To the Rose Playhouse in London, for some archaeology, history and performance. The Rose is one of the many London theatres from the Shakespearian age that we know of, but one of the few for which physical remains have been found. Such archaeological findings have been rare, through a combination of uncertainty of the exact location, destruction over time, and the simple fact that new buildings now stand where once stood a theatre. The Rose itself opened in 1587, the creation of Elizabethan impresario Philip Henslowe. It was such a success that it was expanded in 1592. William Shakespeare acted there and two of his first plays, Henry VI (i) and Titus Andronicus, were performed there. Christopher Marlowe was the chief dramatist. It closed around 1605, when the lease ran out. Thereafter it disappeared into history.
Late in 1988 an office block in Park Street, on London’s south bank, was due to be demolished and a new development built in its place. Archaeologists from the Museum of London were given a short period in which to investigate the site and in January 1989 they discovered the remains of the Rose, a playhouse known to have been located in what was once Maiden Lane but was now Park Street. The developers allowed the archaeologists until May 1989 to continue their work, after which time the new building would begin. But protests were made by theatrical greats (Peggy Ashcroft, Ian McKellen, Laurence Olivier), MPs and the public. Compromise was reached – membranes, a layer of sand and a thin later of concrete were added (the foundations which has been exposed were reacting to the open air) and the remains then covered with water. The developers altered their plans, moving load-bearing piers so that the Rose site was untouched and creating an underground viewing area. They then proceeded with the office block.
Thirty-seven years on, the office block still stands and the remains still remain, underwater, overlooked by a viewing area. The Rose is governed by the Rose Theatre Trust, with the ambition to complete the excavation of the site and create a public exhibition, performance space and learning centre, the Rose Revealed. There are guided tours and special events, among which is the Rose-a-Thon, an annual fundraising play-reading extravaganza. This features read-throughs of six one-hour versions of plays by William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, performed by the audience. Anyone can participate, either as a viewer or as a reader. The occasional well-known actor gets involved, but for the most part it is we the audience who take to the stage.
We went to the Rose-a-Thon last weekend, wanting chiefly to visit the place, but I decided to be brave and take on one of the speaking roles. The plays on offer over the day were Twelfth Night, Doctor Faustus (Christopher Marlowe), A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titus Andronicus, The Alchemist (Ben Jonson) and Hamlet. I had picked Doctor Faustus, scheduled to take place at 13.30.
The Rose lies under a nondescript office block on a back street a short distance from both Shakespeare’s Globe the tourist attraction and the original site of the Globe, which is also on Park Street. Outside are banners giving you the history of the theatre and its rediscovery, with a blue plaque to mark its importance. When we arrived things were running behind, with Twelfth Night still in performance – an inevitable consequence of amateur players – and it was not until 14:00 that we were allowed in. There was no time for the promised tour of the place. Instead we were ushered through a reception area selling tickets, books and mementoes, and into the performance space.
The viewing area has detailed posters about the theatre at the back, then two rows of seats around three-quarters of the perimeter. Beyond and below lies what has been discovered of the foundations of the Rose itself, a ghostly apparition of stone, water and light. We were, in effect, to perform for the theatre.
Ordinary audience members took to their seats; we the performers were taken to a corner where we were handed out scripts and drew out names from a hat. This would be the character that we were to play. The man before me drew Faustus; quite a challenge, given that it’s a play where the greater part of what is said is by two characters: Faustus, the man who sells his soul to the Devil for knowledge, and Mephistopheles. But as an old hand at such things (a number of the performers had done this sort of thing before) he seemed unfazed.
I drew Lucifer.
Now, were you seeking to cast someone as fallen angel and the Devil himself, I would like to think that you wouldn’t pick me. Sure you might think that I have a dark side, but I wouldn’t be any good at portraying it. To add to the challenge, Lucifer has very few lines in Marlowe’s play, and even fewer in our reduced version. He just turns up, introduces the Seven Deadly Sins, who each describe themselves to Faustus, and not much more than that. So, not much for a thespian to get his teeth into. Plus they gave me a Renaissance hat to wear, and I would defy even a Fiennes or a Rylance to play the personification of evil while wearing a floppy hat.
There are a lot of parts, albeit mostly small ones, in Doctor Faustus. With only nine or ten of us having agreed to perform, there would need to be some doubling up. I was therefore given a second role, the Archbishop of Rheims. That made everyone smile. We had labels stuck on us with the names of our characters. I put Lucifer on one jacket lapel, the archbishop on the other, like good and bad angels warring over my soul.
