Shakespeare in Shoreditch

‘Lively and engaging, Ben Blyth’s Shakespeare in Shoreditch [. . .] will be essential reading for anyone interested in understanding more about Shakespeare’s work in the 1590s and the late Elizabethan theatre scene.’ Siobhan Keenan, University de Montfort, UK.

‘Blyth eloquently combines historical and literary analysis with practice-based research to challenge established narratives around Shakespeare’s playhouses and dramaturgies.’ Ollie Jones, University of York, UK.

Made possible by a remarkable body of new archaeological evidence, this book offers the first sustained account of Shakespeare’s dramatic practice at the Curtain playhouse in Shoreditch.

While Stratford-upon-Avon has its Royal Shakespeare Theatre and Southwark its reconstructed Globe, Shoreditch’s connection with Shakespeare remains a distant third in both scholarly discourse and public imagination. Yet it was here, during the late 1590s, that Shakespeare and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men staged some of their most popular, inventive and enduring works. Building on the Museum of London’s 2016 excavation of the Curtain (which revealed a vast rectangular playhouse converted from tenements, with an unusually wide and shallow stage), this book brings together theatre history, textual studies, playhouse archaeology and practice-as-research to recover a distinctive, site-responsive Shakespeare in Shoreditch.

Focusing on the turbulent two years the company spent at the Curtain between 1597 and 1599, the book traces a range of distinctive features from stage combat to sexual commerce, dancing to drinking and jigging to playgoing ‘at liberty’, which shaped how Shakespeare’s plays operated in
performance on the Curtain’s unusual stage. The result was a spectacular and resourceful, immediate and interactive mode of playmaking: a new style of Shakespeare unlike any other stage of his career or at any other playhouse.