Remains of one of Londons earliest Elizabeth playhouses have been found, not far from Liverpool Street Station. The Theatre, the precursor of the Globe on Bankside, saw the premieres of several of Shakespeares plays, including Romeo and Juliet and Richard III.

The Theatre was built in 1576, nine years after the Red Lion in Stepney, which seems to have been the oldest playhouse. “It is important not only for its position in the development of English theatre, but also for its Shakespearean associations,” Julian Bowsher notes in the London Archaeologist.

William Shakespeare was an important enough member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the company based at the Theatre, to be one of three recorded as being paid for performances at the Court of Elizabeth I at Christmas 1594. James Burbage and his sons, the core of the company, were also from Warwickshire, and Shakespeare prospered with them at the Theatre sufficiently to be able to buy a mansion in Stratford upon Avon in 1597, as well as obtain a grant of arms in his father’s name.

The site of his success was pinned down by Simon Blatherwick (who, like Julian Bowsher worked on the Rose theatre excavations) in a study for English Heritage in 1998 (The Times, January 11, 1999). He placed it within the former Holywell Priory, just north of its Great Barn, which was shored up against the playhouse: the site today lies where Curtain Road, New Inn Yard, and Great Eastern Street meet, just on the edge of the Congestion Zone.

Mr. Bowsher’s work has now uncovered part of the north wall of the Great Barn. Once that could be found, the Blatherwick report predicted, “the location of the Theatre becomes easier to establish”, probably about 20 feet (6m) further north. Remodelling of the century-old warehouse at the western end of the site four years ago, for residential development, resulted in a series of trenches being dug in the basement, and it is here that the remains have been found.

“The structural remains all cut into the clay surface, although it is presumed that they were originally cut from a higher level: the footings might have been between 63 cm and 1.23 metres deep and therefore fairly substantial,” Mr. Bowsher says. “The most obvious candidate \ is the Great Barn, and should be part of the north wall near its northeast corner, according to reonstructed plans.”

Some 1.7 metres (5 feet) north of the wall, a chalky deposit is interpreted as the footing for the wooden shoring that propped up the barn, using the playhouse as a base. An adjacent mass of very compact material, including what was probably spoil from the demolished priory buildings, “may therefore represent part of the foundations of the Theatre.

However, such fragmentary remains cannot allow even a guess as to its true shape, although the Theatre is assumed to have been a polygon, like the Rose and the Globe.

“If this is indeed the Theatre, the discovery has a two-fold importance,” Dr. Jean Wilson, the author of The Archaeology of Shakespeare, told The Times. “It gives us information about the playhouse itself, crucially, that more of it may survive; and it increases our hope that other playhouses may survive archaeologically, and provide us with critical evidence about these problematic buildings.”

London Archaeologist Vol. 11 No. 9: 231-34.