ABSTRACT
At the end of New Inn Broadway in Shoreditch, East London, a building site is covered with graffiti: ‘Here is where the original Globe Theatre stood in 1599’. It is an improvised and inaccurate memorial to what lies behind the wooden white hoardings. In 2008 Museum of London archaeologists discovered the remains of the Theatre, a playhouse which staged some of Shakespeare’s earliest works. It was this venue that Shakespeare’s company the Chamberlain’s Men dismantled, taking its timbers across the river Thames to use in the construction of the Globe. The contemporary street art conflates these two related early modern playhouses into one with the misnomer, the ‘Globe Theatre’. This graffiti and the remains of the Theatre are insubstantial traces of sixteenth century playing in Shoreditch. Yet since the discovery of the remains of the Theatre, and 92the remains of another early modern playhouse the Curtain in 2012, artists in this unique area of London have made attempts to remember, revive and respond to histories of Shakespeare in Shoreditch. Drawing on interviews with these artists, in what follows I seek to complicate current critical conversations about cultural memory and performance through practitioner testimony, and to examine the political dynamics of Shakespeare and memory in contemporary theatre-making.
