When a modern audience settles into the velvet seats of a London West End playhouse or the open-air wooden gallery of Shakespeare’s Globe on the South Bank of the Thames, they are participating in a continuous dramatic tradition that transformed the English language itself. Yet in the year 1570, London did not possess a single permanent public theater building; traveling actors were legally classified alongside vagabonds and bear-baiters, performing on temporary wooden planks set up inside muddy coaching-inn courtyards. Then, between 1576 and 1642, a remarkable generation of entrepreneurial carpenters, rebel university graduates, larger-than-life lead actors, and a glover’s son from Stratford-upon-Avon invented modern British Theatre from scratch.
1. James Burbage and “The Theatre” (1576): Building the First Playhouse
Before great plays could be written, someone first had to invent the business model of a permanent, purpose-built commercial playhouse where thousands of ordinary citizens could pay a single copper penny to stand in the yard. That pioneer was James Burbage (circa 1531–1597)—a joiner and master carpenter by trade who had become an actor and leader of the Earl of Leicester’s Men.
In 1576, borrowing money from his brother-in-law, Burbage leased a plot of land in Shoreditch just north of the jurisdiction of the puritanical City of London mayors, and built a polygonal, open-air timber amphitheater that he boldly named The Theatre—the first permanent public playhouse erected in Britain since the fall of the Roman Empire! Twenty-two years later, on the freezing night of December twenty-eighth, 1598, when a greedy landlord tried to confiscate the building after the lease expired, James Burbage’s two sons—Cuthbert and Richard Burbage—alongside a partner named William Shakespeare hired master carpenter Peter Street and a crew of armed men with axes to **dismantle The Theatre timber by timber in the middle of the night**, haul the oak beams across the Thames to Southwark, and use the exact same wood to build the legendary Globe Theatre in 1599!
2. The “University Wits” and Christopher Marlowe’s Mighty Line
To fill these new 3,000-seat wooden amphitheaters (The Theatre, The Curtain, and Philip Henslowe’s The Rose), playhouse managers needed thrilling new scripts every week. In the 1580s, a group of brilliant, bohemian, often impoverished young graduates of Oxford and Cambridge—known to literary history as the “University Wits” (including Thomas Kyd, who invented the smash-hit Elizabethan revenge tragedy with The Spanish Tragedy; John Lyly; Robert Greene; and Thomas Nashe)—abandoned careers in the Church to write for the popular stage.
Towering above all the University Wits was a shoemaker’s son from Canterbury with a Cambridge scholarship and a shadowy second career as an espionage agent for Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham: Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593). Before being fatally stabbed above the eye in a Deptford rooming house at the age of twenty-nine over a tavern bill (“the reckoning”), Marlowe revolutionized English drama with Tamburlaine the Great, Doctor Faustus, and The Jew of Malta—throwing out clunky rhyming couplets and perfecting unrhymed iambic pentameter (blank verse, what Ben Jonson called “Marlowe’s mighty line”) as the electric, musical heartbeat of the British stage.
3. William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and the Leading Tragedians
Into the vibrant theater world created by Burbage and Marlowe stepped William Shakespeare (1564–1616). Unlike rival playwrights who sold their scripts for a flat fee of six pounds and stayed poor, Shakespeare was a uniquely shrewd theatrical businessman: becoming a one-tenth shareholder (“housekeeper”) in both his acting company (the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later the King’s Men) and the physical real estate of the Globe and indoor Blackfriars theatres.
Writing thirty-eight plays that fused the highest philosophical poetry with low-brow tavern comedy—and pushed every year by his brilliant friend and friendly rival, the bricklayer-turned-classical-satirist Ben Jonson (author of Volpone and The Alchemist, who in 1616 became the first English playwright brave enough to publish his stage plays in a grand folio book titled Works, inspiring the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare!)—Shakespeare wrote his greatest roles specifically for the physical voices of two legendary lead actors who were the true first superstars of British acting:
- Edward Alleyn (1566–1626): The six-foot-plus, booming-voiced star of the rival Admiral’s Men, who originated Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Faustus and became so fabulously wealthy from theater ownership that he founded Dulwich College and bought a manor house for £10,000.
- Richard Burbage (1567–1619): James Burbage’s younger son and Shakespeare’s closest stage collaborator—a naturalistic, chameleon-like actor who was the very first human being on Earth to walk onto a stage and speak the words of Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Richard III.
4. Aphra Behn and the Restoration Pioneers (1660s)
When the English Civil War erupted in 1642, Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan Parliament shut down every playhouse in Britain for eighteen years and demolished the Globe. Yet the moment King Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, British theatre roared back to life inside enclosed, candlelit proscenium-arch theaters at Drury Lane and Covent Garden with two revolutionary breakthroughs: first, Charles II issued a royal warrant decreeing that female roles would no longer be played by teenage boy apprentices, welcoming professional actresses (such as Margaret Hughes and Nell Gwyn) onto the British stage for the first time; and second, in the 1670s, a former royal spy in Surinam named Aphra Behn (1640–1689, author of the hit comedy The Rover) shattered the glass ceiling to become the first professional female playwright in the English language—completing the foundation of the modern theatre world.
