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 3d, 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,”10 and 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.
There was at least one older playhouse south of the river, on the road leading from Southwark High Street and crossing St. George’s Fields. It was erected in 1575 or 1576 and is known to historians only as the playhouse at Newington Butts, after the locality in which it was built. It does not seem to have been as great a success as the Theatre and the Curtain in the north. Nevertheless this southern playhouse was the home of the Earl of Warwick’s Men for four years from 1576, after which it was leased to the Earl of Oxford’s Men.
Even as Shakespeare made his way through London, a new theatre called the Rose was being erected on the south bank of the river by Paris Garden. It seemed to be a harbinger of popular and successful times for plays and players. The Rose itself was being financed and managed by one of a new breed of theatrical entrepreneurs. Philip Henslowe plays a large role in Elizabethan cultural history, in part because of the survival of his “diaries” or registers of payment. In true sixteenth-century fashion the dry account of receipts and payments is interrupted by notations on magical spells and astrological matters. He was a merchant and commercial speculator, only thirty-two at the time of the building of the Rose. It might seem that the Elizabethan theatre was a young man’s game and opportunity, especially when the average age of mortality was forty. Henslowe owned much property in Southwark already, having married a wealthy widow of that neighbourhood, and earned his living from starch-making and money-lending as well as the theatre. But he was another of those businessmen who sensed the direction of their time; he became involved in the building and leasing of three other theatres. It was the “growth industry” of the period that also became a highly profitable one.
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.