The mystery of the Red Lion: how a forgotten playhouse paved the way for Shakespeare

A few tiered seats, a couple of dog skeletons and a load of empty beer bottles – the east-London site where archaeologist Stephen White made these discoveries last year could only have been a pub theatre. More remarkable is its historical significance: the Red Lion, built in 1567 by entrepreneur John Brayne, is thought to be England’s oldest commercial playhouse.

Until this week its exact location was lost. The only reason we knew it existed was because Brayne had a habit of refusing to pay his builders, which led to the theatre twice being cited in court records. One of these – a civil suit heard in January 1569 – gives its exact dimensions, which is why we can confidently identify it as the timber structure now uncovered in Whitechapel. The mystery of the Red Lion is solved.

But the solution brings renewed urgency to a far more intriguing question: why was it built in the first place? The Red Lion and the theatres that followed it – the Theatre and the first Blackfriars in 1576, the Rose in 1587; and, of course, the Globe in 1598 – kick-started an astonishing period in English drama.

The work performed in them over the next 50 years was so abundant, so diverse and rich that no other comparable period of theatrical history can rival it. Each night on the seedy riverbanks of London, tightly plotted comedies about city life competed for audiences with continent-sweeping, classically set tragedies and daring, vibrant retellings of English chronicle history. These were the theatres that commissioned Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare. Literary history would look profoundly different if they hadn’t been built. But they came out of nowhere.

Until the 1570s, “seeing a play” meant nothing like what it means today. In York or Coventry it meant showing up on a designated street at four o’clock in the morning, once a year, to spend a day watching local craftsmen perform the entirety of biblical history, from creation to crucifixion, on top of a large wagon.

In smaller towns it meant a pleasant afternoon spent drinking and gossiping in the yard of an inn, as a troupe of local players tried to save your soul, via heavily allegorical stories involving characters like “Good Deeds” and “Death”, plus a generous helping of scatological humour. This theatrical culture was largely religious, amateur and provincial – not an obvious cocktail for wild commercial success. Was John Brayne a visionary?

Emma Smith, professor of Shakespeare studies at the University of Oxford, proposes a slower, slightly messier model for how London’s theatre scene emerged. The way the Red Lion operated “does not fit our conventional view of an Elizabethan theatre, which had its own in-house writers and actors,” she says, but was more like “a London base for touring theatre companies, just as there might have been in Coventry or Oxford”.

These companies provide a potential missing link between provincial mid-century theatre and the London boom. It is easy to imagine how an entrepreneur such as Brayne might have sniffed out an opportunity to make a perennial form of provincial entertainment a more permanent fixture in the rapidly expanding capital. By adapting an inn or private house solely for the purpose of theatre, he might soon have attracted regular performers. And it would not, then, have been a great mental leap for him or his contemporary impresarios to consider keeping a single in-house company all year round.

As Smith points out, the changes required to the business model of a touring theatre company if it settles permanently in a single location are exactly of the kind that might have led to the enormous market for new plays that subsequently emerged in London. “The touring model requires relatively few plays because the company is continually moving around to perform them to new audiences,” she says. Whereas a theatre in a fixed location “wants the same audience to keep coming back, so there is suddenly a huge appetite for new material”.

Research by Martin Wiggins, a Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute, has found records of 140 individual play titles performed in England between 1533 and 1566; between 1567 and 1589, the number is 839.

The lack of surviving records of the Red Lion suggests it may not have existed for very long and was not a big commercial success. Instead, the flurry of theatre openings in the late 1570s might indicate that playgoing did not take off as a really popular pastime with Londoners until then.

It is possible that the plays of the 1560s weren’t much good. All we know of what was performed at the Red Lion is the title of a single lost play, The Story Samson, which suggests a Biblical flavour that might have proved less appealing to a Friday night crowd than, say, Marlowe’s violent 1587 epic Tamburlaine. But according to Wiggins’s research, the number of new plays being written in England began to increase from at least 1567.

Other things must have been driving the outpouring of dramatic creativity in this period, even before the commercial incentive focused it on the capital. Take the 16th-century practice by wealthy noblemen with large households of commissioning entertainments for Christmas. Surviving examples of these works often have more in common with the kinds of commercial play later produced in London than the religious drama typical of the time. One such example is a play called Fulgens and Lucrece, written in 1500 by Henry Medwall for the household of the Archbishop of Canterbury, at Lambeth Palace. It is a play obsessed with pleasing its audience. Two strangely peripheral characters, referred to only as A and B, pop up between scenes to discuss whether or not the show’s any good.

The conclusion they eventually reach could be an advertising slogan for commercial theatre: “This play is made for the same intent and purpose/ To do every man both mirth and pleasure.”

Private theatre was free to probe the enormous possibilities of fiction. It makes sense that Medwall’s work is England’s earliest surviving vernacular drama: Latin was the language of the Church; English of play.

Fulgens and Lucrece was printed for sale in the 1520s, suggesting that its popularity long outlived its original performance. Some 40 years later, a man like John Brayne may well have come across, if not Medwall’s play, then something like it.

We may still not know exactly why John Brayne built the Red Lion, or how he could have predicted that Londoners would keep turning up, night after night, to watch the same group of actors pretend to be people they’re not. But we do know that it was the start of something infectious – that only infection has been able to stop.