Join us to explore the theatrical neighbourhoods of Shakespeare’s London.
This is an open-access resource produced by our NEH funded project, “Shakespeare’s Theaterscape: London Playhouse Districts (1576-1642),” which brings together theatre history and GIS technology via an international team of scholars.
What is Shakespeare’s Theatrescape?
Our project creates interactive maps for four major early modern playhouse districts: the Blackfriars, the Cockpit, the Curtain, and the Fortune. These maps are accompanied by curated documentary materials that give insight into the urban contexts that surrounded 16th- and 17th-century playhouses. Doing so, we start to explore what it was like to live near, work in, or visit a playhouse in Shakespeare’s London: who ran businesses nearby? What routes did people take to and from these areas? What was theatre’s relationship to the parish church? Who were the movers and shakers in playhouse communities, where did they live, and what did they do?
Our project is structured around a series of notable events (drawn from key documents), unfolding around our playhouse districts across their lifespans. To find out more about the districts themselves, visit our Playhouse Districts page.
Why Does this Matter?
Shakespeare’s Theatrescape builds on important digital mapping projects, not least Shakespeare and London Theatres, Layers of London, the Map of Early Modern London, and the maps of our partner project Records of Early English Drama Online. However, we are interested in the lived experience of playhouse districts. Our project regards playhouses as crucial, active neighbourhood institutions, just like a parish church or a guildhall. As such, we offer new ways to see how playhouses shaped both their immediate locales and wider London itself. Our maps can track individuals through the city, follow important events as they unfold, plot informative journeys, and so represent an important step in working towards a thick description of four early modern urban districts.
Our project’s key innovation lies in knitting together this series of interactive “microhistories” (a term, broadly speaking, for an historical approach focusing on a particular event, community, or place in history to help understand bigger questions); together, they indicate how playhouses transformed their locales and were transformed by them, bringing us closer to a more holistic understanding of how playhouses functioned, were sustained, and overlapped.
What’s Next?
Our key documents with their events and our four maps are the beginning of a more thorough mapping project for the theatrical neighbourhoods of Shakespearean London. We hope in the future to expand our range of documents, playhouses, and to build out a more thorough “on-the-ground” picture of Shakespearean London in c. 1616.
