The Rose theatre – the place in Elizabethan London where one could see Shakespeare and Marlowe performed – may have started life as a bear-baiting arena. This is one of the deductions drawn from this new study of the archive from the excavations of 1989. The authors also present a new model for the theatre’s evolution, offer a fresh reconstruction of the building in its heyday and put in a powerful plea for more archaeological investigation on the ground.
