Part I

, with notes on p. lxxxix by H. B. Wheatley, reprinted by L. T. Soc. in _Record_, ii); (_h_) _Delaram Group_, perspective views as backgrounds to portrait (_c._ 1616) of James I by F. Delaram (1620), reproduced by W. Martin in _Surrey A. Colls._ xxiii. 186, and other portraits probably based on some original of _c._ 1603; (_i_) _Hondius Group_, (i) drawing by P. D. Hondius (1610) in J. Speed, _Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain_ (1611), as inset to map of Britain (_L. T. Record_, ii, with notes by T. F. Ordish; Baker, _f. p._), (ii) engraving on title-page of R. Baker, _Chronicle_ (1643), reproduced by Martin in _Surrey A. Colls._ xxiii. 187, (iii) engraving on title-page of H. Holland, _Herwologia Anglica_ (1620), (iv) engraving of triumphal arch at coronation entry of James I by W. Kip in S. Harrison (cf. ch. xxiv), _The Arches of Triumph_ (1604), all perhaps based on the same original or survey; (_k_) _Visscher_, engraving in perspective by Nikolaus Janssen Visscher (1616), ‘Amstelodami, ex officina Judoci Hondii’, with mutilated text from Camden’s _Britannia_, reproduced from unique copy in Brit. Mus. (L. T. Soc. iv, with notes by T. F. Ordish in _L. T. Record_, vi; also W. Martin in _Surrey A. Colls._ xxiii. 188, and in Ordish, _Shakespeare’s London_, _f. p._ and elsewhere); (_l_) _Merian Group_, (i) engraving in perspective by M. Merian in J. L. Gottfried, _Neuwe Archontologia Cosmica_ (1638), 290, reproduced by Martin, 191, and Adams, 256, and copied in (ii) _f. p._ to James Howell, _Londinopolis_ (1657), reproduced by Baker, 154, and (iii) R. Wilkinson, _Londina Illustrata_ (1819); (_m_) _‘Ryther’ Group_, (i) engraving in very slight perspective from drawing unfinished as regards the Bankside in Crace Collection, No. 32, without date, imprint, or indication of authorship, reproduced by W. J. Loftie, _History of London_, ii. 282, C. L. Kingsford, _Chronicles of London_, (1905) _f. p._, and Baker, 36, 125, 135, and ascribed to Augustine Ryther in 1604, but probably of about 1636–45 (cf. _4 N. Q._ ix. 95; _6 N. Q._ xii. 361, 393; _7 N. Q._ iii. 110; vi. 297; vii. 498) in view of (ii) another version in Crace Coll., No. 31, with the Bankside complete, bearing the imprint of ‘Cornelis Danckerts grauer of maps’ in Amsterdam (_c._ 1631–56), and possibly by Hollar, who worked for Danckerts, and was in England 1636–45, (iii) map by T. Porter (_c._ 1666), based on (i) with later additions (reproduced L. T. Soc. v); (_n_) _Hollar_, engraving in perspective by W. Hollar (in London 1635–43), published by Cornelius Danckerts in 1647 (L. T. Soc. xix; section by Martin in _Surrey A. Colls._ xxiii. 194); (_o_) _Faithorne and Newcourt_, engraving in conventional perspective by William Faithorne from drawing by Richard Newcourt, published in 1658 (L. T. Soc. xviii; Mitton, vii). Of the various maps of post-conflagration London the most useful are that of Leeke and Hollar (_c._ 1666), of which a section is reproduced by Martin in _Surrey A. Colls._ xxiii. 191, and those of John Ogilby and W. Morgan (1677, Mitton, viii), John Ogilby and W. Morgan (1682, L. T. Soc. xv), and John Rocque (1746, L. T. Soc. xxxiv, xxxv, xxxvii; Mitton, ix; section in Martin, _ut supra_, 197). Rendle, _Bankside_, has attempted to indicate the sites of the Bankside theatres upon a reconstructed map based on Rocque, and Martin in _Surrey A. Colls._ xxiii. 155, 202, gives parts of the Bankside area as it now stands from the Ordnance Survey map (1896) and a plan of the Anchor Brewery (1909).]

A. INTRODUCTION

The detailed notices, which will form the greater part of this chapter, may with advantage be prefaced with some general observations upon the historical sequence of the theatres and their distribution at different periods over the London area. The earlier Tudor London knew no theatre, in the sense of a building specially planned and maintained for public dramatic performances, although Yarmouth had its ‘game-house’ by 1538, and a _theatrum_ at Exeter was the scene of satirical farces far back in the fourteenth century. The miracle plays, not in London processional, were given in the open air, and probably on temporary scaffolds. Similar stages may sometimes have been used for the interludes, but these were ordinarily represented in the winter-time, and sought the kindly shelter of a hall.[1019] In the provision of specialized buildings, the drama appears to have been anticipated by the ruder sport of baiting. Höfnagel’s pre-Elizabethan map already shows on the Southwark side of the river the two rings, with open centres and roofed seats for spectators, which are repeated later on by Agas and by Smith. They stand in yards or gardens lined with dog-kennels. One is lettered ‘The Bowll bayting’, the other ‘The beare bayting’. When the first Elizabethan theatres were built in 1576, it was the hall on the one hand, and the ring on the other, which determined the general structure of the two types of auditorium that came simultaneously into being.[1020] The ‘private’ house, roofed and lit, and with its seats arranged in tiers along three sides of a long room, and the ‘public’ house, generally circular, with covered stage and galleries, and a central yard or ‘pit’ open to the day, co-existed for more than half a century, and finally merged in the post-Restoration type of theatre which has come down to our own day. The distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public’ is an unessential one, depending probably upon some difference in the methods of paying for admission necessitated by the regulations of the City or the Privy Council.[1021] The performances in all the houses were public in the ordinary sense. There was, however, another important factor, besides the baiting ring, which greatly affected the structure of the open-air theatre. This was the inn-yard. Long before 1576, interludes had been given in public, as well as in the private halls of the great, and even the need for some kind of permanent, or quasi-permanent, installation had been felt. No doubt there were halls in London which could be hired. The keeper of the Carpenters’ Hall in Shoreditch was prosecuted towards the end of Henry VIII’s reign for procuring a Protestant interlude ‘to be openly played’.[1022] Fees for the letting of Trinity Hall for plays occur among the ‘casuall recepts’ of the churchwardens of St. Botolph without Aldersgate in 1566–7.[1023] A jest-book of 1567 records a play at Northumberland Place.[1024] But an even more convenient hospitality was afforded by the great court-yards of the City inns, where there was sack and bottle-ale to hand, and, as the Puritans averred, chambers ready for deeds of darkness to be done, when the play was over.[1025] In these yards, approached by archways under the inn buildings from one or more streets, and surrounded by galleries with external staircases giving access to the upper floors, an audience could quickly gather, behold at their ease, and escape payment with difficulty. The actors could be accommodated with a tiring-room on the ground floor, and perform as on a natural stage between the pillars supporting the galleries. An upper gallery could be used to vary the scene. The first performances in London inns upon record were at the Saracen’s Head, Islington, and the Boar’s Head, Aldgate, both in 1557.[1026] By the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign the use of them was normal. Plays ‘in hostels and taverns’ were specified for prohibition by the proclamation of April 1559, and the City regulations of 1574 are clearly aimed at the control of the ‘greate innes, havinge chambers and secrete places adjoyninge to their open stagies and gallyries’, and impose obligations for the sake of good order upon innkeepers and tavern-keepers in the forefront of those regarded as likely to harbour plays.[1027] It is not reading too much between the lines to suggest that the owners of particular houses specially laid themselves out to secure the attraction of public entertainments, entered into regular contracts with players, and probably even undertook structural alterations which in fact converted their yards into little less than permanent theatres.[1028] We have, indeed, the record of a trade dispute about the workmanship of play-scaffolds at the Red Lion in Stepney as far back as 1567. The Red Lion stood outside the jurisdiction of the City. Within it, and so far as we can judge, much more important in the history of the stage were the Bell and the Cross Keys, both in Gracechurch Street, the Bull in Bishopsgate Street, and the Bel Savage on Ludgate Hill. No one of these four is in fact mentioned by name as a play-house earlier than 1575, and although they must have been hard hit by the regulations of 1574, it is clear that they did not go altogether out of use, especially during the winter, when climatic conditions rendered the suburbs unattractive, for another twenty years. Stockwood, in 1578, speaks of six or eight ‘ordinarie places’ where plays were then performed.[1029] Nevertheless the action of the City, and the enterprise of James Burbadge, whose descendants claimed for him the honour of being ‘the first builder of playhowses’, led to a shifting of the dramatic focus. The Theatre and the Curtain, both built in or about 1576, stood in ‘the fields’ to the north of London proper, and were perhaps soon followed by Newington Butts on the south side of the river, beyond St. George’s Fields; while the Blackfriars, adapted in the same year (1576) by Richard Farrant to house the performances of children, occupied an old monastic building in the precinct of a ‘liberty’ which, although within the walls, was largely exempt from the jurisdiction of the Corporation. This became the home of the Children of the Chapel, while the Paul’s boys played in their own ‘song-school’, either the church of St. Gregory or some other building in the neighbourhood of St. Paul’s. How long this arrangement had existed, or whether any company of children had played in public at all before the date of Farrant’s experiment, we do not know. From 1576 onwards, it is the Theatre and the Curtain which have to bear the brunt of the Puritan attack, and the luxury of these, as compared with the primitive accommodation of the inn-yards, arouses a special indignation. ‘The sumptuous Theatre houses, a continual monument of Londons prodigalitie and folly’, wails Thomas White in 1577. Stockwood in 1578 discommends ‘the gorgeous playing place erected in the fieldes’; and William Harrison, perhaps about the same time, finds it ‘an evident token of a wicked time when plaiers wexe so riche that they can build such houses’.[1030] Presently the theatres became notable amongst the sights which foreign travellers must see in London. Lupold von Wedel in 1584 says nothing of them, although he records the baiting and its rings.[1031] But they are noticed in the following year by Samuel Kiechel, a merchant of Ulm, who writes:[1032]

