Before Shakespeare: The Beginnings of London Commercial Theatre

莎士比亚之前：《伦敦商业剧院的起源》是第一个探讨公共剧场如何以及为什么在伦敦开放的主要项目，认真对待经常重复但很少被质疑的说法，即在16世纪后半叶开放的剧场是自罗马帝国以来欧洲第一个专门建造的公共表演空间。我们试图通过一个创新的两个-档案研究和表演研讨会之间的对话方式探索这一早期时期的戏剧。与莎士比亚的地球仪和新公司海豚的背部，专门致力于上演被遗忘的早期现代戏剧，我们正在重新思考这一时期最早的剧场，以记住这些空间是多么的开拓，不寻常和令人震惊。这项工作还将利用原始剧场的考古遗迹，这些遗迹是在过去30年中发现的，但令人惊讶的是，它们与当前关于这一时期的学术故事相比仍然微不足道。因此，我们不仅将探索新的建筑实验与单一的剧场建筑，但与最早的戏剧区的创建。这也是第一个项目，认真对待这些剧场的世纪中叶的开端，把它们看作是中期都铎王朝和早期伊丽莎白王朝的现象，而不是成为分心的第二代人在剧场工作，其中最著名的是威廉莎士比亚本人。这个项目问的是，如果我们优先考虑这些剧场的起源，把它们看作是企业家、建筑和创造性的创新，并考虑它们给人们写作、表演、观看和（最终）阅读戏剧的方式带来的变化，会发生什么。

Before Shakespeare: The Beginnings of London Commercial Theatre is the first major project to ask how and why public playhouses came to open in London, taking seriously the often repeated but rarely interrogated claim that the playhouses that opened in the second half of the sixteenth century were the first purpose-built public spaces for performance in Europe since the Roman Empire.We seek to answer this question through an innovative two-way conversation between archival research and performance workshops exploring the plays of this early period. Working alongside Shakespeare's Globe and the new company Dolphin's Back, specifically devoted to staging forgotten early modern plays, we are rethinking the earliest playhouses of this period to remember how pioneering, unusual and shocking these spaces were. This work will also take advantage of the archaeological remains of the original playhouses, which have been discovered in the last thirty years but remain surprisingly marginal to current scholarly stories about the period. We will thus explore not only new architectural experiments with single playhouses buildings but with the earliest creation of theatre districts.This is also the first project to take seriously the mid-century beginnings of those playhouses, seeing them as mid-Tudor and early Elizabethan phenomena rather than becoming distracted by the second generation of people working in the playhouses, the most famous of whom was William Shakespeare himself. This project asks what happens if we privilege instead the beginnings of those playhouses, thinking about them as entrepreneurial, architectural and creative innovations and considering the changes they brought about in the way people wrote, performed, watched and (eventually) read plays.