Before Shakespeare: The Beginnings of London Commercial Theatre

Before Shakespeare: The Beginnings of London Commercial Theatre is the first major project to ask how and why public playhouses came to open in London, taking seriously the often repeated but rarely interrogated claim that the playhouses that opened in the second half of the sixteenth century were the first purpose-built public spaces for performance in Europe since the Roman Empire.

We seek to answer this question through an innovative two-way conversation between archival research and performance workshops exploring the plays of this early period. Working alongside Shakespeare's Globe and the new company Dolphin's Back, specifically devoted to staging forgotten early modern plays, we are rethinking the earliest playhouses of this period to remember how pioneering, unusual and shocking these spaces were. This work will also take advantage of the archaeological remains of the original playhouses, which have been discovered in the last thirty years but remain surprisingly marginal to current scholarly stories about the period. We will thus explore not only new architectural experiments with single playhouses buildings but with the earliest creation of theatre districts.

This is also the first project to take seriously the mid-century beginnings of those playhouses, seeing them as mid-Tudor and early Elizabethan phenomena rather than becoming distracted by the second generation of people working in the playhouses, the most famous of whom was William Shakespeare himself. This project asks what happens if we privilege instead the beginnings of those playhouses, thinking about them as entrepreneurial, architectural and creative innovations and considering the changes they brought about in the way people wrote, performed, watched and (eventually) read plays.

This project explores ways in which theatre history can inform the theatrical present. The early London playhouses were themselves experiments in audience engagement, early responses to the possibilities for public conversation represented by a rapidly growing and newly affluent urban space in a highly centralised state that was, in comparison to other West European states, comparatively unaffected by religious war. Playhouse managers and theatre companies believed in the cultural, political and economic value of saying and doing new things in front of new audiences. This project offers the granular or micro detail on the business and culture of a theatre history so often taken for granted or treated as a broad, unchanging period in which playhouses opened for a while and were finally closed. By insisting on the uncertain, fragile early period in which playhouses were entrepreneurial as well as theatrical experiments, we can provide a historical viewpoint from which to consider the place of live performance now. Our wordpress website will act as the public focus of our work, encouraging scholars, performers and general readers to make use of our material and engage with our ideas. Where possible we will disseminate images of important documents on the website and direct readers to any performance videos we or our partners create. A project Twitter account has already been set up and will be supported by the PI and Co-I's own professional accounts, both of which have been used to disseminate and challenge scholarly ideas.

Both PI and Co-I have worked extensively in the theatre where questions and conversations between scholars and actors can transform each other's professional practice, initiate new avenues of work and feed directly into performance or research discoveries. Our work will also be of immediate benefit to Shakespeare's Globe and the Royal Shakespeare Company, both of whom have recently opened or re-opened theatres specifically devoted to Shakespeare's contemporaries and are therefore looking for new and exciting repertories. The two investigators on this project have an already long-established relationship with these companies and this project will strengthen and enhance that relationship. Additionally, our work in support of Dolphin's Back performances will enable a very small and young theatre company to stage their first season of plays, developing their earlier work producing two plays in 2014 which were extremely well-received and well-attended and ran with a minimal budget and in a small auditorium.

In bringing benefits to these companies, the project will of course bring benefit to the actors and other practitioners that they employ and the audiences they play to. The project will exploit the significance of 2016 as the four-hundredth year since Shakespeare's death to publicise and promote his contemporaries to theatres, audiences and the media and use the momentum generated by that year to publicise the five-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the first London playhouse in 2017. The PI already has an essay on Shakespeare's place in the early theatre in Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson's The Shakespeare Circle, a public-facing book published in 2016 and celebrating the Shakespeare anniversary. We hope to apply for funding to record open access, online documentaries with Illuminations film company recording the research process and outcomes, in conjunction with the resources available at Roehampton's film department for fully accessible film-making.