Red Lion: Archaeologists 'find London's earliest theatre' | Hacker News Reader

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

bbc.com

33 pointspseudolus14 comments

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?

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

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

Ok, given your comments and the BBC probably being reliable on the topic of English theatre, I've reverted back to the original title. Thanks!

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.

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?

I relistened to snippets from the course and I think my previous comment about banning for most of history was wrong though the title still right.

I was thinking of the formation of the Kings Company and Dukes Company but they were after not before this. From what I've gathered from relistening to snippets from the course and a bit of Googling the actual answer is lack of demand. London was abandoned for hundreds of years after the Romans left, then there wasn't a big interest in the arts for a long time because of other priorities like being regularly sacked/plagues/etc. I do know theatres were still kept out of the city proper once they started popping up but I can't find why other than again fear of plague.

See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23499672

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

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.

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.

I think there is a video of I believe Frank Zappa in a discussion in the US with some "morally enthusiastic" republicans before some committee where he is decrying censorship.

That moral defender said that they don't employ censorship. Censorship is something the government does. No, they were going to be censored by private entities... how the turn tides... it feels like going back in time and not only because Americans began to talk about culture.

> 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.

In Elizabethan times, plays required a license from the Master of the Revels, who would censor anything illegal (references to rebellion or religion for example). Google should supply plenty of details.

Generally, though, the monarchy of the time was quite supportive of the theatre. Just as well really, as the City of London was run by Puritans at the time and they'd gladly have shut down every one of the theatres. That's the reason they were generally built outside the City.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com