‘Comedies are given daily. It is particularly mirthful to behold, when the Queen’s comedians act, but annoying to a foreigner who does not know the language, that he understands nothing. There are some peculiar houses, which are so made as to have about three galleries over one another, inasmuch as a great number of people always enters to see such an entertainment. It may well be that they take as much as from 50 to 60 dollars [£10 to £12] at once, especially when they act anything new, which has not been given before, and double prices are charged. This goes on nearly every day in the week; even though performances are forbidden on Friday and Saturday, it is not observed.’

The Theatre and the London inns were still the chief playing-places, when at some date between 1576 and 1596 William Lambarde illustrated his account of the pilgrimages to Boxley, by explaining that those who visited the shrine did not get off scot-free--

‘no more than such as goe to Parisgardein, the Bell Sauage, or Theatre, to beholde Beare baiting, Enterludes, or Fence play, can account of any pleasant spectacle, unlesse they first pay one pennie at the gate, another at the entrie of the Scaffolde, and the thirde for a quiet standing.’[1033]

Paris Garden was the generic name given to the successive places for bear-baiting which lay on the Surrey side of the river, not in Southwark proper, which was in the jurisdiction of the City, but in the Liberty of the Clink, which stretched in a westerly direction along the Bankside, or still farther to the west, in the Manor of Paris Garden itself. In Surrey, no less than in London, plays had established themselves at an early date. A performance was going on in Southwark, while the priests of St. Saviour’s sang _Dirige_ for Henry VIII’s soul in 1547.[1034] The Privy Council ordered the Surrey justices to suppress plays in the Borough and the adjoining places during 1578; and it seems probable that a regular play-house had been built south of the river at a date not much later than that of the Theatre itself. It stood far back behind Southwark, in the village of Newington, divided from the river by St. George’s Fields. The distance and the bad roads were against it; and it was not until the Rose was built in the Clink about 1587, that the Bankside became a serious rival to the ‘fields’ in the north as the home of theatres. The Swan, in Paris Garden, was built in 1595. Newington is too far to the south to appear in the maps, but Norden’s map of 1593 shows two round buildings, standing between Bankside and an unnamed road, which may safely be identified with that called Maiden Lane. One is lettered ‘The Beare howse’, the other, more to the east and the south, ‘The play howse’; and this must clearly be the Rose.

In 1596 the City appear to have at last obtained the assent of the Privy Council to the complete exclusion of plays from the area of their jurisdiction. This is probably the proceeding described, with no precise indication of date, in the following passage from Richard Rawlidge’s _A Monster Lately Found out and Discovered, or the Scourging of Tipplers_ (1628):[1035]

‘_London_ hath within the memory of man lost much of hir pristine lustre, ... by being ... filled with ... sinnes, which ... are ... maintained, in Play-houses, Ale-houses, Bawdy-houses, Dising-houses, ... All which houses, and traps for Gentlemen, and others, of such Receipt, were formerly taken notice of by many Citizens, and well disposed graue Gentlemen ... wherevpon some of the pious magistrates made humble suit to the late Queene Elizabeth of ever-liuing memorie, and her priuy Counsaile, and obteined leaue from her Majesty to thrust those Players out of the Citty and to pull downe the Dicing houses: which accordingly was affected, and the Play-houses in _Gracious street_, _Bishops-gate-street_, nigh _Paules_, that on _Ludgate_ hill, the _White-Friars_ were put down, and other lewd houses quite supprest within the Liberties, by the care of those religious senators, ... and surely had all their successors followed their worthy stepps, sinne would not at this day haue beene so powerfull, and raigning as it is.’

The play-houses in Gracious or Gracechurch Street, Bishopsgate Street, and Ludgate Hill were presumably the Bell and the Cross Keys, the Bull, and the Bel Savage. By the house ‘nigh Paul’s’ Rawlidge possibly meant the choir song-school; but in fact there had been no plays by the Paul’s boys since 1590. If there was really a Whitefriars house at so early a date, this is the only notice preserved of it. It may be suspected that Rawlidge confused it with the Blackfriars, which James Burbadge was apparently prevented, upon representations by the City, from reopening in 1596. The claim of the City to exercise any control over the old religious precincts of the Blackfriars and the Whitefriars was a doubtful one; and although they ultimately secured jurisdiction, they were not able to prevent the so-called ‘private’ theatres from establishing themselves in these ‘liberties’.[1036] With these exceptions, however, and possibly that of the Boar’s Head, which seems to have been used for a few years after 1602, but was more likely just outside the bars, 1596 probably saw the last of playing within the actual gates of the City.

Londoners had now to look wholly to the suburbs for their dramatic entertainment. Prince Lewis of Anhalt-Cöthen found four theatres in 1596.[1037] These were doubtless the Theatre and the Curtain on the north and the Rose and the Swan on the south of the river. The Newington house was still used in 1594, but even before that had long been out of fashion. It was probably also about 1596 that John de Witt wrote his _Observations Londinenses_. He too mentioned the four theatres, together with the baiting house, and was particularly struck by the newest, and as he avers, the largest and fairest of them, the Swan, of the interior of which he attached a rough sketch to his manuscript. This manuscript is lost, but fortunately an extract survives, copied into a commonplace book by Arend van Buchell of Utrecht. The following is the complete text:[1038]

EX OBSERVATIONIBUS LONDINENSIBUS JOHANNIS DE WITT.

De phano D. Pauli. Huic Paulino phano adheret locus ab asservandis sacratioribus vestimentis Sacristi dictus, omnino observatione dignus, quippe quo DIANAE delubrum fuisse ferunt. Sacellum est rotundum, hemyphericum, concameratum, cuius structura Romanam antiquitatem referre videtur. Aiunt cum fundamenta templi iacerentur effossam ante huius aediculae fores innumeram cervinorum capitum copiam; inde colligi Dianae sacrificia (cui cervis litabatur) ibi olim peracta esse eique hanc aedem sacratam fuisse; in eodem phano sunt epitaphia et sepulcra varia praeter ea quae alio loco a me notata sunt, Guilelmi Herberti Penbrochiae comitis Walliae praesidis qui obijt A^o aetat. lxiii Christi vero 1569.

Ibidem in aede Westmonasteriensi sunt monumenta cum suis elogiis: Guill. Thynne armigeri ex antiqua Bottevillorum familia, Joannis Thynne fratris qui obijt 14 Martii 1584, item Joannis Bourgh Duisburgi gubernatoris A^o 1596.

