Our history
Built in 1587, The Rose was the fifth purpose-built open-air theatre in London, and the first on Bankside.
It stood on the south side of the Thames, in the Liberty of the Clink in Southwark, on land relatively recently reclaimed from the river.
This was an area already rich in other leisure attractions such as taverns, brothels, gaming dens, bowling alleys, and bull and bear baiting arenas.
To learn more about its history, read on…
1587: Beginning – phase 1
The Rose was built by Philip Henslowe, a shrewd local businessman and property developer.
In 1585, he leased part of a garden plot on Bankside called The Little Rose, and then commissioned John Griggs, a carpenter, to construct a new playhouse on the site. It opened for business in 1587.
Its original shape was a circular 14-sided polygon, approximately 72 feet (22 metres) in diameter.
It was framed in wood, with three tiers of seated galleries covered by a thatched roof, which surrounded an open yard that sloped downwards at a 5° angle towards a shallow trapezoid-shaped stage that projected into the yard from the northern side of the inner wall. Because the stage likely had no roof, there was probably no need for any supporting pillars, leaving sight-lines from the yard and galleries entirely clear.
The audience entered the playhouse from Maiden Lane (now called Park Street), crossing over a shallow ditch that ran along the south-side of the property, and paying a penny to enter the yard to stand as groundlings, or more to enter into and sit in the galleries.
Cut-away illustration of the original Rose playhouse, by C. Walter Hodges
1591-2: Expansion – phase 2
The Rose was clearly a success and must have been playing to packed houses, because in 1591-2 Henslowe decided to invest more money in order to increase audience capacity by having the playhouse expanded.
The bays on the northern side were pushed further north and widened out east-west, creating a flattened oval-shape. This allowed the stage to be set further back by six and a half feet (two metres), and stage-posts were added to support a roof covering it.
Relatively little of The Rose’s history was recorded until this time, when, in 1592, Henslowe began keeping an accounts book – now commonly called his Diary.
This was also the year that Henslowe’s step-daughter married the eminent actor, Edward Alleyn. From then on, Alleyn was closely associated with The Rose and its fortunes.
Portraits of actor Edward Alleyn (dated 1626) and his wife Joan, Philip Henslowe’s step-daughter (dated 1596), both artists unknown. (Dulwich Picture Gallery)
Much later, in 1619, Alleyn founded the College of God’s Gift (now Dulwich College), where many of Henslowe’s papers and accounts – including his Diary – have survived.
The Diary details his expenditure on the theatre building from 1592, and lists many of the plays subsequently staged there, along with their takings. There are expenditure records for props and costumes, and payments to dramatists for the commissioning of plays.
Together the Dulwich papers constitute a uniquely rich resource for the study of the Elizabethan stage, enabling us to establish the history of The Rose in far greater detail than for any other playhouse of the time.
From the Dulwich papers we know that The Rose’s repertoire included Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta, and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy – the most popular and influential play of the entire Elizabethan period.
Title pages of three of the plays known to have been performed at The Rose: the 1620 quarto of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus; the 1615 quarto of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy; and the 1594 quarto of the anonymous play A Knack to Know a Knave, whose title page states “as it hath subdrie tymes bene played by ED. ALLEN and his Companie”.
Just over thirty of the plays that are recorded as having been performed at the Rose survive in print, along with another twenty that were also probably or possibly acted there. These include plays by other popular playwrights of the time, such as Robert Greene, George Peele, Thomas Lodge and Thomas Nashe, all of whom wrote for The Rose in its first years.
By 1596, Marlowe, Kyd, Peele and Greene were all dead, and Henslowe’s Diary records a new generation of dramatists regularly writing for The Rose, including Thomas Dekker, Michael Drayton, Anthony Munday, Thomas Heywood, George Chapman, and Ben Jonson.
Shakespeare & The Rose
The engraving of William Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout, that prefaces the First Folio of his works, published in 1623.
William Shakespeare’s involvement with The Rose – both as an actor and as a playwright came at the very beginning of his career.
The earliest surviving records of any of his plays are to be found in Philip Henslowe’s Diary.
In it, Henslowe records takings of £3 and 8 shillings he received for a performance by Lord Sussex’s Men on Thursday 24 January 1594 of a play he called “titus & ondronicus”. There’s little doubt that this refers to Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, his first tragedy, written in collaboration with the older, more experienced playwright George Peele.
A second performance followed the next week, on Tuesday 29 January, where Henslowe took £2 (worth very roughly about £2,000 in today’s money). He received the same amount again when the play was acted for a third time the week after that, on Wednesday 6 February.
That same day Titus was entered into the Stationer’s Register, and was published later that year. Just one copy of this first quarto edition of the play now survives, and was only rediscovered – to general amazement – in the possession of a postal worker in Sweden in 1904. It is now in Washington, D.C., in the Folger Shakespeare Library.
1600-5: Final years and closure
The Rose’s success soon encouraged other playhouses to be built on Bankside – The Swan in 1595, and then The Globe in 1599.
The following year, in January 1600, Henslowe and Alleyn commissioned Peter Street – the same carpenter who had just built The Globe – to construct a new playhouse north of the river in Clerkenwell. They called their new venue The Fortune, and the Admiral’s Men, who had been in residence at The Rose since 1594, moved in.
Writing to the City of London authorities in support of the building of the new playhouse, the Admiral’s Men’s patron, The Earl of Nottingham, had described The Rose as being in a state of “dangerous decay”, but Henslowe’s records show that he continued to rent it out to other playing companies. Pembroke’s Men acted at The Rose in the autumn of 1600, and Worcester’s Men in the summer of 1602.
By 1603, however, The Rose appears to have fallen out of use, when a rapid sequence of events saw all public performances in London suspended – first for the illness, death, and burial of Queen Elizabeth, then for the arrival into the capital of the new King, James I, and then for another outbreak of plague.
When playhouses were finally allowed to reopen again the following year, in 1604, The Rose was not named on the list of permitted venues. Henslowe had attempted to extend the lease of the land it was built on in 1603, but facing a tripling of the rent he instead allowed it to expire in September 1605, and so either before or shortly after this The Rose was very probably demolished and its timbers taken away for reuse elsewhere.
Soon it vanished from the map altogether…
To learn about the rediscovery of the remains of the Rose in 1989, read on.
Detail of John Norden's 1593 Map of London, showing The Rose Playhouse next to a bear-baiting arena.