Shakespeare

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?” ⁴ At 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.”⁶ In 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,”⁷ who 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.”⁸ Yet 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.”⁹ Marlowe and Shakespeare were on the same ground as the fencers and bear-baiters. They had to match them.