London is getting ready to welcome a new museum on Shakespeare and his Elizabethan world. The experience will be brought to life in a new and immersive museum experience opening in Shoreditch, London. The museum is set to open in Spring 2024.
The museum will be located three metres underground and set within the archaeological remains of The Curtain Playhouse – a scheduled ancient monument once home to Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, before they settled at the Globe.
Transporting the visitors to the year 1598
The museum gives a chance to go back in time. The installations will be transporting the visitors to the year 1598 and live a day in the life of the famous English playwright William Shakespeare, soaking in the sights, smells, and sounds of 16th-century London through artefacts and multisensory experiences.
It was at The Curtain Playhouse that some of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, including Romeo & Juliet and Henry V, premiered. As part of the new museum, the remains of the theatre, which were uncovered during excavations by Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) in 2011-2016, will be made accessible to the public for the first time.
In a statement, Harry Parr, co-founder of Bompas & Parr, the studio designing the museum, says, “This will be Shakespeare as you have never experienced it before.”
Heather Knight, Senior Archaeologist at MOLA, said: ‘Leading the excavations on the site of The Curtain, one of London’s earliest and longest-lived playhouses that have transformed our understanding of Early Modern performance, has been an immense privilege and I am very much looking forward to the next chapter in the history of The Curtain when the Museum of Shakespeare opens its doors in 2024.’
The museum will serve as the centrepiece of The Stage, a new development site being delivered by investment firm Cain International.
