Earlier this year, the UK Government announced a £1.57 billion investment package to protect the nation’s world renowned cultural, arts and heritage institutions, which was officially launched on our Globe Theatre stage on Monday 6 July.

We at Shakespeare’s Globe are hugely grateful and relieved to receive the maximum grant available, a lifeline from the Culture Recovery Fund. We are pleased to have worked closely with DCMS, and our industry colleagues, to ensure that the urgent financial help could be accessed by publicly unfunded organisations like ours.

When we return, our audiences will yet again experience Shakespeare’s poetry in our wooden ‘O’, an emblem of survival spanning 400 years; a plague, and now a pandemic – a reminder that we will come through this time and be together once again.

The Government is backing the arts to ensure that when we come out of these dark months, the country’s internationally renowned cultural strength can rebuild itself and boost national morale significantly contributing, once again, to the UK’s economy.

This fund was created to support organisations that were financially stable before Covid-19, and due to the grant the Globe is now able to produce and plan more confidently for our future, returning to employing a multitude of talented freelancers and artists, the true makers of theatre, who bring Shakespeare’s stories to life.

— Neil Constable, CEO Shakespeare’s Globe and Michelle Terry, Artistic Director