As a big Shakespeare fangirl (the last scene of The Winter’s Tale makes me cry every damn time I read it, which was fairly inconvenient while I was writing my dissertation) I was pleased to read a bit in Saturday’s Grauniad about his links with Shoreditch, which in fact has a pretty solid theatrical history often overshadowed by Southwark. I’m sure all the edgy artistes currently residing in the area will be happy to hear that:
Elizabethan Shoreditch was little more than a shanty-town, an unsanitary overspill of “poor cottages” and “alleys backward” spreading through the fields and marshes and dissolved monastery gardens outside Bishopsgate. But it was also, because of that connection with the theatres, the Bohemian haunt of Elizabethan London.
I’m looking forward to boho Bard shanty chic! Make a change from skinny jeans and mullets at any rate.
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