Amphiteatra Londinij sunt iv visendae pulcritudinis quae a diversis intersigniis diuersa nomina sortiuntur: in iis varia quotidie scaena populo exhibetur. Horum duo excellentiora vltra Tamisim ad meridiam sita sunt, a suspensis signis ROSA et Cygnus nominata: Alia duo extra vrbem ad septentrionem sunt, viâ quâ itur per Episcopalem portam vulgariter Biscopgat nuncupatam. Est etiam quintum, sed dispari [vsu?] et structura, bestiarum concertationi destinatum, in quo multi vrsi, tauri, et stupendae magnitudinis canes, discretis caueis & septis aluntur, qui [_drawing occupies rest of page_] ad pugnam adseruantur, iocundissimum hominibus spectaculum praebentes. Theatrorum autem omnium prestantissimum est et amplissimum id cuius intersignium est cygnus (vulgo te theatre off te cijn [off te swan]),[1039] quippe quod tres mille homines in sedilibus admittat, constructum ex coaceruato lapide pyrritide (quorum ingens in Britannia copia est) ligneis suffultum columnis quae ob illitum marmoreum colorem, nasutissimos quoque fallere possent. Cuius quidem formam quod Romani operis vmbram videatur exprimere supra adpinxi.

Narrabat idem se vidisse in Brittannia apud Abrahamum de lyndeley [?] mercatorem Alberti Dureri omnia opera cartacea elegantissima et absolutissima.

The account of Paul Hentzner, who was in London from 31 August to 8 September 1598, lays less stress upon the theatres than upon the baiting, and is not altogether consistent with that of de Witt as to the structure of the Swan, which was the nearest house to the moorings of the royal barge at the west end of Paris Garden.[1040] Hentzner writes:

‘Sunt porro Londini extra Urbem Theatra aliquot, in quibus Histriones Angli Comoedias & Tragoedias singulis fere diebus, in magna hominum frequentia agunt, quas variis etiam saltationibus, suavissima adhibita musica, magno cum populi applausu finire solent. Non longe ab uno horum theatrorum, quae omnia lignea sunt, ad Thamesim navis est regia, quae duo egregia habet conclavia, fenestris perlucidis, picturis & sculpturis eleganter exornata, in sicco & quidem sub tecto collocata, propterea, ut a pluviis & coeli injuria immunis sit.’

Hentzner then describes the baiting.[1041] He concludes:

‘Utuntur in hisce spectaculis sicut & alibi, ubicunque locorum sint Angli, herba Nicotiana, quam Americano idiomate Tabacam nuncupant (Paetum alii dicunt) hoc modo frequentissime; Fistulae in hunc finem ex argilia factae, orificio posteriori, dictam herbam probe exiccatam, ita ut in pulverem facile redigi possit, immittunt, & igne admoto accendunt, unde fumus ab anteriori parte ore attrahitur, qui per nares rursum, tanquam per infurnibulum exit, & phlegma ac capitis defluxiones magna copia secum educit. Circumferuntur insuper in hisce theatris varii fructus venales, ut poma, pyra, nuces & pro ratione temporis, etiam vinum & cerevisia.’[1042]

It is perhaps natural that foreign visitors should be more struck by the English theatres at a time when the English stage was serving as a model to northern Europe, than was the case with a native chronicler of grave and slightly Puritanic tendencies. John Stowe, when he published his _Survey of London_ in 1598, had nothing to say of the Bankside houses, and but little of those in Middlesex. After writing of the miracle plays, he says:

‘Of late time in place of those Stage playes, hath beene vsed Comedies, Tragedies, Enterludes, and Histories, both true and fayned: For the acting whereof certaine publike places as the Theater, the Curtine, &c., haue been erected’ [_in margin_, ‘Theater and Curten for Comedies & other shewes’].[1043]

In another place, at the end of a description of Holywell, he adds:

‘And neare therevnto are builded two publique houses for the

## acting and shewe of Comedies, Tragedies, and Histories, for

recreation. Whereof the one is called the Courtein, the other the Theatre: both standing on the South-west side towards the field.’[1044]

Even these scanty references were pruned in the second edition of 1603, after the Theatre had disappeared at the end of 1598 and the Chamberlain’s men had left the Curtain. And of the Globe, built during the earlier half of 1599, to which they migrated, Stowe takes no notice. The Globe, however, appears, although unnamed, together with two other theatres, of which one must be the Curtain, in the next foreign account, a very full one by Thomas Platter of Basle, who was in England from 18 September to 20 October 1599.[1045] I translate the passage, of which sufficient use has not been made by historians of the stage:

‘After dinner on the 21st of September, at about two o’clock, I went with my companions over the water, and in the strewn roof-house saw the tragedy of the first Emperor Julius with at least fifteen characters very well acted. At the end of the comedy they danced according to their custom with extreme elegance. Two in men’s clothes and two in women’s gave this performance, in wonderful combination with each other. On another occasion, I also saw after dinner a comedy, not far from our inn, in the suburb; if I remember right, in Bishopsgate. Here they represented various nations, with whom on each occasion an Englishman fought for his daughter, and overcame them all except the German, who won the daughter in fight. He then sat down with him, and gave him and his servant strong drink, so that they both got drunk, and the servant threw his shoe at his master’s head and they both fell asleep. Meanwhile the Englishman went into the tent, robbed the German of his gains, and thus he outwitted the German also. At the end they danced very elegantly both in English and in Irish fashion. And thus every day at two o’clock in the afternoon in the city of London two and sometimes three comedies are performed, at separate places, wherewith folk make merry together, and whichever does best gets the greatest audience. The places are so built, that they play on a raised platform, and every one can well see it all. There are, however, separate galleries and there one stands more comfortably and moreover can sit, but one pays more for it. Thus anyone who remains on the level standing pays only one English penny: but if he wants to sit, he is let in at a further door, and there he gives another penny. If he desires to sit on a cushion in the most comfortable place of all, where he not only sees everything well, but can also be seen, then he gives yet another English penny at another door. And in the pauses of the comedy food and drink are carried round amongst the people, and one can thus refresh himself at his own cost.

‘The comedians are most expensively and elegantly apparelled, since it is customary in England, when distinguished gentlemen or knights die, for nearly the finest of their clothes to be made over and given to their servants, and as it is not proper for them to wear such clothes but only to imitate them, they give them to the comedians to purchase for a small sum.

‘What they can thus produce daily by way of mirth in the comedies, every one knows well, who has happened to see them

## acting or playing.’

Platter then describes the Cockpit and the baiting. He concludes:

‘With such and many other pastimes besides the English spend their time; in the comedies they learn what is going on in other lands, and this happens without alarm, husband and wife together in a familiar place, since for the most part the English do not much use to travel, but are content ever to learn of foreign matters at home, and ever to take their pastime.’

A year later than Platter, another traveller thus describes a visit to the Bankside:[1046]

‘1600 die Lunae 3 Julii. Audivimus comoediam Anglicam; theatrum ad morem antiquorum Romanorum constructum ex lignis, ita formatum ut omnibus ex partibus spectatores commodatissime singula videre possint. In reditu transivimus pontem magnificis aedificiis ornatum e quibus uni adhuc affixa cernuntur capita quorundam comitum et nobilium, qui laesae Majestatis rei supplicio affecti sunt.’

When Lewis of Anhalt and de Witt wrote, there were four theatres, exclusive of the City inn-yards, which were probably already closed. Platter found two, and sometimes three, performances being given daily. This agrees with the evidence available from other sources. After the scandal of _The Isle of Dogs_ in 1597, the Privy Council decreed a limitation of the London companies to two, the Chamberlain’s men and the Admiral’s. The former played at the Curtain until 1599, when they destroyed the Theatre and built the Globe. The latter played at the Rose until 1600, when they migrated to the newly built Fortune. But it is clear that the ordinance of the Privy Council was not strictly observed. An intruding company was playing in February 1598, either at the Theatre or the Swan. Platter’s three houses in 1599 included the Curtain, together presumably with the Globe and the Rose. When the Council sanctioned the opening of the Fortune in 1600, they understood that the Curtain was to be ‘either ruinated or applied to some other good use’, but it was still the scene of plays in 1601. Finally, in the spring of 1602 Elizabeth ordered the Council to tolerate a third company, that of the Earl of Worcester, Master of the Horse. This was then playing at the Boar’s Head, a short-lived house of which practically nothing is known; in the autumn it moved to the Rose. The Swan possibly went out of use, except for the occasional performances of acrobats and fencers, or of amateurs. On the other hand, Lord Hertford’s men were in London during the winter of 1602–3, in addition to the three privileged companies, and they must have practised somewhere.

To the above must be added, for the closing years of Elizabeth’s reign, the ‘private’ houses; Paul’s reopened in the winter of 1599, the Blackfriars in that of 1600. Of these Platter knows nothing, but Duke Philip Julius of Stettin-Pomerania, in the autumn of 1602, in addition to performances at the Fortune and another theatre, saw also, doubtless at the Blackfriars, the _Kinder-comoedia_. The following is an extract from the diary of the visit kept by the duke’s secretary, Frederic Gerschow:[1047]

‘13 [September] On the thirteenth a comedy was played, of the taking of Stuhl-Weissenberg, firstly by the Turks, and thereafter back again by the Christians.

