Before Shakespeare
The Beginnings of the London Commercial Theatre
​
The Dolphin's Back took part in the first major project to ask how and why commercial playhouses came to be built in London during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, a two-way conversation between performance workshops and archival research to explore the plays of this early period, also taking advantage of the archaeological remains of the original playhouses which have been discovered in the last thirty years.

Working alongside
King's College London
The University of Roehampton
Museum of London Archeology
&  Shakespeare's Globe

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2017-8  WORKSHOPS

1pm Sunday 21 July 2018
​The Curtain Rises:
Exploring the Diverse Histories of the Curtain Playhouse.
Hackney House
Curtain Road, Shoreditch
In collaboration with MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology)
The Stage development, Shoreditch​

An afternoon with leading archaeologists, academics, historians, and fencers, of short interactive talks and performances exploring The Curtain playhouse - its history, its location in Shoreditch, and the diversity of both its audiences and the range of entertainment it offered from Elizabethan times onwards - in a venue right next to and overlooking its original site.
Built around 1577, The Curtain was one of Elizabethan London’s first commercial playhouses, and its longest serving. Shakespeare and his company performed Romeo and Juliet there, and it was the venue for Henry V’s very first performance. The spectacle on offer extended beyond plays to fencing, jigs and fireworks, and its audiences and neighbours were hugely diverse, including actors, silk-weavers, school-masters, cobblers, and button-makers, many of them European, Asian and African immigrants. 
The day gave us the opportunity to rethink our ideas about Shoreditch as an historical space and the communities it has housed and served, and ask how this can inform our relationship to the sites and subjects of our shared heritage now.

Actors
Rhys Bevan, Dan Abelson, Suzanne Ahmet,
Adam Cunis and Tommy Swale
Fencers
Craig Hamblyn and Kiel O'Shea

​Read Callan Davies about The Curtain here
and his report of the event here

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3pm Sunday 18 January 2018
​The First Blackfriars Playhouse 1576-84:
Ownership, repertoire and audience
Apothecaries' Hall
Black Friars Lane
I​n collaboration with the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries of London.

Using a mix of documentary evidence, new archival research, and performed scenes from the plays themselves, actors from The Dolphin's Back join Dr Andy Kesson, Dr Callan Davies and Dr Lucy Munro from the AHRC-funded Before Shakespeare project  explored the ownership, repertoire and audience of the first Blackfriars theatre on its original site.

Apothecaries' Hall was built on the site of the smaller playhouse that existed in the Blackfriars before the more famous and larger theatre later used by Shakespeare's company.

In 1576, the same year as James Burbage built The Theatre in Shoreditch, Richard Farrant, Master of Windsor Chapel, obtained the lease to property in the former monastic lands of Blackfriars from Sir William More and built a small indoor theatre there for performances by boy actors. In 1583 Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford gained a sublease, and gave the theatre to his secretary John Lyly to run, before More reacquired the lease the following year, and the theatre closed.

It was here that Lyly's first two plays, Campaspe and Sapho and Phao were first publicly played before their performance at Whitehall Palace before Queen Elizabeth I.

Actors
Beth Park, Patrick Walshe McBride, John Hopkins, Tim Blore,
​James Askill, Tim Frances, and James Wallace

Two blogs from Callan Davies
about the Blackfriars here
& the event here

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3pm Sunday 19 November 2017
​Audiences, Immigration and Belonging
​in Elizabethan Theatres
33 Finsbury Square

In collaboration with the European Research Council-funded TIDE project

Who visited Elizabethan playhouses?
What might it mean to put “non-English” characters on stage?
What do playwrights’ engagement with the issues of immigration, identity, and belonging tell us about late sixteenth-century playing spaces?

This experimental workshop staged extracts from a number of sixteenth century plays that dramatised the economic, social, and cultural issues of immigration in order to further understand both Elizabethan attitudes to "foreignness" and our own relationship to Renaissance drama.

We used by a wide array of non-dramatic documents from the period - such as letters, diaries, travel reports, orders from the London Mayor, and official lists of immigrant residents - and will be open to staging suggestions and discussion from audience members.

Actors
​Suzanne Ahmet, Jamie Askill, Emma Denly, Tim Frances, John Hopkins, Mark Oosterveen, and Tok Stephen, lead by James Wallace
Academics
Andy Kesson, Lucy Munro, Callan Davies, (Before Shakespeare)
Nandini Das & Haig Smith (TIDE)

Two blogs by Callan Davies and Haig Smith,
about the area in Elizabethan times here
and about the event here

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3pm Sunday 22 January 2017
THE THREE LADIES OF LONDON
​at THE RED LION PLAYHOUSE
Upstairs at The Urban Bar, Whitechapel

  Dissimulation 
What, Fraud? Well met. Whither travellest thou this way?

  Fraud
To London, to get entertainment there, if I may,
Of the three ladies: Lucre, Love, and Conscience.
I care not whom I serve - the devil - so I may get pence.

The earliest surviving play that we can be certain was written for professional commercial performance is The Three Ladies of London, written c.1581 by actor-playwight Robert Wilson for Leicester's Men. A philo-semitic usury play, it follows honest Simplicity, a miller, as he journeys to London, encountering some very unsavoury characters along the way.

LONDON'S FIRST THEATRE
London's first purpose-built professional playhouse was constructed in 1567 for John Brayne, brother-in-law to the actor James Burbage, on the site of The Red Lion farm, a mile outside the City walls in Whitechapel.

 This workshop explored the play, playwright, and playhouse,
upstairs at The Urban Bar,
​on the original site of the Red Lion farm itself.

Actors
Beth Park, Bella Heesom, Emma Denly, Philip Cumbus, Leo Wan,
Dan Ableson, James Askill and James Thorne,
​directed by James Wallace
Academics
Andy Kesson, Lucy Munro and Callan Davies
​from the Before Shakespeare project,

For Callan Davies' blog on the event, click here
and do read his brilliant
​Guide to the Elizabethan East End

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There's a wealth of material to explore about London's first playhouses and the culture of Elizabethan London on the
BEFORE SHAKESPEARE
​website

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Workshop at Apothecaries Hall

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