The Shakespeare Post is proud to introduce Lend Me Your Ears, a new podcast series created exclusively for the Post. Lend Me Your Ears will 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.
The Museum of London Archaeology has discovered what it believes to be the brick foundation of the Theatre, one of London’s first purpose-built playhouses. Although just announced this week, the discovery was made in June during construction work for a new building for the Tower Theatre Company. The site is located on New Inn Broadway in Shoreditch, which is within the East London Borough of Hackney. It has long been known that an open air playhouse, called the Theatre, stood in this area, but traces of its exact location have until now proved elusive.
The Mary Rose, the flagship of Henry VIII’s navy, may have sunk because most of the crew didn’t speak English and couldn’t understand their officers’ orders. Using archaeological remains and archival records, scientists have determined that the ship was largely manned by foreign sailors, thought to be either mercenaries or Spanish prisoners of war.
Last week’s news of the recovery of the Durham copy of the First Folio, with the assistance of the Folger Shakespeare Library, has helped raise awareness of the importance of the folio to our understanding of Shakespeare. The Folger owns 79 copies of the First Folio, more than any other institution in the world. But [...]
The Rose Theatre archaeological site in London will be open to the general public over the next two weekends as part of National Archaeology Week. Guides will be available to assist visitors and a video about the Rose, narrated by Ian McKellen, will be shown hourly. Simon Blatherwick, an archaeologist who helped unearth the Rose [...]
Shakespearean tragedies are usually bloody affairs on stage but Shakespearean theatre has reputation for refinement and respectability. That wasn’t always the case. In his 2007 book “The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama and Death in 19th-Century America,” author Nigel Cliff describes how a feud between the English actor William Charles Macready and the first great American [...]
Marine archaeologists working in the English Channel have announced the discovery of the wreckage of a large Jacobean ship off the coast of Dorset. They believe the vessel sank around 1620, possibly after being hit during a naval battle near Portland.
The oak-timbered ship was 40m (130ft) long and weighed around 600-tons making it one of [...]
Archaeologists working in the English Channel off the coast of Normandy are gaining insight into the technological advances that reshaped the English Navy during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. They are working on the wreck of a gunned Elizabethan vessel that sank off the coast of the channel island Alderney in 1592. The ship [...]
A previously unknown portrait of a teenage Elizabeth I has been discovered at Boughton House, the Northamptonshire home of the Dukes of Buccleuch and Queensberry. The painting shows Elizabeth, age 18 or 19, standing to the right (from the viewer’s perspective) of her sister Mary, brother Edward, father King Henry VIII and his jester Will [...]
This month marks the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of 17th Century historian and churchman Thomas Fuller. While he was considered one of he great English writers in previous centuries, he’s nearly forgotten today. Fuller was a Doctor of Divinity at Cambridge and Chaplain Extraordinary to Charles II. His most long lasting contributions were [...]
