On 28 December 1598, in the dead middle of the Christmas holidays, about a dozen men walked into a yard in Shoreditch with a master carpenter and began taking a building to pieces.
They worked fast. The landlord was away in the country, which was the point.
What they were dismantling was The Theatre, the first purpose-built playhouse England had put up since the Romans left, and the reason they were dismantling it at night in December was a dispute over a lease. What nobody in that yard could have known is that the argument they were settling with crowbars would remake the finances of the English stage, make one of the men involved permanently rich, and produce the conditions under which Hamlet got written.
A Building Worth Stealing
The Theatre went up in 1576 on the grounds of a dissolved priory at Holywell, just north of the City wall. That location was not an accident. The Lord Mayor and the Corporation of London loathed playhouses – they drew crowds, crowds spread plague, and apprentices who were watching plays were not working – so the men who built them built them a few hundred yards outside the boundary, where the Corporation’s writ stopped. The Curtain followed a year later, a short walk away. For the next two decades Shoreditch was the theatre district of London.
James Burbage, joiner turned actor turned impresario, had taken a twenty-one-year lease on the ground. He died in early 1597, weeks before it ran out. His landlord, Giles Allen, then took the reasonable view that the building standing on his land was now his building. Burbage’s sons took the view that their father’s lease had allowed him to remove what he had put up, and that the clause had not died with him.
They did not go to court about it. They went in December, with Peter Street, a carpenter good enough that he would shortly build both the Globe and the Fortune.
The timbers went to a yard by the river. Allen sued, at length and with feeling, and lost. There is a persistent story that the wood was hauled across a frozen Thames, and it is a good story, and no contemporary evidence supports it. What we know is that by the following summer the beams were standing on Bankside as the Globe.
The Men Who Owned the Playhouse
Here is the part that gets skipped, and it is the part that matters.
The Burbage brothers had the timber. They did not have the money to put up a building around it. So instead of finding a financier, they did something nobody in English theatre had done: they sold half the new playhouse to the actors.
Cuthbert and Richard Burbage kept fifty per cent between them. The other half went to five members of the company at ten per cent each. One of the five was William Shakespeare, who was thirty-four, and who until that moment had been a hired pen and a jobbing player – well paid by the standards of hired pens, and entirely dependent on other men’s buildings.
A share in the house was a different animal from a fee for a play. The householders took a cut of the gallery receipts, every afternoon the doors opened, whether the piece being performed was yours or somebody else’s or forty years old. It was income rather than payment. Within three years of the Globe opening, Shakespeare was buying a hundred and seven acres of arable land at Stratford for three hundred and twenty pounds, and three years after that a half-interest in the Stratford tithes for four hundred and forty. He died a landowner. The plays did not do that. The building did.
But the deeper consequence was structural, and it changed what the English theatre was capable of.
Across the river, Philip Henslowe ran the other model: the impresario owns the house, hires the company, advances the writers money against scripts and keeps them in debt to him. Under that arrangement a playwright is a supplier and an actor is staff. The Globe inverted it. The company owned its own premises, which meant it could keep a permanent troupe together year after year, hold a standing repertory rather than churning through new pieces to service a landlord, and plan on a horizon of decades.
And it meant the resident playwright knew exactly which voices he would be writing for next season, because he owned a tenth of the building they worked in and so did they.
Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Othello, Lear and Macbeth as a part-owner of the theatre they were staged in, for actors he was in business with. That is not a footnote to the achievement. It is a good part of the explanation for it. A landlord in Shoreditch tried to seize a wooden building over Christmas, and the accidental result was the first actor-owned playhouse in England and the working conditions that produced the best plays in the language.
The City They Were Selling Tickets In
To understand why a penny to stand in a Shoreditch yard was a viable business, you have to look at the year those men were working in, because 1598 and 1599 were not comfortable years in London.
The Queen was sixty-five. She had never named an heir and had made it a punishable matter to discuss the succession, which meant the entire political nation was privately doing nothing else. In August 1598 William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who had run the country for forty years, died, and his hunchbacked younger son Robert took the machinery of state in hand with a quiet competence that frightened people. Against him stood the Earl of Essex – thirty-two, handsome, charming, adored in the streets of London, and possessed of political judgement so poor that watching it now is like watching a man walk backwards off a roof.
In March 1599, Essex sailed for Ireland with the largest army England had sent anywhere in the reign, and by September he was back without permission, bursting into the Queen’s bedchamber at Nonsuch before she had her wig on. He had perhaps eighteen months left.