14. In the afternoon was played a tragicomedy of Samson and the half tribe of Benjamin.’[1048]

On 16 September the duke and his retinue saw the baiting. On 18 September they visited the Blackfriars, and Gerschow wrote an account of the organization of the Children of the Chapel and of the nature of their performances.[1049]

The Globe and the Fortune continued in regular use, as the houses of the King’s men, and the Prince’s men respectively, during the new reign, and endured to the closing of the theatres in 1642. Each was destroyed by fire and rebuilt; the former in 1613, the latter in 1621. Queen Anne’s men at first used the Boar’s Head and the Curtain, but migrated from the Boar’s Head to the Red Bull, which had been built by 1606. This became their principal house, and they cannot be shown to have used the Curtain after 1609. These were the only companies of men players in London during 1603–8, and the Globe, the Fortune, and the Red Bull are obviously the ‘three houses’ whose rivalry is referred to by Dekker in the following passage from his _Raven’s Almanack_ of 1608:[1050]

‘Another ciuill warre doe I finde wil fal betweene players, who albeit at the beginning of this fatall yeare, they salute one another like sworne brothers, yet before the middle of it, shall they wish one anothers throate cut for two pence. The contention of the two houses, (the gods bee thanked) was appeased long agoe, but a deadly warre betweene the three houses will I feare burst out like thunder and lightning. For it is thought that Flag will be aduanced (as it were in mortall defiance against Flag), numbers of people will also bee mustred and fall to one side or other, the drums and trumpets must be sounded, partes will then (euen by the chiefest players) bee taken: words will passe to and fro: speeches cannot so bee put vp, handes will walke, an alarum be giuen, fortune must fauour some, or els they are neuer able to stand: the whole world must sticke to others, or else al the water in the theames wil not serue to carrie those away that will bee put to flight, and a third faction must fight like wilde Buls against Lyons, or else it will be in vaine to march vp into the field.’

There were, however, more than three London companies about 1608. M. de la Boderie tells us how one fell into disgrace during that year, and how four others subscribed to buy off the consequent inhibition of plays.[1051] The reconciliation is simple. Dekker has in mind only the ‘public’ and not the ‘private’ houses. Of these Paul’s was closed in 1606; it was made worth its Master’s while not to reopen it. The Blackfriars was used by the successive boy companies, known generically as the Queen’s Revels, until 1608 or 1609, when it passed to the King’s men, who thereafter maintained it as a winter house, to supplement the Globe. The Queen’s Revels then moved to the Whitefriars, a private house built at some time before 1608, and occupied in that year by the ephemeral company of the King’s Revels.

An increase in the number of adult companies now made fresh demands upon theatrical house-room. It is presumably the Duke of York’s men who were described at Leicester in 1608 as ‘the Princes players of the White Chapple, London’. The description suggests that they used the Boar’s Head, but if so, nothing more is heard of it, and it is conceivable that they soon succeeded to the Curtain. The Lady Elizabeth’s, who came into existence in 1611, are traceable at the Swan, which Henslowe may have taken over to succeed the Rose, disused, if not pulled down, by 1606. The following lines are in John Heath’s _Two Centuries of Epigrammes_ (1610), but may of course, especially as the Red Bull is not named, date back to the period when the Curtain was still in the hands of the Queen’s men:

Momus would act the fooles part in a play, And cause he would be exquisite that way, Hies me to London, where no day can passe But that some play-house still his presence has; Now at the Globe with a judicious eye Into the Vice’s action doth he prie. Next to the Fortune, where it is a chaunce But he marks something worth his cognisance. Then to the Curtaine, where, as at the rest, He notes that action downe that likes him best.[1052]

A foreign traveller again gives us help. The relation of the visit of Prince Lewis Frederick of Württemberg in 1610 merely records that he went to the Globe, and Justus Zingerling, who was in London at about the same date, has the briefest note of the existence of ‘theatra comoedorum et in quibus ursi et tauri cum canibus committuntur’.[1053] But the itinerary of Prince Otto of Hesse-Cassel in the following year is more expansive. The compiler writes:

‘In London there are seven theatres, where daily, except on Sundays, comedies are performed, whereof the most important is the Globe, which lies over the water. The theatre, where the children play, is on the hither side of the water; they play at three o’clock, but only from Michaelmas to Easter. Here it only costs half a shilling to enter, but for the other places at least half a crown. These play only with lights, and are the best company in London.’[1054]

In addition to the Globe and the Whitefriars, the tale of seven theatres is probably made up by the Blackfriars, the Fortune, the Red Bull, the Curtain, and the Swan.

Henslowe’s correspondence with Daborne shows that he still had a ‘publique howse’, probably the Swan, in December 1613, and also that in June of that year his company was only just thinking of ‘comming over’ for a summer season, presumably from the Whitefriars, as he had recently carried out an amalgamation between the Lady Elizabeth’s men and the Queen’s Revels.[1055] In the following year occurred an episode which curiously emphasizes the constant shifting of the focus of theatrical interest during the whole of the period with which we are concerned. Originally stageland was in the heart of the City itself. With the building of the first theatres, it was transferred to the Fields of the northern suburbs. During the last decade of the sixteenth century the Fields in their turn gave way to the Bankside. The Rose, the Swan, and the Globe successively made their appearance, and the vestry of Southwark began to echo the earlier outcry of the City against the iniquities of players, until their mouths were stopped with tithes. But the transpontine period proved a brief one. Hardly was the Globe up, before Alleyn’s choice of a site for the Fortune set the fashion veering again, and opened up a new theatrical region in the western suburbs. This was convenient for the Court and the great houses along the Strand and for the lawyers in the Temple and at Westminster, as well as for the City proper, and its tradition has endured until quite recent years. The Red Bull and the Whitefriars followed in the same area. On the other hand, the Rose had vanished, and the King’s men, although they did not desert the Globe, acknowledged the change of venue by taking up their winter quarters in the Blackfriars hard by. One result was that men who had ridden to the Fields and been ferried to the Bankside, now walked or drove in their coaches to the theatre door. During the spring of 1614 things were probably at their worst. Both the Globe, after its fire, and the Hope were still in the builder’s hands, and if the Lady Elizabeth’s lingered again at the Whitefriars, there can have been no plays across the water at all. The watermen, who twenty years before had exercised the influence of their patron, the Lord Admiral, to induce the Privy Council to revoke an inhibition on the Bankside houses, sent up a bitter cry of protest. John Taylor, the ‘water-poet’, whom they chose as their spokesman, tells the story.[1056] A petition to the King was prepared, to the effect that no play-house might be permitted ‘in London or in Middlesex, within four miles of the City on that side of the Thames’, and with this Taylor pursued James to Theobalds, Newmarket, and Royston. It recited the service done by watermen in the navy during the Armada invasion of 1588 and in such expeditions as those of Essex in 1596 and 1597. And it proceeded:

‘Afterwards the players began to play on the Bankside and to leave playing in London and Middlesex (for the most part), then there went such great concourse of people by water that the small number of watermen remaining at home were not able to carry them, by reason of the court, the terms, the players, and other employments, so that we were enforced and encouraged (hoping that this golden stirring would have lasted ever) to take and entertain men and boys.’

It was calculated that the number of watermen and their dependants between Windsor and Gravesend had now by 1614 reached 40,000:

‘The cause of the greater half of which multitude hath been the players playing on the Bankside, for I have known three companies besides the bear-baiting, at once there; to wit, the Globe, the Rose, and the Swan. And it is an infallible truth that, had they never played there, it had been better for watermen by the one half of their living, for the company is increased more than half by their means of playing there in former times.’

Foreign employment had now come to an end:

‘And the players have all (except the King’s men) left their usuall residency on the Bankside, and do play in Middlesex far remote from the Thames, so that every day in the week they do draw unto them three or four thousand people, that were used to spend their monies by water.’

Such, Taylor assures us, was the effect of the petition. It was referred by James to ‘his commissioners for suits’, that is to say, the Court of Requests, composed of Sir Julius Caesar, Sir Thomas Parry, Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Henry Montagu, Sir Walter Cope, George Calvert, and Baron Sotherton. The King’s men exhibited a counter-petition, and the case came on for hearing.

‘Sir Francis Bacon very worthily said that so far as the public weal was to be regarded before pastimes, or a serviceable decaying multitude before a handful of particular men, or profit before pleasure, so far was our suit to be preferred before theirs.’

