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Google Maps Screenshot, taken by Cassidy Cash, of the location of The Curtain theater in Shoreditch. Source At the excavation site, a section of brick walls was discovered that were determined to be the foundations of The Curtain theater. We started work on the project in 2011, and the reason we were digging there was that the land owner had a plaque that said “Somewhere here stood the curtain playhouse” they did some trail excavation, and wanted to see if any archaeology survived and we did find walls, a swell as gravel surfaces, and they were the right date, and constructed in the right way we knew it was a theater...In 2016 is when we determined it was The Curtain, because we found the things the playgoers left behind like broken fragments of wine flasks, beads from their clothing, food like oyster shells, and their clay tobacco pipes. All that material culture said yes we have a playhouse. Archaeological dig at the site of The Curtain Elizabethan playhouse where Shakespeare performed | Photo by Jwslubbock | This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. | Source There is a 1599 image called a View of London, that shows what was believed to be the Curtain theater. While there’s been research done that suggests the image may actually depict The Theater in Shoreditch, the point is that the image represents a long held belief about the shape of the Curtain theater, which has been debunked by the recent excavation Heather’s team has performed. Given the date of the map, it assumed it was The Curtain, because of when The Theater had been demolished, and at that point we had nothing to indicate the Curtain was anything other than polygonal, but nothing to say what the shape might have been. When we started digging, and we diode’t have a polygonal structure, they stopped and aid “Ok, so what parallels do we have” In Spain, it’s a carbon copy the Curtain. We went back and we looked gain at the panorama, on the right of the round looking building, there’s another building with a flag on it. Memorial to the Tudor players | Located in St Leonards, Shoreditch | photo by Kevin Thompson Kbthompson at English Wikipedia | This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. | Source Their discoveries support the theory that not all early modern playhouses were shaped like The Globe, meaning some were not that polygon shape. They come in all shapes and sizes. We have the small indoor theaters like the Blackfriars and Salisbury court, city inns, and polygonal buildings like Fortune and the Globe, and the Red lion, etc. Stow's Survay of London, 1618 edition | Photo by Das48 | This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. | Source Other aspects of the Curtain Brick foundations for the stage, wide stage, 14 m wide and it would have taken a timber superstructure onto of that brick footing. The stage would have been...
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