Foreword: The Stage on the Shore

Abstract

In 1599, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men crossed the river. In so doing, they established the premier theater of its day on the banks of the Thames, close to where the Rose already stood. We no longer understand what that must have meant, because the Thames was embanked in the nineteenth century and the Thames Barrier came into operation in 1982. But the river across which audiences were rowed to performances was very different from our own: sometimes there was enough ice for frost fairs to be held upon it, sometimes whales and dolphins swam up it, and it lapped directly at the feet of passers-by; with only one bridge and many boatmen, it was in its own right a populous thoroughfare. It was also a point of arrival and departure for journeys that could sometimes be to what were for the time very exotic destinations indeed; the river was itself, but it was also a gateway to the sea. When Pocahontas died at Gravesend and Marlowe at Deptford, they were both poised on that most fluid of all edges, the cusp between the river and the sea. In one of the period’s most watery-minded plays, Pericles, Dionyza says to Marina,