The players appealed to the Earl of Somerset, who became Lord Chamberlain and in that capacity their official protector on 10 July 1614, but he proved well affected towards the watermen. The hearing was adjourned and never resumed, owing to the death of Cope on 31 July, the promotion of Caesar to the Mastership of the Rolls on 1 October, and the consequent dissolution of the commission. Ill feeling broke out between Taylor and his fellows the watermen, who declared that he met the players at supper at the Cardinal’s Hat on Bankside, and took bribes of them to let the suit fall. Taylor, therefore, wrote his pamphlet to vindicate his position.[1057] The completion of the new Globe and the Hope during the progress of the dispute had probably eased matters temporarily for the watermen, but the growing tendency of things theatrical towards Middlesex was not permanently checked. Some of the minor companies used the Hope until 1617, and then left it to the bears again. The Globe survived, but will be found to have occupied during the Caroline period a distinctly secondary position to the Blackfriars in the economy of the King’s men. For this there was another reason besides the geographical superiority of Middlesex over Surrey. The acquisition of the Blackfriars, even though only for winter purposes, in 1608 was an acknowledgement of the advantages for adult companies of the ‘private’ or roofed type of theatre, hitherto used only by boys. Once these advantages were realized, the doom of the old ‘ring’ type, with its central opening, was written. Probably the Hope was the only new house constructed on these lines after 1608, and obviously the Hope required free ventilation to get rid of the stink of bears and dogs. In 1615 Philip Rosseter and others obtained sanction for the conversion of Porter’s Hall in the Blackfriars into a theatre. This was to be used by children as well as adults, and was probably roofed. It was pulled down again by what seems a somewhat arbitrary decision in 1617. About the same time, the roofed Cockpit in Drury Lane was converted into a theatre, under the name of the Phoenix, for the occupation of the Queen’s men, who migrated to it from the Red Bull. Whether or not the Fortune was given a roof at the rebuilding of 1623, or the Red Bull at somewhat the same time, is uncertain; but at any rate the Salisbury Court theatre, built near the Whitefriars in 1629, perhaps to replace the old Whitefriars theatre, was a roofed house.[1058] This was the last new theatre built before the civil wars. The Blackfriars, the Cockpit, and Salisbury Court were the most important of the Caroline stages, and in the post-Restoration houses, although these were on a larger scale than the ‘private’ houses of the past, the roofed model was invariably adopted.

Soon after the completion of Salisbury Court, Edmund Howes, who had already edited the fourth edition of John Stowe’s _Annales_ in 1615, was again revising the text for the fifth edition of 1631, and took occasion to append to his account of the burnings of the Globe and the Fortune the following summary of theatrical enterprise since 1569:[1059]

‘In the yeere one thousand sixe hundred twenty nine, there was builded a new faire Play-house, neere the white Fryers. And this is the seauenteenth Stage, or common Play-house, which hath beene new made within the space of threescore yeeres within London and the Suburbs, _viz._

‘Fiue Innes, or common Osteryes turned to Play-houses, one _Cockpit_, S. _Paules_ singing Schoole, one in the _Black-fryers_, and one in the _White-fryers_, which was built last of all, in the yeare one thousand sixe hundred twenty nine, all the rest not named, were erected only for common Play-houses, besides the new built Beare garden, which was built as well for playes, and Fencers prizes, as Bull bayting; besides, one in former time at _Newington_ Buts; Before the space of threescore yeares aboue-sayd, I neither knew, heard, nor read, of any such Theaters, set Stages, or Play-houses, as haue beene purposely built within mans memory.’

This passage serves as a fair summary of the detailed investigations set out in this chapter. Howes only allows one house to the Blackfriars and one to the Whitefriars, and must therefore be leaving out of account the abortive Porter’s Hall house, and treating Salisbury Court as a continuation of the earlier Whitefriars. The Hope and Newington Butts are afterthoughts, and make his seventeen into nineteen. We can identify his five inns as the Bull, the Bell, the Cross Keys, the Bel Savage, and probably the Red Lion, although this just antedates his period of sixty years; while his balance of eight unnamed common play-houses must be the Theatre, the Curtain, the Rose, the Swan, the Globe, the Fortune, the Boar’s Head, and the Red Bull.

Prynne, in his _Histriomastix_ (1633), records six ‘divels chappels’ as then in use, and these are doubtless the six houses, the Blackfriars, Globe, Cockpit, Salisbury Court, Fortune, and Red Bull, which are also noted by the Restoration writers on the stage, John Downes and James Wright, as surviving up to the cataclysm of the civil wars.[1060]

Somewhat more confused and vague in their datings are the reminiscences about 1660 of the Marquis of Newcastle in his letter of advice to Prince Charles, under the head of ‘Devertismentes for your Ma^{tie} People’:[1061]

‘Firste for London Paris Garden will holde good for the meaner People.

‘Then for severall Playe Houses as ther weare five att leaste In my Time,--

‘Black-Friers, the Cock-Pitt, Salsburye Courte, the Fortune, & the Redd Bull,--Ther weare the Boyes thatt played at Black-Friers, & Paules, & then the Kinges Players played att the Globe--which is nowe calde the Phenixe [!]--Some Played, att the Bores heade, & att the Curtin In the feildes & some att the Hope whiche Is the Beare Garden, and some at White Friers,--Butt five or Sixe Playe Houses Is enough for all sortes off Peoples divertion & pleasure In thatt kinde.’

The marquis is the only one of the chroniclers who definitely records the Boar’s Head.

A manuscript continuation of Stowe’s _Annales_, found in a copy of the 1631 edition, narrates the havoc wrought by Puritans and ground-landlords:[1062]

‘Play Houses. The Globe play house on the Banks side in Southwarke, was burnt downe to the ground, in the yeare 1612. And now built vp againe in the yeare 1613, at the great charge of King Iames, and many Noble men and others. And now pulled downe to the ground, by Sir Matthew Brand, On Munday the 15 of April 1644, to make tenements in the room of it.

‘The Blacke Friers players play-house in Blacke Friers, London, which had stood many yeares, was pulled downe to the ground on Munday the 6 day of August 1655, and tennements built in the rome.

‘The play house in Salsbury Court, in Fleetstreete, was pulled downe by a company of souldiers, set on by the sectuaries of these sad times, on Saturday the 24 day of March 1649.

‘The Phenix in Druery Lane, was pulled downe also this day, being Saterday the 24 day of March 1649, by the same souldiers.

‘The Fortune Play-house betweene White Crosse streete and Golding Lane was burnd downe to the ground in the yeare 1618. And built againe with brick worke on the outside in the yeare 1622. And now pulled downe on the inside by the souldiers this 1649.

‘The Hope, on the Banks side in Southwarke, commonly called the Beare Garden, a Play House for Stage Playes on Mundayes, Wedensdayes, Fridayes, and Saterdayes, and for the baiting of the Beares on Tuesdayes and Thursdayes, the stage being made to take vp and downe when they please. It was built in the year 1610, and now pulled downe to make tennementes, by Thomas Walker, a peticoate maker in Cannon Streete, on Tuesday the 25 day of March 1656. Seuen of M^r. Godfries beares, by the command of Thomas Pride, then hie Sheriefe of Surry, were then shot to death, on Saterday the 9 day of February 1655, by a company of souldiers.’

