Shakespeare

The growth of the city, and the increasing appetite for urban entertainment, presented Brayne and Burbage with an opportunity. The Red Lion sounds like an inn but it was in fact a permanent playhouse, attached to an old farmhouse. Its stage was 40 feet wide and 30 feet deep; there was a trap-door for special effects, and an 18-foot “turret of Tymber” was built above the stage for scenic ascents and descents. The coherence of its design suggests that it was based upon previous models, and was therefore not the first of its kind. It is sometimes suggested that the drama before Shakespeare’s arrival was coarse and rudimentary, complete with wooden daggers and bladders of ox blood. But that is not necessarily so. Of course there must have been much trash, as there has always been – trashy plays were known colloquially as “Balductum” plays – but it would be unwise to underestimate the skill and subtlety of early writers and performers. There is no progress or evolution in theatrical matters – the nineteenth-century theatre is signally worse than the sixteenth-century theatre – and plays now lost were no doubt excellent of their kind.

The Red Lion was followed by a joint venture between John Brayne and James Burbage. They picked another spot outside the city walls, in Shore-ditch, and there in 1576 erected a public building known as the Theatre. They deliberately chose the name from the Latin “theatrum,” and may have hoped that the classical connotation would augment the status of their enterprise; they could not have anticipated that the word would take on generic status. It was a large building, with capacity for some fifteen hundred people seated in three levels of galleries around an open yard; the yard was also used by members of the audience, and the stage was set against one side. This fixed stage had a roof, supported by pillars, and a “tiring-house” at the back that was used for exits, entrances and changes of costume. It resembled the general shape of all future public theatres of the period, in other words. It became the formal setting for Shakespeare’s own plays. Its coherent design again suggests, however, that it was based upon lost originals. It was polygonal in structure, plastered black and white, with a tiled roof. There was a principal entrance, but two external staircases led to the different levels.

It was located in the ancient land of Halliwell or Holy Well, so named from a holy well harboured within a Benedictine nunnery in the vicinity. The name of Holywell Street survives to this day. It marks an interesting association, since other theatrical sites have sprung up beside holy wells. The first miracle plays in London were performed at Clerkenwell beside the clerks’ well, for example, and the Sadlers Wells theatre was erected beside a healing well of the same name. The association has never been properly examined, but it suggests that the theatre was still in a subliminal sense seen as a sacred or ritual activity.

The Theatre itself was erected on the site of the convent, just west of its old cloister. It was close to a horse pond and a great barn. Bordered on its southern and western sides by the Finsbury fields and open ground, it had Shoreditch High Street to the east and private gardens to the north. A ditch and a wall separated it from the fields, and a breach was made into the wall to allow the citizens to walk or ride up to the playhouse. Two years after the establishment of the Theatre a preacher asked: “Will not a fylthye playe with the blast of a trumpette [sooner] call thither a thousande … so full as possible they can thronge?” 4At the blast of a trumpet, then, the people gathered. It is depicted as if it were a relatively new phenomenon, the urban crowd out in force to seek entertainment. In Tarlton’s News out of Purgatory , Richard Tarlton narrated how “I would needs to the Theatre to a play, where when I came, I founde such concourse of unrulye people, that I thought it better solitary to walk in the fields, then to intermeddle myselfe amongst such a presse.” He fell asleep close by, in Hoxton, and when he awoke “I saw such a concourse of people through the fields that I knew the play was doon.” 5

Where there were crowds, there were also riots and affrays. Four years after the construction of the Theatre, Brayne and Burbage were indicted for causing “tumults leading to a breach of the peace” as a result of showing “playes or interludes.” 6In 1584 there was a serious riot involving gentlemen and apprentices. The official documents of the period constantly refer to “the baser sorte of people,” “the refuse sorte of evill disposed and ungodly people,” “maisterles men and vagabond persons,” 7who haunted the vicinity of the Theatre.

And what were the entertainments on display there? There were “playes, beare-bayting, fencers and prophane spectacles.” Among the “playes” were The Blacksmith’s Daughter, Catiline’s Conspiracy, The History of Caesar and Pompey , and The Play of Plays . It was the occasion for spectacle and melodrama as well as stage fighting and bawdry. Mention is made of “a baudie song of a maide of Kent and a litle beastly speech of the new stawled roge.” 8Yet this was also the setting for some of Shakespeare’s earliest plays. There is an allusion to “the visard of the ghost which cries so miserably at the Theator, like an oister-wife, Hamlet, revenge!” The playwright, Barnaby Rich, wrote of “one of my divells in Dr. Faustus, when the olde Theatre crackt and frighted the audience.” 9Marlowe and Shakespeare were on the same ground as the fencers and bear-baiters. They had to match them.

It was a commercial venture by Brayne and Burbage, and was so successful that only the year after it opened another Londoner, Henry Laneham, built a new playhouse a few hundred yards away. This was named the Curtain – not after any theatrical curtain, which did not exist in the period, but after a wall on its ground that offered some relief from wind and bad weather. It was built on the same plan as the Theatre, with three tiers of galleries surrounding an open yard and raised scaffold as stage. A foreign visitor noted that it cost a penny to stand in the yard, and a further penny to sit in the gallery. It cost 3 d , however, for the most comfortable seats with cushions. There is an engraving of the period, “View of London from the North,” showing both theatres with flags flying from their roofs; there are fields to the south of them but, to the east, are closely congregated thatched dwellings and barns. These were the suburbs of Shoreditch, where Shakespeare would dwell.

The Curtain and the Theatre soon ceased to compete with one another, and came to a profit-sharing arrangement whereby the Curtain became an “easer” or second home for the theatrical companies. With the presence of two playhouses Shoreditch enjoyed a novel reputation as a place of resort and entertainment, on a larger and more garish scale than any other part of London. It was a centre for passing trade of every description – for sales of food and beer, for trinkets and playbills – and the site of taverns and of brothels. It became a fairground and a market, quite unlike anything else, and was no doubt deeply unpopular with the older residents of the area.

The playhouses themselves were decorated and gilded; the wooden pillars upon the stage were painted so that they resembled gold and marble, while all the accoutrements were designed to be as gaudy and as elaborate as possible. There were painted walls, carvings and plaster modellings. If the Theatre itself was named after alleged classical predecessors, then it was important that it had the air of glamorous antiquity. When Thomas Nashe attempts to describe a Roman banqueting house in The Unfortunate Traveller , he says that “it was builte round of greene marble, like a Theatre without.” In that respect the sixteenth-century playhouses were close in spirit to late nineteenth-century music halls or to early twentieth-century picture palaces. A new communal art demanded new and enticing surroundings. These were the circumstances in which some of Shakespeare’s dramas were performed. Romeo and Juliet “won Curtain plaudities,” 10and when the Prologue in Henry Prefers to “this wooden O” he is alluding to the Curtain. It is often suggested that Shakespeare himself played the part of the Prologue, in Henry V , and so we can place him on the creaking boards of this theatre.