The war with Spain had outlived the Armada by eleven years and was still swallowing money. Drake had died of dysentery off the coast of Panama in January 1596 and been tipped over the side in a lead coffin. Raleigh, out of favour since marrying one of the Queen’s maids of honour without asking, had gone looking for a gold city up the Orinoco and come back with rumours. Christopher Marlowe had been dead five years – stabbed above the eye in a room in Deptford at twenty-nine, in a quarrel over a bill that nobody has ever satisfactorily explained – and his death had cleared the most gifted rival the man from Stratford would ever have, which is a thing literary history rarely says out loud.
Underneath all of it, the city was in trouble. Four consecutive harvests had failed between 1594 and 1597. Bread prices went up, wages did not, and the government passed a Poor Law in 1598 because the alternative was disorder. Plague rose and fell and closed the playhouses whenever it rose. And still London grew, perhaps two hundred thousand people by the turn of the century, pouring in from the countryside faster than anyone could house, feed or police them.
That was the market. A frightened, hungry, overcrowded capital with an ageing queen, no named successor, a war it could not win or end, and a penny to spare. The Burbages were not selling art to it. They were selling two hours out of it, in a wooden yard beyond the reach of the Lord Mayor, and the demand was enormous.
Forty Shillings for Richard II
On the afternoon of 7 February 1601, a group of Essex’s followers went to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and paid them forty shillings to revive an old play.
The play was Richard II, in which an English king is deposed by a nobleman with a grievance and a following. It had been on the shelf for years. The company took the money and performed it at the Globe, and the next morning Essex came out into the streets of London with two hundred armed men expecting the city to rise.
It did not. By evening he was under arrest. He was beheaded on 25 February, and on the night before the execution, the same company played at court in front of the same Queen.
They were questioned about the performance and talked their way out of it – they were players, they said, they had been offered money for an old piece and taken it. Nobody hanged. Elizabeth is reported to have remarked some months later, to an archivist showing her the records of the reign, that she was Richard II, and did he not know it.
Whether she said it or not, she had understood exactly what a playhouse was. So had the men who had carried one across London on a cart.
What Came Up Out of the Ground
For four centuries nobody knew precisely where The Theatre had stood. A bronze plaque went up on Curtain Road in the last century to mark the spot, and the spot was wrong.
In 2008, archaeologists from the Museum of London, working ahead of a development at New Inn Broadway, found the footings of a polygonal building. Angled walls, a gravel yard surface, the edge of the structure that Shakespeare had acted in before he owned anything. It became the first scheduled ancient monument in the borough of Hackney. Further work followed a decade later.
Then, in 2011, the Curtain turned up a few streets away under Hewett Street, and excavation through to 2016 produced the genuine surprise of the whole story.
It was rectangular.
Not a wooden O, not a ring, but a long hall of roughly thirty metres by twenty-two, apparently adapted out of existing buildings rather than raised from scratch. Which raises an awkward question about the prologue to Henry V, a play the Curtain very probably hosted, and its famous apology for a cockpit and a wooden O. Either the line was not describing the house it was spoken in, or it was never a description at all.
The small finds are better than the walls. Nutshells trodden into the yard, from people eating through a four-hour performance. Drinking vessels. A fragment of pottery with a bearded man in a ruff on it. Ceramic money boxes, which the gatherers held at the door and which had to be smashed open to get the takings out – the room they were broken open in was the box office, and the phrase has outlived the practice by four hundred years. And a small ceramic bird whistle, which may well have made the lark and the nightingale that Juliet and Romeo argue about at dawn.
Going to Look at It
The honest position is that you cannot see very much, and that this is absurd.
The remains of the Curtain sit three metres below a development called The Stage, off Hewett Street, waiting inside a purpose-built museum with a glass floor over the playhouse and a bird-shaped cut-out in its north wall, put there for the whistle. The Museum of Shakespeare was announced for spring 2024. Then 2025. Then it was postponed without a date, and then promised for 2026. At the time of writing it has still not opened.
The Theatre’s own foundations lie under New Inn Broadway, a few minutes north-west, with nothing much to see but the street itself. Walk up Curtain Road and find the plaque that marks the wrong place. Then go to St Leonard’s Shoreditch, where the parish buried its players – Richard Burbage among them, the first Hamlet, the first Lear, the first Othello, in the ground of the district that made him.
Bankside has a reconstruction of the Globe, built four hundred yards from where the real one stood, and a million people a year go to it. Shoreditch has the actual timber-holes of both playhouses that came before it, under an office development, behind a hoarding, in the dark, unopened.
The Burbages would have found this funny. They knew what happened to buildings when the lease ran out.
