Red Lion: Archaeologists 'find London's earliest theatre'

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-52983008

by pseudolus • 6 years ago

33 14 6 years ago

rozab2• 6 years ago

In what possible sense could a building from 1567 be 'London's earliest theatre'? Has the journalist misunderstood something about it being the earliest of the Elizabethan era?

dang3• 6 years ago

Not clear what the intended scope of 'earliest' is, so we replaced the title above with a different sentence from the article.

oldlondonta3• 6 years ago

Earliest in this case lines up well with "first permanent".

oldlondonta3• 6 years ago

I just finished The Great Courses course The History of London and they spend quite a bit of time talking about theatre in London and it was pretty much banned/heavily controlled for most of London's history. As a result London just didn't have purpose built theatres very early compared to a lot of other cities.

dang3• 6 years ago

That's fascinating. I assume it was banned/controlled for religious reasons? But then the religion doesn't fork until 1534 (Church of England), so why would it have been banned earlier, and why the difference with other countries?

rozab2• 6 years ago

I was thinking that there must have been a Roman theatre in Londinium, but apparently not. There were known theatres in St Albans and Colchester though

rsynnott• 6 years ago

They may mean first purpose-built, and it actually might be that. People were quite paranoid about theatre in England back in the day; Shakespeare's plays, say, had to be approved by a government censor. It was very much the "jazz/rock music/video games/tiktok are corrupting the youth" of its day.

trekrich• 6 years ago

Every generation always has something. The coming of the morse code machine, BBS, Internet etc. There is an interesting book on this kind of thing. Check out a book called Writing on the wall, by Tom Standage.

Mediterraneo10• 6 years ago

Shakespeare's plays, say, had to be approved by a government censor

Can you point me to some literature on that? The infamous law in England that all plays had to be approved by the Lord Chamberlain (a situation which persisted until the late 1960s) dates from 1737, and thus over a century after Shakespeare’s time.

Red Lion: Archaeologists 'find London's earliest theatre'

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