Your feature (London museum to use AI to let visitors walk on Shakespeare’s early stage, 19 April) rightly trumpets the impending new museum on the site of the Curtain theatre in Shoreditch, but wrongly credits unequivocally this site as “home to Shakespeare’s earliest performances” and his “main venue before the Globe was built”. The better claim for this is made by the venue known as the Theatre, built one year earlier (1576) a few hundred yards north, by the actor-manager James Burbage and his brother-in-law (and Grocers’ Company member) John Brayne.
This was the first longstanding dedicated performance venue in the country and the first to use the name “theatre”. Burbage’s troupe, the Earl of Leicester’s Men, were based here, as were initially their successors the Admiral’s Men, and eventually the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, led by his son, the great actor Richard Burbage. Shakespeare joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and became the lifelong partner of and writer for Burbage Jr.
While at the time there was considerable fluidity in scripts and performers between the Theatre, the Curtain, and the third great venue of this time, Newington Butts, founded by fellow Grocer Richard Hicks, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men did not move formally to the Curtain until 1596, having fallen out with the Theatre’s landlord. By then, Shakespeare had probably written Henry VI, Richard III, Titus, Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night’s Dream etc.
The Curtain was the likely site of the first performance of Henry V, but not until about 1598. In 1599, Burbage, Shakespeare and co returned to The Theatre, surreptiously dismantled the timbers and moved them across the river to build the Globe, and thus the Theatre re-established itself as their main venue in its new location with its new name.
This long, productive and often ignored association between the Grocers’ Company and Elizabethan/Stuart theatre came to its pinnacle with the First Folio, whose 400th anniversary is celebrated this year. The drawing together of the legendary First Folio is entirely attributable to the efforts of John Heminges and Henry Condell, Shakespeare’s partners and fellow actors, who were both staunch members of the Grocers’ Company.
It is often forgotten that the old tradition of throwing rotten tomatoes at bad performance was dependent on a ready supply of these at the theatre – a useful side line for the Grocer trading locations nearby, to shift the “past their sell-by date” merchandise.
Rupert Gavin
Past master, Grocers’ Company; director, Society of London Theatre
• The siting of the Museum of Shakespeare in his old stomping grounds around Shoreditch is a welcome testament to the exhaustive research of the Museum of London. However, while the Curtain Playhouse was of undoubted importance to Elizabethan drama, it is Burbage’s the Theatre (1576-98), tagged to reflect the glories of the Roman theatrum, that we have to thank for the modern name.
Though there is a strong case that Romeo and Juliet was first performed at the Curtain, the Theatre remains a contender. Shakespeare’s fellow playwright Christopher Marlowe, so the story goes, was set upon in 1589 in nearby Hog Lane. His friend intervened against the attacker’s blade, stabbing him to death. Both Marlowe and his defender were eventually acquitted on the grounds of self-defence.
Whichever playhouse premiered the play, it is tempting to think that this death in theatreland was the template for the ill-fated and fatal duel that results in the death of Mercutio.
Austen Lynch
Garstang, Lancashire
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