Downes and Wright do not mention the Hope, as they were not discussing baiting. On the other hand, the annalist says nothing of the fate of the Red Bull, which in fact appears to have escaped destruction, to have been occasionally used for ‘drolls’ during the Commonwealth, and to have served once more, with the Cockpit and Salisbury Court, the demolition of which was probably limited to the interior fittings, for the first entertainments of the Restoration. The building of Vere Street in 1660, Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1661, and Drury Lane in 1663 made them obsolete.[1063]

These records leave ambiguous the fate of the Curtain and the Swan. The Curtain is traceable in occasional use up to about 1627, and is figured as a roundish building in the ‘Ryther’ maps, which are probably of a decade later.[1064] It cannot, therefore, have vanished long before the civil wars, and was the most long-lived of all the theatres. It may, of course, have been rebuilt, later than its original foundation in 1576, but as to this there is no evidence. The ‘Ryther’ maps also show the Fortune. No other maps give any of the theatres on the north of the river. Of the Bankside houses, the Swan is shown by a decagonal ground-plan, with the inscription ‘Old Play house’, in the Paris Garden Manor survey of 1627.[1065] And it is described as still existing side by side with the Globe and the Hope, but clearly also as derelict, in the following passage from _Holland’s Leaguer_ (1632):

‘Especially, and aboue all the rest, she was most taken with the report of three famous _Amphytheators_, which stood so neere scituated, that her eye might take view of them from the lowest _Turret_, one was the _Continent of the World_, because halfe the yeere a World of _Beauties_, and braue _Spirits_ resorted vnto it; the other was a building of excellent _Hope_, and though _wild beasts_ and _Gladiators_ did most possesse it, yet the Gallants that came to behold those combats, though they were of a mixt Society, yet were many Noble worthies amongst them; the last which stood, and as it were shak’d handes with this Fortresse, beeing in times past as famous as any of the other, was now fallen to decay, and like a dying _Swanne_, hanging downe her head, seemed to sing her owne dierge.’[1066]

I turn now to the maps of the Bankside, which, had they been datable, and drawn with cartographical precision, ought not only to have furnished valuable evidence as to the duration of the theatres, but also to have indicated accurately the position of each amongst the streets and lanes of the district. Neither condition is, however, fulfilled. Even where the date of an engraving is known, the date of the survey on which it was based can, as a rule, be only approximately determined. And the constant intrusion of pictorial elements, which gives the maps the character of perspective views rather than of plans, is naturally emphasized on the Bankside, which has to serve as a foreground to the design. The main topographical features which have to be borne in mind are simple, and can easily be related to those in John Rocque’s map of 1746, as interpreted by Strype’s _Survey_ of 1720, or in a modern Ordnance map. The whole region concerned lies roughly between the southern approaches to London and Blackfriars Bridges. It underwent a good deal of development during one period, especially in the area of the Clink, a liberty lying between Southwark on the east and another liberty of Paris Garden on the west, and affording a convenient suburban resort outside the jurisdiction of the City. Stowe’s account of the neighbourhood in 1598 is perhaps a little misleading. He describes no more than the Bankside proper, ‘a continuall building of tenements’ on the riverside, extending about half a mile west of London Bridge. Here he places, from west to east, the bear gardens, the former stews, the prison of the Clink, Winchester House, and the church of St. Mary Overie in Southwark.[1067] This agrees pretty well with the maps of Agas (_c._ 1561) and Norden (1593), except that there was already a group of houses falling outside Stowe’s purview, which stood on the river near Paris Garden Stairs and practically continued the Bankside westwards. But there was also, which Stowe does not mention, a marshy _hinterland_ to the Bankside, of ponds and gardens, among which Agas, and still more Norden, show a good many scattered houses. By the end of the century there was a fairly definite north to south street known as Deadman’s Place, which debouched from the east end of the Bankside, and from which in its turn struck out one called Maid or Maiden Lane, which went in an irregular line westwards over the marshes, and was finally joined by two divergent ways, Love Lane and Gravel (afterwards Holland) Lane, to the Paris Garden group of houses. Thus was formed a rough parallelogram, half a mile long, and from 200 to 350 feet deep, within or near which all the theatrical sites are placed by the maps. In Norden’s map of 1593, both the Bear House and the Play House, which must be the Rose, stand considerably to the west of Deadman’s Place. The Bear House is the most westerly of the two, and is about halfway between the Bankside houses on the north and Maid Lane on the south. The Rose is a good deal nearer Maid Lane. In the Delaram views (1603–20) there are three flagged, but unnamed, structures. One which stands well back from the river and, after allowing for the view-point, appears slightly the most easterly of the three, is cylindrical; the upper half is alone windowed, and has a smaller diameter than the lower half. It is placed amongst trees and meadows. There is nothing which obviously indicates Maid Lane.[1068] The two other buildings stand much nearer the river’s edge, amongst houses; they are angled, probably octagonal, and not cylindrical. The ‘Hondius’ views repeat the cylindrical building and the most westerly of the two angled buildings much in the same relative position; the intermediate one has disappeared. It seems obvious that the cylindrical building must be the Globe, and the other two the Bear Garden, afterwards the Hope, to the west, and the Rose, left out of the ‘Hondius’ group, because it disappeared in 1605, in the centre. The Delaram and ‘Hondius’ views do not extend far enough west to include the Swan. It is shown by Visscher in 1616, and named. So are the Bear Garden and the Globe, both of which appear as angled buildings, octagonal or hexagonal, about equidistant from the Bankside houses, and north of Maid Lane, the angle of which next Deadman’s Place is shown.[1069] As the change from a cylindrical to an angled representation of the Globe coincides with the rebuilding of the house in 1614, we may perhaps infer that the structural form is not a mere cartographic convention.[1070] It is rather singular that in the Merian maps (_circa_ 1638) there are four houses again, including the Swan, well to the west. This, with two of the three houses in the eastern group, is named by the engraver. A third unnamed house stands between the Globe on the east and the Bear Garden on the west, which is approximately where the Rose used to stand. It is distinctly nearer the river than the other two, but all three are north of Maid Lane, from which the Bear Garden is slightly more remote than the Globe.[1071] If the Rose had actually a second term of existence, it was probably only a brief one.[1072] The fullest of the Ryther maps (_c._ 1636–45) has two angled buildings, one to the west, rather nearer to Bankside than to Maid Lane; the other to the east, and south of Maid Lane, standing in an angle between that and a track running from north-west to south-east. There are no names, but obviously the eastern house is the Globe, and the western the Hope, and indeed the dogs can be made out. The track joining Maid Lane may be Globe Alley. The Hollar view of 1647 shows two cylindrical, not angled, buildings. One lettered ‘The Globe’ is on the extreme brink of the river; the other, to the east and south of it, is lettered ‘Beere bayting’. Faithorne and Newcourt, in 1658, give no theatres proper, but only a ring marked ‘Beare garden’. Finally, Leeke and Hollar about 1666 give a single unnamed roundish theatre, south of Maid Lane. Presumably it is the Globe, but copied from a survey of earlier date, as the Globe had been pulled down for tenements in 1644.

On the whole, the maps are disappointing guides. It seems more probable than has quite been recognized, that the singular two-storied structure shown by Hondius and Delaram really represents the earlier, the Shakespearian, Globe. And the representation of a fourth house by Merian, even if he did not know its name, gives support to the view that the Rose may have had some kind of existence at a later date than the Sewers records indicate. But as regards the alinement, the distance from the river, and the relation to Maid Lane, of the three houses in the Clink, it is clear that no consistent story is told. The general impression one gets is that the Hope stood farthest to the west, then the Rose, and then the Globe; and that the Rose stood nearest to the river, then the Hope, and then the Globe. Nor is this inconsistent with documentary evidence, which in particular indicates that the parcel of land, on which the latest of the Bear Gardens was built, was contiguous on the west to that known as ‘the little Rose’.[1073] Bear Garden and Rose Alley, running side by side from the Bankside into Maid Lane or Park Street, are traceable in eighteenth-century maps and in the modern Ordnance map.[1074] Did one judge by the maps alone, one would probably, in spite of the dissenting testimony of ‘Ryther’ and of Leeke and Hollar, come to the conclusion that the Globe stood to the north of Maid Lane. The balance of other evidence points unmistakably in the other direction.[1075]

B. THE PUBLIC THEATRES

i. The Red Lion Inn. ii. The Bull Inn. iii. The Bell Inn. iv. The Bel Savage Inn. v. The Cross Keys Inn. vi. The Theatre. vii. The Curtain. viii. Newington Butts. ix. The Rose. x. The Swan. xi. The Globe. xii. The Fortune. xiii. The Boar’s Head. xiv. The Red Bull. xv. The Hope. xvi. Porter’s Hall.

i. THE RED LION INN

The following record appears in the court books of the Carpenters’ Company:[1076]

Courte holden the xv^{th} daie of Julie 1567, Annoque Regni Reginae Eliz. nono by M^r William Ruddoke, M^r Richard More, Henrye Whreste & Richard Smarte wardeins, & M^r Bradshawe.

Memorandum that at courte holden the daie & yeare abovesayd that, whear certaine varyaunce, discord & debate was betwene Wyllyam Sylvester carpenter on thone partie & John Brayne grocer on thother partie, yt is agreed, concluded & fullie determyned by the saide parties, by the assent & consent of them bothe, with the advise of the M^r & wardeins abovesayd that Willyam Buttermore, John Lyffe, Willyam Snellinge & Richard Kyrbye, Carpenters, shall with expedicon goe & peruse suche defaultes as are & by them shalbe found of in & aboute suche skaffoldes, as he the said Willyam hathe mad at the house called the Red Lyon in the parishe of Stebinyhuthe, & the said Willyam Sillvester shall repaire & amend the same with their advize substancyallie, as they shall thinke good. And that the said John Brayne, on Satterdaie next ensuenge the date above written, shall paye to the sayd Willyam Sylvester the some of eight poundes, tenne shillinges, lawfull money of England, & that after the playe, which is called the storye of Sampson, be once plaied at the place aforesaid the said John shall deliver to the said Willyam such bondes as are now in his custodie for the performaunce of the bargaine. In witnesse whereof both parties hereunto hathe sett their handes.

by me John Brayne grocer. [Sylvester’s mark.]

