- The footings of The Theatre © Museum of London Archaeology
August 13, 2008
The Shakespeare Post is proud to introduce Lend Me Your Ears, a new podcast series created exclusively for the Post. Lend Me Your Earswill feature interviews with actors, directors, scholars, historians, educators and anyone else making news in the world of Shakespearean performance and research.
For the inaugural podcast, Jo Lyon, senior archaeologist for the Museum of London Archaeology, discusses the discovery of The Theatre in London. Lyon led the team that unearthed the foundations of the playhouse earlier this summer.
Lyon talks about how the discovery was made, what researchers have learned from the excavation, and what she hopes to find when she returns to the site later in the year.
Use the embedded player to listen to the podcast.
Lend Me Your Ears - A Shakespeare Post Podcast
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One Comment
Perhaps I am a little late in coming to the party, but, as an interested amateur scholar, I have just learned about the discovery of the foundations of the Theater discussed here.
It seems to me that the fact that James Burbage’s 1576 Theatre was the very first of many such wooden polygonal theaters built in London over the subsequent 25 years or so alone argues for further excavation. And in addition to that, this building, the very first purpose-built English renaissance public theater structure, which opened 4 years before Palladio’s Teatro Olympico, was quite possibly, like the English theater’s Italian counterpart, also patterned after the plan of the Roman theater outlined in Vitruvius–an hypothesis Dame Frances Yates proposed over 40 years ago. This hypothesis argues for the fullest possible excavation of the site to determine the dimensions and proportions of the original plan, and whether or not it was designed on a zodiacal plan, ‘a figure of the twelve’.
It “might have been an octagon,” (says Jo Lyon on the audio podcast) …what a shame not to know what the true geometry was with more certainty.
Dame Frances proposed a hexagon without and a dodecagon within, a design which would conform to the Vitruvian plan.
To know the position and size of the stage and tiring house, the number of facets on the ‘inwyrd side’ of the building’s plan, showing how many galleries were arranged facing the yard, would be definitively revealing.
And if it were to be discovered that Vitruvius’ plan of the theater did indeed provide the framework for the building of London’s first theater might that not also reflect on architectural speculations regarding the Globe theater itself built from the timbers of the first Theater?