DID SHOREDITCH FOUND SHAKESPEARE’S FORTUNE?

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6884, 13 April 1929, Page 7

DID SHOREDITCH FOUND SHAKESPEARE’S FORTUNE?

Early London Theatre Interest in the claim that it was at Shoreditch Shakespeare laid the foundations of his fortune will bo stimulated by a recent discovery, states the London Daily Telegraph. While looking over some ancient documents in his office at Wigan, Mr. J. C. Hcald, a

solicitor, came across a seventeenthcentury parchment deed relating to the conveyance of "the site of the late monastery or priory of Holliwell, near tho City of London, in the County of Middlesex.” The parchment, which bears the date 1692, proceeds to Tcfer also to "the Ladye Gardene lying on the back side of the said monastery and all that garden called the Dove House Gardene lying within the precincts of the said monastery and the Orchard called the Corent Orchard,” etc., "situate and being in the Parish of St. Leonard, Shoreditch.” Mr. Heald has presented tho deed to the borough of Shoreditch, and it is now in the custody of Mr. Thomas Greene, the borough librarian. Shakespeare had been dead more than 70 years when this legal conveyance was drawn up, but the link with the dramatist rests in the fact that in one corner of tho site of the Priory there

stood, from 1577 to 1598, the theatre, “the first London building specially devoted to the performance of plays." The Curtain Theatre, close by, was buiLt a little later. Shoreditch believes that it was in these theatres that Shakespeare made his first appearance as a player.

“Southwark takes all tho credit for Shakespeare," Mr. Greene said, “but there is one important point that is always overlooked when so much is claimed for tho Globe Theatre, at B'anksidc. Before tho days of the Globe Shakespeare was in negotiation for the purchase of Now Place, Strat-ford-upon-Avon, the largest house in Stratford. Shakespeare must have had substantial means at tho time, and there is sound reason to believe that ho had already laid the foundations of his fortune in Shoreditch." Mr. Greene thinks it most likely that after the poaching incident in 1584, Shakespeare sought refuge in London, and took up his quarters in Shoreditch in order to be«> near the theatre, which was the property of James Burbage, Shakespeare’s actor friend.

In 1599 Bichard and Cuthbert Burbage, who had come into possession of the theatro two years earlier on the death of their father, were so harassed by the lessor of the ground on which the building stood that they demolished it. With the aid of the players themselves they removed the wood and timber to Southwark, where they utilised tho material in the erection of the Globe, at Bankside. In this way Shoreditch claims priority over Southwark in the possossion of Shakespeare as a local celebrity. The site of the theatre is commemorated by a tablet placed on a shop wall in Curtain road by the London County Council.