What are our Key Documents?
Each playhouse district has a set of 10-12 “key documents” that help tell its story. These documents range from lawsuits to petitions. These are a curated set of records, drawn from the many that pertain to each playhouses, and they relate a series of representative or telling “events.” These documents have been transcribed from their original manuscript sources.
Here, you can explore a theatrical district via these documents and take your own historical journey through and beyond the playhouses.
Each document contains a series of narrative events, which you can explore on the maps via the timeline feature. They are “tagged” with details of each individual and location mentioned (which you can also discover on our People and Places pages).
These documents are not exhaustive accounts of these playhouses’ history, but they offer a colourful and representative sample of each theatrical neighbourhood. Many of these documents predate or postdate our “anchor” date of 1616, but we have sought to show each district across a range of time, plotted as best as possible onto our 1616 maps.
