Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse: Eleven Days at Newington Butts

What if the theatre industry that made someone like William Shakespeare possible was predicated on collaboration rather than individual endeavour? Of the many necessary explorations conducted and questions posed by Laurie Johnson in his recent monograph, Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse, this may be the most surprising. This necessary and long-overdue examination of the Playhouse that was located in Newington Butts, about a mile south of the River Thames and just outside the London city boundary, intervenes in three major ways. First, it literally and figuratively expands the map of where playing took place in London during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Second, it provides a framework, supported by manuscript, archaeological and literary attestations, for analysing the work of playing companies outside the proverbial season. Third, it rhetorically places early professional plays presumed to be blockbusters due to their curricular primacy – such as The Jew of Malta, Titus Andronicus, The Taming of the Shrew and Hamlet – alongside less-canonical and even “lost” plays, situating works associated with Shakespeare within a larger financial context