London’s War of the Rose

LONDON —  To Mr. Anthony Beaumont-Dark, Conservative M.P. from Birmingham, it was no great tragedy if the pilings of an obscure 400-year-old theater had to be re-buried in mud and roofed over with concrete.

After all, Mr. Beaumont-Dark told the House of Commons on Monday, if the great builders of the past had been forced to preserve the footings of “every ancient brothel or theater,” London would still be a pile of Roman rubble.

Progress in today’s London means new office buildings, such as the 13-story affair that was supposed to start this week in Rose Lane, just west of the Southwark Bridge.

But when the previous building on the site was demolished, evidence appeared that, as scholars had long suspected, this was the site of the theater for which Rose Lane had been named centuries ago--the Rose Theatre, built in 1587, where Shakespeare learned his craft, both as an actor and a playwright.

The developer (Imry Merchant Developers) did the responsible thing: They turned the site into a temporary archeological dig. On Monday, though, construction was to resume. A protective layer of sand would be deposited over the remains of the theater, and it would be reburied. Perhaps it could be re-exhumed later, now that its location had been established.

Protectionists and actors howled. Prominent actors, too--performers such as Ian McKellen, Judi Dench and Peggy Ashcroft. They called the newspapers and formed a human chain when the sand trucks chugged up the narrow lane on Sunday evening. Monday, the builder agreed to put off construction for a month and the government agreed to pay them for the delay--adding that this was the only amount of money the government planned to put into the site.

A slightly ambiguous victory for the Save the Rose Committee. And it wasn’t relaxing its vigil at the site on Tuesday morning. “They have acted impeccably--so far!” said actor Robert Holden into his bullhorn, referring to the builders. “Write to your M.P.! Keep them on the right track!”

Up on the Southwark Bridge, a crowd looked down at the remains of the theater, scattered like dinosaur bones at the bottom of a grave. There wasn’t much to see: The vestiges of some pilings, an edging of bricks, a section of mortar floor. It wasn’t much to get excited about, unless you could read its signals.

Actor Patrick Stewart knew exactly what they meant. Stewart plays Capt. Jean-Luc Picard on TV’s “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” He and his wife had just flown home from Los Angeles on holiday, and suddenly he found himself “up to my eyebrows” in the Save the Rose campaign. As a veteran Royal Shakespeare Company actor, he knew that the discovery of the Rose settled questions that actors had been debating for years.

For example, there is a theory that Shakespeare’s plays must have been ranted, so as to hush a large crowd of noisy groundlings standing around the stage. The Rose rebukes this hypothesis.

“Look at how small it was!” Stewart says to the crowd on the bridge. “We’re told that the Globe, Shakespeare’s second theater, was a big house. But the Rose certainly wasn’t--and Shakespeare’s first plays were done for this stage. Those pilings mark the outside walls. The auditorium can’t have been more than 60 feet deep. It’s something that we actors have always felt--that Shakespeare needs intimacy.

“The bricks mark the edge of the stage. Up to now we have thought that Shakespeare’s actors worked on a platform projecting deep into the house. This shows that it curved gently into the house. An actor wouldn’t be working with spectators standing behind him. He could command the house with a look.”

The mortar floor also gives a signal, Stewart said. This was where the groundlings had stood. Scholars have assumed that it was a flat floor with spectators in the back craning their necks to see. The Rose’s “pit” is more like a bowl, a gently-raked space, putting those in the rear on an equal footing with those in the front. A common-sense idea. What is strange is that the scholars assumed that the Elizabethans wouldn’t have thought of it.

Down at the site, actress Carrie Segrave was peering through the chain-link fence decorated with paper roses. She pointed to the wavering line that could be seen towards the edge of the stone floor, a spillway worn by rain dripping from the thatched roof in the protected part of the open-air theater.

“Somehow, that makes it real to me,” she said. “This really was a theater. Shakespeare really acted here.”

What next? Activists are cautiously hopeful either that the builders will put the Rose under glass and incorporate it into a redesigned office block or that--better--the office building will be canceled, and the Rose will inspire a new structure.

“I love Stratford-on-Avon,” said actor Michael Pennington. “But this is worth all of Stratford’s relics put together. This is where you really feel Shakespeare’s presence.”