Next year, visitors will be able to stand three meters below the current level of Shoreditch in east London and admire a scene that William Shakespeare knew intimately. The Curtain Playhouse, one of the first purpose-built theaters in London, was its original “wooden O”, like the famous preface to Henry V—performed for the first time here – described it.
The Shakespeare Museum is set to open in the archaeological remains of the Curtain Playhouse in spring 2024. It will explain the significance of the site and display finds including a bird’s whistle possibly used for sound effects, pottery piggy banks – which had to be smashed to extract the day’s box office receipts, as well as fallen buttons, clay pipes, pins, coins and nutshells from theater snacks. Visitors will see the foundations of the stage and the gravelled courtyard where rambunctious soloists paid sixpence to stand.
The museum will open as part of the Stage, a new commercial development of apartments, offices and retail, and promises a projected recreation of the original theater and the “sights, smells and sounds” of Shakespeare’s London. Although aimed at a popular audience, the site is a scheduled ancient monument and the new attraction, designed by creative studio Bompas and Parr, is being developed in consultation with Historic England, the Museum of London Archeology (MOLA) and experts from the Shakespearean theatre.
The Curtain Playhouse excavation site Image: Courtesy of the Museum of Archeology, London
The approximate location of the Curtain Playhouse was known, but the exact site has been lost in the four centuries since its closure in the 1620s. street marking best estimate has proven to be remarkably accurate. The Tudor entrance was through a tavern, probably exactly where a scruffy Victorian pub was later built. The courtyard of the pub and the gardens to the rear of the surrounding cottages and workshops had kept the site in open ground, with the stage, courtyard and brick foundations of the tiered timber seating remarkably well preserved.
The Curtain, built in 1577, was only a few hundred yards from another theater further along Curtain Road, imaginatively named the Theatre, whose foundations were uncovered in 2008, also by MOLA.
When Shakespeare’s theater manager James Burbage fell out with the theatre’s owner, according to stage darling legend, the company dismantled the building under cover of darkness and shipped the timbers across the Thames to rise again as the much more famous Globe. Until the new theater was ready in Southwark, for at least two years from 1597, the company leased the Curtain, where Henry V and, it is believed, Romeo and Juliet were staged for the first time.
The famous image of a theater in the “O of wood” comes from the prologue of Henry V: “Can this Cock-Pit contain in this Woodden O, the same Caskes which frightened the Ayre at Agincourt?” The theater and globe were indeed wooden bones, but part of the excitement for theater historians over the curtain was the revelation that it was actually a rectangular building with a long, narrow stage, the earliest known example in London.
