Shakespeare's London Theatres

Academic's app explores lost Shakespearean theatres

Everybody knows about the Globe, but Gabriel Egan, DMU's Professor of Shakespeare Studies, has researched widely to find the actual locations of many of the theatres where some of Shakespeare's plays were first performed.

Professor Egan developed a smartphone app which directs users to the specific sites of the theatres dating from 1576 to 1642 and shows visual representations of how they looked 400 years ago. The app also contains several walking tours, which allows people to virtually explore Shakespearean London for the first time. Around 12,000 free copies of the map have been distributed from tourist sites across London and beyond.  

Funded by the Arts Council

The two-year £415,000 project titled ShaLT (Shakespearean London Theatres) was launched at The Victoria and Albert Museum in London on 23 April - the date generally accepted by scholars to be the anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth in 1564 and his death in 1616.

ShaLT is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as a collaboration between Professor Egan's team at DMU (Dr Maurice Hindle, Dr Peter Sillitoe and Meena Toor), fellow Shakespearean theatre expert Professor Andrew Gurr of Reading University, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Prof Egan said: “We always knew which were the important sites but only knew roughly where they were. The University of London archaeology team have been digging in recent years and we can now tell to the exact centimetre where the sites are."