This is the only notice of the Red Lion playing-inn which has been preserved, but John Brayne, grocer, is doubtless the same who financed his brother-in-law, James Burbadge, in the far more important enterprise of the Theatre in 1576. Stebunheth or Stepney was a parish in Middlesex, lying to the east of the City, beyond Whitechapel, and, although near enough to be in a sense a suburb, was outside the civic jurisdiction.

ii. THE BULL INN

The first notice of the Bull is on 7 June 1575 when the playing of a ‘prize’ there is recorded in the register of the School of Defence. It appears to have been the most popular of all localities for this purpose and there are fourteen similar notices of its use in the register, ending with one on 3 July 1590.[1077] Florio refers to it as a place for plays in 1578.[1078] Stephen Gosson in his _Schoole of Abuse_ (1579) exempts from his ordinary condemnation of plays _The Jew_ and _Ptolemy_ ‘shown at the Bull’.[1079] On 1 July 1582 the Earl of Warwick asked permission from the Lord Mayor for his servant John David to play his provost prizes at ‘the Bull in Bishopsgatestrete or some other conuenient place to be assigned within the liberties of London’. This was refused, much to Warwick’s annoyance, on the ground that an inn was a place ‘somewhat to close for infection’, and David appointed to play ‘in an open place of the Leaden hall’.[1080] The Bull, with the Bell, was assigned by a civic order of 28 November 1583 to the Queen’s men for their first winter season. Tarlton and the Queen’s men are said in the _Jests_ to have played ‘oftentimes’ at ‘the Bull in Bishops-gate-street’, and here their play of _The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth_, with Tarlton in the parts of the judge and the clown and Knell in that of Henry, was given.[1081] This must, of course, have been between 1583 and Tarlton’s death in 1588. In 1592 the translator of _The Spaniard’s Monarchie_ disclaims any ‘title fetched from the Bull within Bishopsgate, as a figge for a Spaniard’. I do not know whether any old play underlying the Admiral’s (q.v.) _Spanish Fig_ of 1601–2 can be referred to. The house was still in use during 1594, for in April or May of that year Anthony Bacon settled in Bishopsgate, to the vexation of his mother, ‘on account of its neighbourhood to the Bull Inn, where plays and interludes were continually acted, and would, she imagined, corrupt his servants’.[1082] Richard Flecknoe mentions the Bull in Bishopsgate Street, with the Cross-Keys, as one of the inns turned into theatres at the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, as was ‘at this day to be seen’ in 1664.[1083] The site was at No. 91 on the west of Bishopsgate Street, and is shown in Hatton’s map of 1708, and the Ordnance Survey maps of 1848–51 and 1875.

iii. THE BELL INN

This inn existed in 1560, for on 12 June of that year ‘the wyff of the Bell in Gracyous-strett’ was carted as a bawd and whore.[1084] Plays must have been used there in 1576–7, in the Revels Account for which year an item of 10_d._ is included ‘ffor the cariadge of the partes of y^e well counterfeit from the Bell in Gracious strete to St. Iohns to be performed for the play of Cutwell’.[1085] With the Bull, it was assigned to the Queen’s men by a civic order of 28 November 1583 for their first winter season. _Tarlton’s Jests_ also mention Tarlton and ‘his fellowes’, probably the Queen’s men, as performing at the Bell ‘by’ the Cross Keys which was also in Gracious Street, and this must have been before Tarlton’s death in 1588.[1086] Both houses may be included in Rawlidge’s reference to play-houses in Gracious street and elsewhere ‘put down’ by the City in Elizabeth’s time. I suppose that the site is that of Bell Yard at No. 12 on the west of Gracechurch Street.[1087]

iv. THE BEL SAVAGE INN

The Bel Savage is named as an early London play-house in the 1596 edition of Lambarde’s _Perambulation of Kent_. This inn, of which the name is still preserved on Ludgate Hill, where it stood until 1873 (Harben, 63), must be distinguished from another in Gracechurch Street once kept by Tarlton, which in his time was known as the Saba.[1088] The origin of the name is obscure; a deed of 1452 refers to an ‘inn ... called Savages Inn, otherwise called the Bell on the Hoop, in the parishe of St. Bride in Fleet Street’ (_L. T. R._ ii. 71). Probably therefore the notion of the Belle Sauvage is a later perversion. Gascoigne, in the prologue to his _Glass of Government_ (1575), repudiates the ‘worthie jests’ and ‘vain delights’ of ‘Bellsavage fair’.[1089] Gosson, in 1579, excepts from his general condemnation of plays ‘the two prose books, played at the Belsavage, where you shall find never a word without wit, never a line without pith, never a letter placed in vain’.[1090] A play-house ‘on Ludgate Hill’ is included by Rawlidge in his list of those ‘put down’ in Elizabeth’s time. Probably the Queen’s men were acting at the Bel Savage in 1588, for after the death of Tarlton in that year was published ‘a sorowfull newe sonnette, intituled Tarltons Recantacion uppon this theame gyven him by a gentleman at the Belsavage without Ludgate (nowe or els never) beinge the laste theame he songe’.[1091] Prynne’s reference to _Dr. Faustus_ (q.v.) at the Bel Savage suggests that at some time the Admiral’s also played there. It was also occasionally used for the playing of ‘prizes’; the earliest recorded date in the Register of the School of Defence being in 1575–7 and the latest on 31 January 1589.[1092]

v. THE CROSS KEYS INN

This inn may have been the play-house, or one of the play-houses, ‘in Gracious Street’ said by Rawlidge to have been ‘put down’ under Elizabeth. The first notice of it dates from 23 June 1579, on which day James Burbadge was arrested at the suit of John Hynde for £5 1_s._ 1_d._, ‘as he came down Gracious Street towards the Cross Keys there to a play’. The house is described as the dwelling-house of Richard Ibotson, citizen and brewer of London.[1093] It was in use as a place of popular amusement during the life of Tarlton, who died in 1588, for one of the Jests relates how he came from the Bell, where he was playing to ‘the Crosse-Keyes in Gracious streete’ to see Banks’s performing horse there.[1094] A company can first be definitely located at it in 1589, on 5 November of which year Lord Strange’s men, as reported by Lord Mayor Hart to Burghley, disobeyed an admonition to forbear playing, and ‘went to the Crosse Keys and played that afternoon’. In 1594 Strange’s men were absorbed in Lord Hunsdon’s, and on 8 October 1594 Hunsdon wrote to the Lord Mayor to obtain toleration for ‘my nowe companie of players’ who had been accustomed ‘to plaie this winter time within the citye at the Crosse Kayes in Gracious street’.[1095] How long Shakespeare’s fellows continued to use the Cross Keys as a winter house is unknown; presumably it ceased to be available in 1596. The adaptation of the inn as a theatre was still visible at the Restoration, and is assigned by Richard Flecknoe to ‘about the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s reign’. The site is shown in Ogilby and Morgan’s map of 1677 and the Ordnance Survey map of 1848–51: it is on the west of Gracechurch Street.

vi. THE THEATRE

[_Bibliographical Note._--Material is available in the records of four litigations: (a) _Peckham v. Allen_ (Wards and Liveries, 1589) as to the title to the site; (b) _Burbadge v. Ames et al._ (Coram Rege, 1596–9) and _Earl of Rutland v. Allen and Burbadge_ (Exchequer, 1599–1602) as to the title to a neighbouring plot; (c) _Burbadge v. Brayne_ (Chancery, 1588–95). _Brayne_ (afterwards _Miles_) _v. Burbadge_ (Chancery, 1590–5), and _Miles v. Burbadge_ (Requests, 1597), as to the profits of the house; (d) _Allen v. Street_ (Coram Rege, 1600), _Burbadge v. Allen_ (Requests, 1600), _Allen v. Burbadge_ (Queen’s Bench, 1601–2), and _Allen v. Burbadge et al._ (Star Chamber, 1601–2), as to the removal of the fabric. A few documents from these, some of which he supposed to relate to the Blackfriars, were printed by Collier in _Memoirs of the Actors_ (1846 and _H. E. D. P._ iii. 257) and in _Original History of the Theatre in Shoreditch_ (1849, _Sh. Soc. Papers_, iv. 63). A large number were used by Halliwell-Phillipps for his excursus on _The Theatre and Curtain_ (_Outlines_, i. 345), and in C. C. Stopes, _Burbage and Shakespeare’s Stage_ (1913), where abstracts of (a) and (b) may be consulted. The full texts of (c) and (d) are printed in C. W. Wallace, _The First London Theatre, Materials for a History_ (1913, _Nebraska University Studies_, xiii. 1). The exact locality of the site has been carefully investigated by W. W. Braines in _Holywell Priory and the Site of the Theatre, Shoreditch_ (1915, _Indication of Houses of Historical Interest in London_, xliii), and again in _The Site of the Theatre, Shoreditch_ (1917, _L. T. R._ xi. 1).]

