Ritrovati i resti del teatro Curtain

Gli archeologi del Museum of London Archaeology affermano di aver individuato il sito esatto del teatro shakespeariano nel cuore di Shoreditch.

Ecco come la BBC presenta la notizia:

The Curtain was operated by theatre manager James Burbage and was home to Shakespeare's Company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, from 1597 until The Globe opened two years later. The theatre disappeared from historical records in 1622 but could have remained in use until the outbreak of the Civil War, 20 years later. Plays thought to have premiered there include Henry V, Romeo and Juliet and Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humour. "This is one of the most significant Shakespearean discoveries of recent years," a spokesman for Plough Yard Developments, which owns the site, said.

Leggi qui l'intero articolo.

Di grande interesse è inoltre la riflessione di Maev Kennedy sull'importanza del ritrovamento pubblicata su The Guardian (leggi qui l'intero articolo). Eccone uno stralcio:

Does it matter? That was the question I asked myself as I stood on that gravel, a few feet above a surface that Shakespeare must have walked on, trying to be objective yet also repressing a shiver down the backbone. I couldn't maintain any degree of objectivity: this is a space that generates that visceral feeling that history is a permeable membrane, 400 years a gap to be bridged just by stretching out a hand. Michael Boyd, artistic director of the RSC, caught it when he learned of the discovery, saying he longed just to touch the mud and stone of the theatre.

The same team from the Museum of London Archaeology found the Theatre just up the road in 2008, and, across the river, remains of other Elizabethan theatres – the Rose, and the Globe itself. Do we need archeological evidence of yet another Shakespeare theatre? Yes, I think. There's almost certainly more of the Curtain to be found as development of the site continues. We should learn the size of the yard – and therefore how many groundlings could be packed in for a penny a head – and possibly, from the size of the foundations, how tall the galleries rose. (The only image believed to show the Curtain in 1600 shows an implausibly grand structure on the scale of the Tower of London.) We'll know what the spectators ate, from dropped oyster shells and hazel nuts; what they wore, from dress hooks and little metal tips of laces; what they drank, from broken ale mugs and wine cups (the beer shop may well have been at the entrance, almost certainly where a small Victorian pub now stands); and even where they peed when they'd drunk too much.

R.G.