This article is taken from the August-September 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
On a Sunday in November 1577, a vicar named Thomas White addressed a crowd in the churchyard outside St Paul’s Cathedral. His chosen topic was the moral danger posed by theatres, which he called:
a continual monument of London’s prodigality and folly … the old world is matched, and Sodom overcome, for more horrible enormities … If thou be a father, thou losest thy child: if thou be a master, thou losest thy servant, and thou be what thou canst be, thou losest thy self that hauntest those schools of vice, dens of Thieves, & Theatres of all lewdness.
And you thought Mary Whitehouse was bad.
That said, a trip to the theatre in Elizabethan London was a rather different experience from today’s sanitised, bankruptcy-inducing experience. It wasn’t entirely certain, for instance, that you’d make it out alive. A 1587 performance at The Theatre, precursor to the Globe and the subject of this book, saw a bullet from the real gun used on stage ricochet into the audience, killing a child and a pregnant woman, and injuring a man in the head.
A few years earlier the danger had come from the actors themselves, when two audience members subjected them to “mockery” and “laughter”: the thesps responded by jumping down from the stage and getting busy with their fists. Meanwhile at the Paris Garden in Bankside, eight spectators at a bear-baiting session were killed when scaffolding collapsed.
The reason you’ve heard of the Globe, of course, is the name of the playwright most closely associated with it. The same logic applies to this book: The Theatre only existed for 21 years, and you almost certainly wouldn’t be reading about it now, were it not for the fact that William Shakespeare learned his trade there, before heading over the river to the more famous venue.
It stood just north of the City of London, on a site now bordered by Shoreditch High Street, Great Eastern Street and Holywell Lane, but then bordered by ditches (hence “Shoreditch”).
The Theatre’s founders, James Burbage and John Brayne, had it open for business by the summer of 1577, but had to close again almost immediately because of an outbreak of the plague. They had borrowed heavily to fund the enterprise, and were soon being sued by their creditors. Not long after that they were suing each other. There was a hearing in front of a notary in July 1578, and “Burbage did there strike [Brayne] with his fist”.
The real star of the show then arrived at The Theatre — well, as with so much about Shakespeare, we don’t really know when he did arrive. We do know that he honed his craft whilst he was there, rewriting other people’s plays such as The Famous Victories of Henry V and The True Tragedy of Richard III. He might also have boosted his income by looking after the props and acting in some minor parts, possibly in plays by Ben Jonson.
If he did tread the boards, there had been a clue to such tendencies when he was still in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he trained (again, we think) as a butcher. According to one 17th century biography, “when he kill’d a Calf, he would do it in a high style, & make a Speech”. I’ve known a few butchers like that myself.
All this uncertainty about the actual facts makes this one of those books that goes large on the uses of “perhaps”, “we might guess” and so on. We don’t even know for sure which plays Shakespeare wrote — Daniel Swift follows the New Oxford Shakespeare and gives him the benefit of the doubt as a co-author of Arden of Faversham.
There is also thought to be a lost work called Love’s Labours Won. Amongst the plays we do know about, the most popular profession, practised by 78 characters, is “servant”, followed in second place by the 50 dukes.
You’ll need to be a real Shakespeare junkie to truly appreciate this book. It’ll fill you in on some of Will’s finances — back then a playwright only made £7 or so by selling one of his works to a company of actors (a respectable annual wage was £20), although by 1595 Shakespeare had become a partner in the Chamberlain’s Men, upping his income somewhat.
Just three years later, The Theatre finally closed. But it continued to play a role in the life of the world’s most famous playwright — some of its timbers were used in the construction of the Globe.
