The only surviving timber floorboards where William Shakespeare once performed are “larger than a tennis court” and are “the dry equivalent of the Mary Rose.”
That is according to Tim FitzHigham, the creative director of St George’s Guildham in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, who has for the best part of 18 months been working on a conservation project which will now see theatre work move to a different building on-site as layers of the floorboards are lifted over the coming months.
FitzHigham said the floor is “larger than a tennis court, and it’s all 1419 beams around you. The information that’s coming out of that floor is kind of like the dry equivalent of the Mary Rose; that’s how important that discovery is,” he said.
“Having the whole floor (now) exposed gives us a massive amount of information about the venue’s use over the last 600 years,” he told the Independent today. “We’ve found the food, we found all this stuff down the cracks of the floorboards.”
“We’ve got loads of nutshell, oyster shells, bits of pipe, broken wine bottles, and chicken bones,” FitzHigham said.
Uncovered in September 2023, the rare find, made at the UK’s oldest working theatre, used tree-ring dating and building surveying to verify its origins. At the time, Wood Central reported that the boards had been perfectly preserved for 600 years thanks to “an unusual form of construction.”
As reported by the BBC at the time, “the hugely important discovery” is the largest 15th-century timber floor in the UK and possibly Europe and the sole surviving example of a stage where Shakespeare once acted. Experts were ‘blown away’ by the ‘extraordinary and magical’ discovery, with floorboards uncovered under the existing auditorium during renovations.
The theatre claims Shakespeare acted at the Norfolk venue in 1592 or 1593 when performing companies fled London during the plague: “We have the borough account book from 1592-93, which records that the borough paid Shakespeare’s company to come and play in the venue,” FitzHigham said at the time.
Dr Jonathan Clark, an expert in historical buildings, has been researching the venue and said, “We wanted to open up an area to check, just to see if an earlier floor was surviving here. And lo and behold, we found this,” and points through to a temporary trapdoor.
A couple of inches below the modern floor are what he believes to be boards trodden by the Bard, each 12in (or 30cm) wide and 6in (or 15cm) thick. Using a combination of tree-ring data and a building survey, Dr Clark could date the floor to 1417 and 1430 – which coincided with the original construction of the theatre.
According to Dr Clarke, the floor was locked together and pegged through to massive bridging beams: “We opened up a section of modern flooring and confirmed it was the original floor structure that people would have walked on, including probably Shakespeare.”
“We can date the flooring by the construction type – these boards are pegged to secure them, which is a medieval technique. And they are rebated, which means they have a step in the side to lock into each other.”
Tree-ring dating, known as Dendrochronology, is a scientific method of dating tree rings to the exact year they were formed in a tree. A tree’s growth rate changes in a predictable pattern throughout the year in response to seasonal climate changes, resulting in visible growth rings.
“We know that these (floorboards) were here in 1592, and in 1592, we think Shakespeare is performing in King’s Lynn, so this is likely to be the surface that Shakespeare was walking on.”
“It’s the only upper floor, which is in something of its original state, where he could have been walking, could have been performing,” he says.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, FitzHigham “first heard the tale that Shakespeare had performed at the Guildhall as a kid, but when (he) went back as an adult, it seemed King’s Lynn had forgotten about it.”
The historic building was a religious meeting house in the early 15th century before becoming a theatrical venue extensively used by touring companies. Queen Elizabeth’s Men, a troupe of actors formed at the command of the Tudor Queen in 1583, performed ten times in the late 1500s with Robert Armin, Shakespeare’s leading comic actor, born just one street away from the theatre.
According to a book published in Shakespeare’s lifetime, an audience member at the King’s Lynn Theatre confessed to killing her husband after watching a play about a murder. It is alleged that the incident inspired the famous Murder of Gonzago scene in Hamlet:
“Before I became Creative Director, I had researched the venue’s history. We could demonstrate the town’s connection with Robert Armin and Shakespeare,” FitzHigham said. “A lot of original features remain at the venue that Shakespeare would have been able to see – including the walls, windows and roof timbers. (So) to have the documents around, you can say this is where Shakespeare performed, is remarkable. To have the actual floor he performed on is a different league.”
“As archaeological finds go, this is right up there,” he said at the time, “it is so rare to get a 15th-century floor, and the sheer scale of this is just extraordinary.”
