We wondered whether to reshoot or abandon this section of our film. Shakespeare scholars and theatre historians immediately began to speculate that the initial chorus of Henry V – which makes reference to a “wooden O” – must have been added or amended for a later performance at the Globe Theatre rather than being spoken at the Curtain. A few weeks after we completed that sequence, Museum of London Archaeology announced their discovery that the Curtain Theatre was probably rectangular rather than (as most people had assumed) round. We also restaged the famous oration at the beginning of Henry V just outside the site where it was first performed. We presented Shakespeare’s career in Shoreditch alongside his Shoreditch contemporaries: Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, Ben Jonson, the actor Gabriel Spenser, the recusant nobleman Thomas Tresham, and the spy Robert Poley. We visited the crypt underneath St Leonard’s Church which contains the bones of many of Shakespeare’s first actors. We tried unsuccessfully to interview a representative of Galliard Homes. We interviewed Peter Tatchell and Owen Jones about the effects of today’s gentrification. We interviewed academics, the archaeologists responsible for The Theatre and Curtain excavations, and a group of very entertaining drunk people outside a pub. In 1596 The Theatre reached the end of its lease, and its (putative) landlord’s demands for more rent (as well as a complicated dispute about ownership) meant the venue was dismantled in the winter of 1598.Īssisted by funding and filmmakers from London Film School, I made a thirty-minute documentary titled ‘Shoreditch: Shakespeare’s Hidden London’. All of these venues combined to make Shoreditch an increasingly lucrative place for landlords and landowners. Tap-houses sprung up to provide refreshment to audiences, and the owner of The Theatre was repeatedly fined for running an illegal “tippling-house” nearby. It was at this second theatre – The Curtain – that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men staged plays such as Romeo and Juliet and Henry V. Yet it was such a success on opening that, one year later, another theatre was erected two hundred yards away. It would have taken supreme confidence to imagine that it might survive for a year, especially when its prototype (The Red Lion playhouse in Whitechapel) seems to have lasted little more than six months. Indeed most London residents would have bet upon the Theatre being a pop-up disappointment. The Theatre was a risky venture: it was expensive, without much recent precedent, and plagued by contractual loopholes and circumscriptions. It helped cement Shoreditch’s reputation as an entertainment district – a place to have sex (in one of its many brothels), or a drink (in one of its many taverns), or a stroll (in one of its many green spaces). This was perhaps the first freestanding purpose-built public theatre in England. In 1580 Shoreditch couldn’t offer many brioche buns, but it was home to one of the most important pop-ups of all time: The Theatre.
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