In fair Shoreditch, where we lay our scene … the shape of Shakespeare’s stage
Your interesting piece on the Curtain playhouse in Shoreditch, London (How the excavation of Shakespeare’s Curtain theatre has changed stage history, 7 October), says: “It was on this stage that Romeo and Juliet and Henry V are believed to have first been performed.” Henry V dates from 1599 and is more likely to have been the opening play of the 1599 Globe theatre: the “wooden O” of its prologue would not sit well with the apparently rectangular stage of the newly uncovered Curtain. On the other hand, Romeo and Juliet (1596-97) was almost certainly a Curtain play: in The Scourge of Villainy (1598) Shakespeare’s contemporary John Marston refers to the acting of “pure Juliet and Romeo” and “Curtain plaudities”.
As for visitors to a future Shakespeare Museum at the Curtain “able to stand – perhaps even to act – on the very same spot”, it is worth adding that they have been able to do so at the Rose playhouse in Southwark for many years. The Rose sits a few yards north-west of Shakespeare’s 1599 Globe theatre, on the other side of Southwark Bridge, with the Elizabethan Globe’s foundations clearly displayed.
René Weis
London
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