Your feature (London museum to use AI to let visitors walk on Shakespeare’s early stage, 19 April) rightly trumpets the impending new museum on the site of the Curtain theatre in Shoreditch, but wrongly credits unequivocally this site as “home to Shakespeare’s earliest performances” and his “main venue before the Globe was built”. The better claim for this is made by the venue known as the Theatre, built one year earlier (1576) a few hundred yards north, by the actor-manager James Burbage and his brother-in-law (and Grocers’ Company member) John Brayne.
This was the first longstanding dedicated performance venue in the country and the first to use the name “theatre”. Burbage’s troupe, the Earl of Leicester’s Men, were based here, as were initially their successors the Admiral’s Men, and eventually the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, led by his son, the great actor Richard Burbage. Shakespeare joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and became the lifelong partner of and writer for Burbage Jr.
