some think on the same foundations. The Puritans tore down that one in 1644 and put up tenements.
Mr. Wanamaker got his first acting job at a replica of the Globe erected by the British government at the 1937 Great Lakes Festival in Cleveland. He performed in a repertoire of Shakespeare's plays that changed every hour.
During a long career of acting and directing, he played everybody from Macbeth to Sigmund Freud. He directed his own theater company in Liverpool and opera in Covent Garden.
"I think he was best known for his Iago against Paul Robeson's Othello in Stratford, in the late '50s," Mrs. Blodget says. "He loved Paul Robeson.
"He was very convincing," she says, "especially when there was fire and he could get his teeth in the role. He was good at conflict and argument."
He was also extremely tenacious when he decided a new Globe had to be built. He devoted the last 20 years of his life to the reconstruction of the first Globe.
"He loathed the word 'replica,' " says Mike Abbott, the spokesman for the International Shakespeare Globe Centre. "He felt replica smacked of a theme park."
He wanted a living theater. But he also wanted it authentic. The Globe is being built with fine English oak -- treated against fire, of course -- fitted together with 17th-century mortise and tenon carpentry. Some of the joints look like three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles.
The builders follow faithfully the Globe's layout of 20 sections of three tiers of seats each, constructed around the open-air "yard," 80 feet across -- a kind of Shakespearean era general admission section for standees. The tiers face a 40-foot stage with a backdrop that will look like the facade of an Elizabethan house when it's finished.