Shakespeare

The Rose itself was situated on Bankside in Southwark, close to the High Street and in the parish of St. Saviour’s. It was smaller than its predecessors, in large part because of the premium on building land. Its walls were of lath and plaster, its galleries roofed with thatch. It was situated beside two houses for the baiting of bulls and bears, suggesting that it harboured a distinct but associated activity. The discovery of a bear skull and other bones, in recent excavations, does suggest that it also reverted to type. The actors performed among the very reek of animals. The theatre itself was built upon the site of a former brothel, “rose” being the slang name for a prostitute as well as an heraldic emblem, and there were many houses of assignation in the vicinity. Philip Henslowe owned some of them.

In his contract for the theatre there was a clause concerning the repair of bridges and wharves that were part of the property, suggesting the marshy and riverine nature of the area. The excavations have revealed that the Rose was a fourteen-sided polygon, which was the closest approximation to a circle then possible. The advantages of a “wooden O” had become obvious from the success of the Curtain. The archaeologists have come to the provisional conclusion that the theatre was in fact built without a stage, suggesting that Henslowe conceived a multitude of purposes for the space. But then in the course of the first year a stage was added. It stretched out into the yard, and was so located that it received the full light of the afternoon sun; the yard itself was “raked” or sloped downwards, presumably to allow a better angle of vision for the audience congregated there. When the site was investigated in 1989 it revealed, among other items, “orange pips, Tudor shoes, a human skull, a bear skull, the sternum of a turtle, sixteenth-century inn tokens, clay pipes, a spur, a sword scabbard and hilt, money boxes, quantities of animal bones, pins, shoes and old clothing.”¹¹ So the life of the period is retrieved.

It has been calculated that in its original form the Rose held some nineteen hundred people and, after a remodelling of its interior five years later, some 2,400 customers. But the diameter of the theatre measured only 72 feet, roughly the size of London’s smallest contemporary theatres. The diameter of the inner yard itself was some 46 feet. When it is recalled that one of London’s largest theatres, the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, has a maximum capacity of less than nine hundred, the sheer accumulation of people in the Rose is little short of astonishing. It was jammed at least three times as full as any modern place of entertainment. It smelled of rank human odours, of bad breath and of sweat, of cheap food, of drink. The theatres were open to the air in part to expel this miasma of noisome savours. That is perhaps why Hamlet, when meditating upon the stage scenery of the world with its “majestical roof fretted with golden fire,” then alludes suddenly to “a foule and pestilent congregation of vapoures” (1233-4). This was the atmosphere in which the young Shakespeare acted and in which the plays of Marlowe were performed.

These theatres, north and south of the river, north and east of the city walls, varied in size and in construction. It has long been debated whether they were built upon classical principles, or whether they were modelled upon the more impromptu art of the street theatre. Theatrical historians have reached some consensus, however, that these buildings represented the first public theatres in London. But there is reason to doubt that claim. There were certainly public theatres in Roman London, and it seems likely that there were popular venues in the period after the re-emergence of London in the ninth century. In the early twelfth century William Fitzstephen, the first historian of London, noted the prevalence of dramatised saints’ lives in public places. There are also references to “spectaculis theatralibus” and “ludis scenicis.”¹² In 1352 Bishop Grandisson of Exeter referred to “quondam ludum noxium,” a certain unpleasant entertainment, “in theatro nostrae civitatis” in the theatre of our city.¹³ This plainly suggests that there was a building in Exeter which was popularly known as a “theatrum.” If there was one in a provincial city, it seems likely that there was also one and perhaps more in London itself. All the evidence suggests that there was much more secular dramatic activity than is generally recognised, and that certain places in the city were designated as playing areas. Why not, for example, the old amphitheatre that has recently been discovered by the Guildhall? There was also an amphitheatre at Southwark at a very early date.