Langley had the theatre built almost certainy in When it was new, the Swan was the most visually impressive of the existing London theatres. Translated from the Latin, his description identifies the Swan as the "finest and biggest of the London theatres," with a capacity for spectators. It was built of flint concrete, and its wooden supporting columns were so cleverly painted that "they would deceive the most acute observer into thinking that they were marble," giving the Swan a "Roman" appearance.
De Witt also drew a sketch of the theatre. The original is lost, but a copy by Arendt van Buchell survives, and is the only sketch of an Elizabethan playhouse known to exist. If the Lord Chamberlain's Men acted at the Swan in the summer of —which is possible, though far from certain—they would be the actors shown in the Swan sketch. When Henslowe built the new Hope Theatre in , he had his carpenter copy the Swan, rather than his own original theatre the Rose, which must have appeared dated and out of style in comparison.
In the Swan housed the acting company Pembroke's Men, who staged the infamous play The Isle of Dogs, by Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson, the content of which gave offense for unknown reasons. Jonson was imprisoned, along with Gabriel Spenser an actor in the play, and others. Langley, already in trouble with the Privy Council over matters unrelated to theater, may have exacerbated his danger by allowing his company to stage the play after a royal order that all playing stop and all theaters be demolished.
This order may have been directed at Langley alone; the other companies, the Lord Chamberlain's Men and the Admiral's Men, had been authorized to return to the stage by October. Because both court and city were interested in limiting the number of acting troupes in London, and because there was, consequently, a glut of large open-roof venues in the city, the Swan was only intermittently home to drama.
The theater offered other popular entertainments, such as swashbuckling competitions and bear-baiting, and by it had been pulled down. It opened in , and continued staging plays until The Curtain was built some yards south of London's first playhouse, The Theatre, which had opened a year before, in It was called the "Curtain" because it was located near a plot of land called Curtain Close, not because it had the sort of front curtain associated with modern theatres.
Elizabethan theatres had small curtained enclosures at the back of their stages; but the large front-curtained Proscenium stage did not appear in England till after the Restoration. Little is known of the plays performed at the Curtain or of the playing companies that performed there. Its proprietor seems to have been one Henry Lanman, who is described as a "gentleman. From to it became the premiere venue of Shakespeare's Company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, who had been forced to leave their former playing space at The Theatre after the latter closed in It was the venue of several of Shakespeare's plays, including Romeo and Juliet which gained "Curtain plaudits" and Henry V.
In this latter play the somewhat undistinguished Curtain gains immortal fame by being described by Shakespeare as "this wooden O. Later that same year Jonson gained a certain notoriety by killing actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel in nearby Hoxton Fields.
The Lord Chamberlain's Men departed the Curtain when the Globe, which they built to replace the Theatre, was ready for use As far as is known, Lanman ran the Curtain as a private concern for the first phase of its existence; yet at some point the theatre was re-organized into a shareholders' enterprise.
Thomas Pope, one of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, owned a share in the Curtain and left it to his heirs in his last will and testament in You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies.
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The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. Women never performed in plays, so young boys played female characters.
The performances took place in the afternoon because it was too dark at night. There was no stage crew as there is today. Actors had to do everything themselves - from making costumes to setting the stage. Plays were organized by acting companies. They performed about 6 different plays each week because they needed money to survive. They had almost no time for rehearsals.
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