Playhouses

Shakespeare had more predecessors as an Elizabethan actor than he did as an Elizabethan dramatist. Theatrical culture was thriving well before the performance of the famous plays we read today, which date from the 1580s and thereafter. Yet in the year of Shakespeare's birth, 1564, the Bishop of London wrote to the Secretary of State, Sir William Cecil, to complain about players performing in London every day, doubly concerned about the spread of plague likely from the assembly of large groups of people gathered as audiences and the ungodly character of plays and theatres. His letter speaks of 'the houses where they play their lewd interludes'. We know little of where Londoners were watching plays in 1564, but three years later a special stage and auditorium were built in Stepney for a show which was not ungodly at all: it was described as the story of Samson. The Red Lion playhouse, to give it the title of the farmhouse or inn where it was built, lay about three-quarters of a mile (0.9km) east of the city walls. It had a large platform stage - 30 feet by 40 (9m by 12m) - and galleries for the audience to sit and watch the play. It seems that the important features of the best-known Elizabethan playhouse, the Globe, opened in 1599, were established in theatre buildings more than thirty years earlier.