We the performers sat on chairs with the Rose behind us. I had imagined, in signing up for this, that we would be reading from our seats, but not a bit of it. When it was your turn to speak, you stood up and moved centre stage, as did any others sharing the scene with you. We spoke to the scripts in our hands rather than to those performing opposite it, but it was rather more drama than the reading I had been expecting.
The acting, such as it was, was variable. Those with experience in such ‘readings’ were better, putting some brio into their performances. Other read flatly and quietly. Some muddled things up, reading other people’s lines by mistake. All struggled with the pronunciation of unfamiliar words – for example, pronouncing ‘zounds’ as ‘zownds’ instead of the correct ‘zoonds’, as any Shakespearean pedant could tell you. The clarity of Marlowe’s language meant that sense was seldom lost, even with the most hesitant of speakers, and the most beautiful lines kept their beauty.
I leafed through my script, noting that my first words were on page 14. How to approach them? They didn’t look all that terrifying. Legends arose after Doctor Faustus was first performed that the Devil himself had appeared on stage, and to have Lucifer, Belzebub and Mephistopheles appear on stage together must have shaken quite a few of the credulous in the audience of 1594. But dressed in grey jacket, shirt and trousers rather than something red with horns did not help when delivering my opening lines “Christ cannot save thy soul, for he is just. There’s none but I have interest in the same.”
What to do? I thought of the film Time Bandits, considering that I could either go for the lip-curling of David Warner, playing Evil, or the urbane hauteur of the besuited Ralph Richardson, playing the Supreme Being. In the end I went for a slightly exaggerated version of myself. If the audience were disappointed, they were polite about it. Certainly they were not terrified.
All of us are putting on an act, but only a few of us can be actors. I marvel at the ability that some have to project a personality that is not their own. They do not see words on the page, they see the being. And this made me think that what was so extraordinary about the great outpouring of theatres in London in the Elizabethan to Caroline eras, which began in 1576 and ended with the closure of the theatres by the Puritans in 1642, a period which gave us Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, Massinger, Beaumont, Fletcher and many more great playwrights and plays, was that those times gave us actors.
There were hundreds of actors in London at this time. E.K. Chambers, in The Elizabethan Stage (vol. 2), names some 450 culled from assorted sources. There had been actors in British life before the Elizabeth era of course, from court troupes to touring companies, but never before had there been such a concentration of performers, nor of such excellence. It is generally recognised that a rise in quality of plays helped draw in the crowds in late Elizabethan London. The logical inference must be that there was an equal rise in the quality of performance. Great plays brought forth great actors. People who could terrify us, people who could make us weep, people who made us love them, who could be anyone, who were the personification of our dreams.
In actors people saw themselves magnified, caught between fantasy and reality, the sacred and the profane. Anyone might find themselves in Faustus.
The Rose Playhouse is a small London treasure. You have to use your imagination to picture how things once were here, but that’s only appropriate for a theatre. Where thousands once came to see king and queens, comics and tragedians, lovers, gods and devils, there is now the flooded foundations, a combination of performance space and viewing platform, some informative posters, and a shop-cum-box office. It is not open daily, as yet, but there are occasional guided tours, events such as the Rose-a-Thon and public lectures, and there is a fine website with information on its history, restoration and plans for the future. Visit, and dream.
Links:
- The Rose Playhouse website is engagingly designed, well illustrated and filled with useful information and resource links. This includes a fascinating list of 140 plays known to have been performed at the Rose for which no text survives, cross-linked to the Folger Shakespeare Library’s mighty Lost Plays Database – The Capture of Stuhlweissenburg, Frederick and Basilea, The Triplicity of Cuckolds, The Poor Man’s Paradise, Truth’s Supplication to Candlelight…
- We know a great deal about the operation of the Rose, including the titles of the 325 or so plays performed there, thanks to the survival of the ‘diary’, or accounts book, of its owner Philip Henslowe. There are sample pages and background information on the Shakespeare Documented site and you can browse a 1904 edition on the Internet Archive. It has also been published, with commentary, as a blog
- The Rose playhouse shop sells copies of Peter Sillitoe’s informative 2013 booklet Shakespearean London Theatres, which comes with an excellent walking map of London’s early theatres 1567-1642. A PDF of the booklet and the map itself can be downloaded from the Shakespearean London Theatres website, an exemplary online resource based on an academic project, still very useful even though not updated since 2013
- One early London theatre about which more is known that was the case in 2013 is The Curtain in Shoreditch. In 2018 I wrote about visiting the location and taking part in a celebratory event with performances and some audience participation in a blog post entitled Before Shakespeare, and after. The site today, now full of office blocks and called The Stage, promises a future underground Museum of Shakespeare
- The design of the Rose Theatre in Kingston, London, which opened in 2008, was inspired by the Rose playhouse
