London is full of hidden gems. And MOLA does an extraordinary job in unveiling them. Their current project: the excavation of London’s second playhouse ‘The Curtain’ from Shakespeare’s times, which was first mentioned in a religious pamphlet in 1577. So MOLA’s current programme of talks and tours matches this exciting undertaking. To join one of the guided tours, focussing on The Curtain and Crime, approximately 20 people gathered on a Saturday afternoon on Hewett Street, Shoreditch, next to what is currently the excavation site of the former playhouse.  

The tour started with a surprise – the group was allowed exclusive access to the excavation site. This part of the walk wasn’t mentioned in its description on MOLA’s website, so having the opportunity to actually enter the site was met with excitement amongst the group. James Wright who works on The Curtain’s excavation as Senior Archaeologist, explained in detail the in’s and out’s of where The Curtain could’ve stood and the process of digging through four centuries of concrete and brick foundation. It was not only impressive to be part of an exclusive viewing of a site related to such significant history, but also to see the scale and enormous effort related to such an excavation project.  

After the 20 minutes viewing of the excavation site, the actual guided tour began, led by Jon Kaneko-James, writer and researcher, who couldn’t have opened the topic in a more captivating way than comparing the stories of the rogues and villains of Elizabethan theatre with a ‘1980s gangster rap’. He prepared the audience for 90 minutes of gory reality that would open anyone’s eyes who thought that 16th and 17th century theatre was a harmonic, fun place to be. In 10 stops around the area surrounding The Curtain, from the Fields to Bishopsgate, Jon earned a notable amount of ‘Ugh!’s and ‘Yuck!’s for his detailed stories that embraced violence and ‘villainy justice’ only known from movies. From the relatively harmless roguery of the Dutton brothers, to the deadly fight between Ben Jonson and Gabriel Spenser as well as the painful killing of Christopher Marlowe – the tour definitely broadened the audience’s horizons of the reality in Shakespeare’s time and culture. The tour ended at the Cross Keys – a pub nowadays, but an Inn during Shakespeare’s times, where the lastly mentioned rogue of the tour, Richard Tarleton, performed.  

Jon and James were the perfect match for the purpose of this tour – both open, welcoming, fun to listen to, and even more importantly:  enthusiastic and exceptionally knowledgeable. And it couldn’t have been any more authentic than having a senior archaeologist and a writer and researcher in the area explain the rogues and villains of Elizabethan theatre surrounding The Curtain.