Oysters and hazelnuts: Elizabethan popcorn
Elizabethan audiences at The Globe and The Rose theaters gnoshed on oysters, mussels, hazelnuts, walnuts, pies and dried fruit while attending plays by the likes of Shakepeare and Marlowe.
The evidence has emerged from the most detailed study ever carried out on a Tudor or early Stuart playhouse. Archaeologists have been analysing the thousands of seeds, pips, stones, nutshell fragments, shellfish remains and fish and animal bones found on the site of the Rose Playhouse on London’s South Bank.
Museum of London Archaeology has just published the findings in The Rose and The Globe: Playhouses of Shakespeare’s Bankside, written by archaeologists Julian Bowsher and Pat Miller.
