- William Shakespeare, probably arrived in Shoreditch from Stratford-upon-Avon in the late 1580s, when he was in his mid-20s

- Writing several decades after the playwright’s death, the well-informed but notoriously unreliable biographer John Aubrey tells us that Shakespeare “lived in” Shoreditch and it would have been odd if he had set himself up anywhere else

- For an ambitious young English actor-dramatist at the end of the 16th century, there was nowhere better to be

- Christopher Marlowe had lodgings immediately to the south in Norton Folgate while the great comic actor Richard Tarlton lived in Holywell Street with a prostitute named Em Ball. Ben Jonson stabbed a man to death in a duel on nearby Hoxton fields and Robert Greene, the pamphleteer who had an early literary spat with Shakespeare (the “upstart crow”) was also a resident

Times Archive, 1909: Shakespeare in London

Fresh documents on the poet and his theatres

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• Shakespeare revival set for East Enders

- The young Shakespeare was plunging into an area that, then as now, had a reputation for creativity and dedicated hedonism. Today, after decades of decay, Shoreditch is enjoying a revival

- It might not be quite as self-consciously cool as it was in the 1990s, when it nurtured first the Young British Artists and then the new media fashion victims satirised by Charlie Brooker’s apalling comic creation Nathan Barley. But it is at the heart of a resurgent East End, bursting with bars, nightclubs, restaurants, boutiques, delicatessens and start-up businesses, even though it borders many of the most deprived communities

- In Shakespeare’s time the area was little better than a shanty town, a tangle of “poor cottages” and alleyways sprawling over fields, marshes and dissolved monastery gardens to the east of the city walls

- It was rife with plague and other diseases but because it was outside the Lord Mayor of London’s jurisdiction it was also a natural home for brothels and theatres, which the authorities regarded as seditious and dangerous to public health

- In 1576 James Burbage a joiner turned theatre entrepreneur, built The Theatre in Shoreditch to provide a permanent home for his players. It was the first purpose-built venue of its kind in the country.

- Early versions of Hamlet and Richard III are believed to have premiered there, with the boss’s son, Richard Burbage, taking the lead

- By the time that Burbage senior died in 1597, Shakespeare was a leading figure in the company but a dispute with a Puritan landlord marked the end of his time there

- In the dead of night, in the winter of 1598-99, the company dismantled The Theatre, carried it across the frozen Thames and reassembled it piece by piece in Bankside. It would become known as The Globe and bear witness to the full flowering of Shakespeare’s talent

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