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Shakespeare lived and worked in London for 25 years? His life was not always easy and pleasant. He had to go to the theatre in the morning to rehearse, then again in the afternoon to act. In the evening and on his days off, he had to make changes in old plays, and write new ones for the company. All in all, he wrote 37 plays.

At that time playwrights wrote for a definite theatrical company and the theatre became the owner of the play. Theatres did not want their plays to be published – they did not want other theatres to produce them. They wanted the public to come to the playhouse and not to read the script at home.

Shakespeare's plays were very popular and dishonest publishers tried to steal them. They sent stenographers to performances of the plays, to write down the lines as they heard them from the stage. Sometimes, publishers sent several men to see a play again and again, to try to memorize the lines of the different actors and write them down.

About london theatres drury lane theatre

This is London's most famous theatre, and the oldest still in use. The first theatre on this site was built in 1662. Known as “the theatre Royal in Bridges Street”, it opened on 7 May 1663. The whole theatre was about the same size as the stage of the present Drury Lane; the pit benches were covered in green cloth, and the floor was steeply raked so that people at the back could converse with the occupants of the boxes behind. For ten years the theatre prospered, in spite of having to be closed on account of. plague from June 1665 to Nov. 1666.

On the night of 25 June 1672 the theatre was partly destroyed by fire, with the loss of the entire wardrobe and stock of scenery.

The new theatre, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, was larger than the first theatre. It opened (as the theatre Royal in Drury Lane) on 26 March 1674. On 5 May 1733 a riot took place. It was caused by the abolition of the custom of allowing free admission to the gallery for footmen attending their masters.

In 1742 Garrick made his first appearance at Drury Lane Theatre.

Drury Lane has its ghost, an eighteenth-century gentleman in a long grey riding cloak, riding boots, sword, three cornered hat, and powdered hair, who walks in at one wall of the upper circle and out at the other, but only at a matinee, and when the house is full. He may have some connection with the skeleton found bricked up in one of the walls, with a dagger in its ribs – the murderer or the murdered?

Haymarket theatre

The first theatre on this site was built in 1720 by a carpenter named John Potter who erected a small theatre on the site of an inn called “The King's Head”.

The present Haymarket, designed by Nash, was built in 1820 and opened on 4 July 1821. The Haymarket was the last theatre in London to give up candles and to install gas lightning.

Covent garden theatre

There has been a theatre on this site since 1732 when the first Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, was built on a piece of land which had formerly been part of a convent garden (hence the name).

In 1784 and 1792 the theatre was so extensively altered that it may be said to have been virtually rebuilt.

On 30 September 1808 the theatre was burnt down, twenty-three firemen losing their lives. In this fire perished Hendel's organ and the manuscript scores of some of his operas, which had been produced at Covent Garden in 1730s and 1750s. A new theatre, designed by Robert Smirke and modelled on the Temple of Minerva on the Acropolis, arose on the site and opened on 18 September 1809.

Between 1809 and 1821 most of the famous actors of the day, and many singers appeared at Covent Garden as did famous pantomimists.

In 1842 the theatre fell on hard times, and was finally closed to reopen in 1847, after expensive alterations, as the Royal Italian Opera House. From this time the story of Covent Garden is the story of opera in London, and it ceased to be a home of “legitimite” drama. On 5 March 1856 it again burnt down, and the present theatre, designed by Sir Edward M. Barry, was built in six months.