Curtain Theatre

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Curtain Theatre takes its name not from any stage drapery but from a stretch of monastic wall. The land it stood on was called Curtain Close, and that plot owed its name to the curtain wall of Holywell Priory nearby. A curtain wall is the section of masonry running between two bastions. That small etymology captures something about the Curtain itself: almost everything assumed about it turned out to be wrong. For centuries after it went dark, scholars did not even know precisely where it had stood. What kind of playhouse stages Romeo and Juliet to audiences who respond so loudly that a rival playwright immortalizes their noise in print? And how does a theatre that survived plague, the Privy Council, and decades of controversy simply disappear from the historical record after 1627?

• 2. The Easer Arrangement

  ›

  Henry Lanman, described in period records as a "gentleman," built the Curtain in 1577. It stood just 200 yards south of The Theatre, which had opened in 1576. In 1585, Lanman struck a formal agreement with James Burbage, proprietor of The Theatre. Under this deal, the Curtain would serve as a supplementary house, an "easer," for the older playhouse. The two proprietors would pool their profits for seven years. In Shakespeare studies: An annual gathering of Research, Criticism and Reviews, J. Leeds Barroll argued this pooling arrangement implied both theatres were doing similar business. Burbage would have had little reason to share profits if his own venue were clearly outperforming Lanman's.

  Lanman ran the Curtain as a private concern for the early part of its life. Before his death in 1606, Edmund Chambers concluded, the theatre had been reorganized as a shareholder enterprise. Thomas Pope, one of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, left his share in the Curtain to his heirs in his will in 1603. Some historians concluded from these shareholder connections that the reorganization took place while the Lord Chamberlain's Men were acting there. Their arrival in 1597 had come not by choice but because their former home, The Theatre, had closed the year before.

• 3. Curtain Plaudities

  ›

  John Marston's 1598 satire Scourge of Villainy preserves the moment in two words: "Curtain plaudities." The Lord Chamberlain's Men were performing Romeo and Juliet at the Curtain, and the audience's approval was loud enough to catch a rival playwright's attention. Henry IV Part I and Part II were performed there during the same period.

  In 1598, Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humour was staged at the Curtain, with Shakespeare himself in the cast. Jonson that year proved capable of drama offstage as well. Later in 1598, he killed the actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel fought in nearby Hoxton Fields. The Lord Chamberlain's Men departed in 1599, once the Globe Theatre was ready for use. Even before their departure, the Curtain had faced organized opposition. In 1597, local residents had written to the magistrates' court demanding that no plays take place there that year.

• 4. Plague and Politics

  ›

  London's theatres, including the Curtain, were shut from September 1592 to April 1594. Bubonic plague had made public gatherings dangerous, and the closure lasted the better part of two years. In 1600, the Privy Council tried to close the Curtain permanently and failed. John Stow had named the Curtain in his Survey of London in 1598, but it did not appear in the 1603 edition.

  In 1603, the Curtain became the home of Queen Anne's Men, a company formerly known as Worcester's Men. They had most recently been at the Rose Theatre, where they performed Heywood's A Woman Kill'd With Kindness in February of that year. In 1607, The Travels of the Three English Brothers, by Rowley, Day, and Wilkins, was staged at the Curtain. The theatre continued in use until at least 1624, and no record of it survives after 1627. Its ultimate fate remains unknown. Beneath Hewett Street, however, the ground held physical answers that no surviving document had preserved.

• 5. What the Soil Revealed

  ›

  In 2012, archaeologists from MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) announced the discovery of the Curtain's remains during trial excavations in Hewett Street. The most significant revelation was the theatre's shape. By May 2016, excavators had confirmed that the Curtain was a rectangle measuring roughly 22 by 25 metres, not the round or polygonal structure scholars had expected. Walls had survived up to 1.5 metres high in places. The courtyard where less wealthy theatregoers stood was made of compacted gravel. Timber galleries with mid and upper areas provided seating for those willing to pay more, and the galleries were straight rather than curved.

  A fragmentary ceramic bird whistle, dated to the late 16th century, was among the objects recovered from the site. Archaeologists debated whether it had been a child's toy or a prop for plays requiring sound effects. In November 2016, a tunnel was unearthed beneath the stage. Accessed through doors at each end, the tunnel allowed actors to exit from one side of the stage and reappear at the other without the audience seeing them pass. Fragments of ceramic money boxes pointed to another discovery entirely. Theatregoers paid entry fees into these boxes, which were carried to a counting room, smashed, and the coins tallied. That counting room was known as the "box office," a term that has remained in use ever since.

  A small statue of Bacchus was among the additional finds, along with glass beads, clay pipes, and a bone comb. In August 2019, the structural remains and below-ground deposits were designated a Scheduled Monument. A reconstruction of the Curtain appears in the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love. The jukebox musical and Juliet also imagines the Curtain as its main setting, centering its story on an invented first performance of Romeo and Juliet.