The chief claim to distinction of Shoreditch lies in the fact that the first theaters of London were built there in the seventeenth century. The Shoreditch Theater was the first real theater to be built in England and was erected within the precincts of Holywell Priory, where the players were outside the jurisdiction of the Lord Mayor, for stage plays were forbidden. Companies of players, however, were springing up all over the country, generally under the protection of some nobleman. Amongst these were the Earl of Leicester's Servants, with James Burbage as their manager. Burbage borrowed - 600 from his father-in-law and built the Shoreditch Theater, a round wooden structure, which was afterwards carefully pulled down by his son Richard and re-erected in Southward as the Globe. Richard was the original creator of most of Shakespeare' s great characters, including Hamlet and appeared to have been one of the greatest actors on the English stage. The site of the Shoreditch Theater has recently been determined by a careful survey and is found to have been partly on the site of a furniture factory at the comer of Curtain Road. The Curtain was a rival theater and was so named from the fact that it had a curtain which shut off the stage from the auditorium. This theater had associations with Burbage and Green players from the town of Stratford-on-Avon, and later with the son of a Stratford butcher, who was a boy at school when the theater was built. His name was William Shakespeare. He came to London as a young man and was employed at the Curtain in minor parts, but his chief work was adapting plays, from which he proceeded to write them. Not far away was another theater, the Fortune, aptly-named, for it was owned by Alleyn who made his money from it. The Shoreditch Theater was built in the shape of ______.