The following statement as to the beginnings of theatrical enterprise in London is made by Cuthbert Burbadge and his family in the so-called _Sharers Papers_ of 1635:[1096]

‘The father of us, Cutbert and Richard Burbage, was the first builder of playehowses, and was himselfe in his younger yeeres a player. The Theater hee built with many hundred poundes taken up at interest. The players that lived in those first times had onely the profitts arising from the dores, but now the players receave all the commings in at the dores to themselves and halfe the galleries from the houskepers. Hee built this house upon leased ground, by which meanes the landlord and hee had a great suite in law, and, by his death, the like troubles fell on us, his sonnes; wee then bethought us of altering from thence, and at like expence built the Globe.’

The accuracy of this is fully borne out by the records of the various legal proceedings in connexion with the Theatre, which a painful investigation has exhumed, and the topographical indications furnished by the evidence in some of these have made it possible to locate with some precision the site of London’s first regular play-house.

The Theatre stood in the Liberty of Halliwell or Holywell, part of the Middlesex parish of St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, immediately outside the Bishopsgate entrance to the City.[1097] The name of the Liberty was derived from an ancient holy well, which has now disappeared, and its status from the fact that it had been the property of a priory of Benedictine nuns. The buildings of the priory lay between Shoreditch High Street, leading north from Bishopsgate, on the east and the open Finsbury fields on the west. Its southern gate was in a lane leading from the High Street to the Fields, then and still known as Holywell Lane or Street, on the south of which lay the Prioress’s pasture called the Curtain. Part of this south end of the liberty, lying on both sides of Holywell Lane, had been leased in 1537 and 1538 to the Earls of Rutland, who continued to hold it from the Crown after the dissolution in 1539, and obtained a renewed lease in 1584.[1098] The rest of the property, including the main conventual buildings, was sold in 1544 to one Henry Webb, whose daughter Susan and her husband Sir George Peckham sold it in 1555 to Christopher Bumsted, and he in the same year to Christopher Allen and his son Giles. The alienation of 1555 was challenged as illegal by Susan Peckham’s heirs in 1582, and ultimately, but not until about thirty years later, they appear to have made good their claim.[1099] In the meantime Giles Allen had leased a part of the property, which became the site of the Theatre, to James Burbadge on 13 April 1576.[1100] This was bounded to the north by the wall of Allen’s own garden, probably corresponding to the main cloister of the convent, on the east or south-east by the Earl of Rutland’s holding, and on the west by a ditch dividing it from the open Finsbury fields. Within the ditch and divided from it by a strip of void ground, was the old brick wall of the precinct. On the extreme south was a bit of void ground lying between an Oat Barn occupied by Rutland and another Great Barn included in the lease. The Oat Barn and the void ground were in fact debatable property claimed both by Allen and Rutland. North of the Great Barn, and immediately to the east of the precinct wall was more void and garden ground; farther to the east the ‘inner court yarde’ of the convent. This held tenements backing upon Allen’s garden to the north, and others, including a mill-house, backing on the garden ground to the west. In this yard was a well, probably the eponymous ‘Holywell’, which fed a horsepond by Rutland’s stable on the south-east, and then drained away through the debatable ground to the Finsbury ditch.[1101] Since Burbadge’s barn is known to have been shored up to the Theatre, it is evident that this must have been constructed in the void and garden ground between the tenements and the precinct wall, and as there was no right of way through Rutland’s holding from Holywell Lane, an entrance was made through the wall direct from Finsbury fields. The Theatre itself, indeed, was sometimes loosely spoken of as ‘in the fields’.[1102] Working from later title-deeds of the locality, Mr. Braines has successfully located the precise site of the building in the angle now formed by Curtain Road, which occupies the strip of void ground between the precinct wall and Finsbury ditch, and New Inn Yard, which occupies a strip of the ‘debateable ground’ and a strip also of the site of the Great Barn. The site is now part of the premises of the Curtain Road Elementary School.[1103]

Burbadge’s lease was for a term of twenty-one years from Lady Day 1576. He was to pay a fine of £20 and an annual rent of £14. He covenanted to spend £200 within the first ten years in improving the existing buildings, and in return Allen covenanted to make a new lease for twenty-one years at any time within the first ten years, and also to allow the tenant at any time within the term of either lease ‘to take down such building as should within the sayd tenne yeeres be erected on the sayd voyde growndes for a theater or playinge place’. It was also agreed that Allen and his wife and family ‘vpon lawfull request therfore made’ should be entitled ‘to enter or come into the premisses and their in some one of the vpper romes to have such convenient place to sett or stande to se such playes as shalbe ther played freely without any thinge therefore payeinge soe that the sayd Gyles hys wyfe and familie doe com and take ther places before they shalbe taken vpp by any others’. Burbadge, a joiner as well as a player, had probably the technical qualifications for his enterprise. But he was a man of small means, not worth above 100 marks, and had no credit.[1104] He found a partner in his brother-in-law, John Brayne, a well-to-do grocer of Bucklersbury, who had already been connected with a play-house speculation at the Red Lion inn. The association proved a calamitous one, and its history can only be traced through the dubious _ex parte_ statements of later litigation. Burbadge, in an unfortunately mutilated document, appears to have alleged that Brayne acquired an interest by means of a promise, which he afterwards evaded, to leave it to his sister’s children.[1105] Robert Miles, of the George Inn, Whitechapel, a friend of Brayne, who supported and ultimately inherited the case of his widow, told a different story.[1106] He had heard Burbadge ‘earnestlie insynuate’ Brayne to join in the transaction, as one which ‘wold grow to ther contynual great profitt and commodytie’. Brayne was ‘verye loth to deale in the matter’, and complained later to Miles that it was ‘his vtter vndoing’, and that he would never have touched it, but for the ‘swete and contynuall’ persuasions of Burbadge. His brother-in-law had assured him that the cost of erecting the play-house would not exceed £200, and after it had already cost £500, urged that ‘it was no matter’, and that the profits ‘wold shortlie quyte the cost vnto them bothe’. Obviously Brayne was out for profits, and had to take his risks. But if the account of Miles is to be trusted, he had also definite grievances against his partner. Burbadge’s small contribution to the outlay was partly made in material, for which he overcharged at the rate of sixpence for a groat’s worth. When funds ran short, Brayne and his wife worked as labourers on the structure, while Burbadge, if he set his hand to a job, took the regular rate of wages for it. And there is some corroboration of a more serious charge of ‘indyrect dealing’, after the house was opened, about the ‘collecting of the money for the gallories’.[1107] Miles alleged that during a space of two years Burbadge used a secret key made by one Braye, a smith in Shoreditch, to filch from ‘the commen box where the money gathered at the said playes was putt in’, thus cheating ‘his fellowes the players’ as well as Brayne. He would also ‘thrust some of the money devident betwene him and his said ffellowes in his bosome or other where about his bodye’. The Theatre was in use by 1 August 1577, as it is mentioned by name in the Privy Council inhibition of that date.[1108] But it was opened before the work was completed, and the last stages were paid for out of the profits.[1109] Moreover, in addition to what Brayne and Burbadge could find, money had to be raised on mortgage, with the result that Brayne never got full security for his interest in the undertaking. He was not a party to the original lease, thinking that if a joint lease were entered into, the survivor would take all.[1110] When a draft assurance of a moiety of the profits to him was prepared on 9 August 1577, it could not be executed because the lease was at pawn, and ultimately, on 22 May 1578, Burbadge gave him a bond of £400 to assure in due course.[1111] An assurance was, however, never made. The friction between the partners led to violent disputes. On one occasion, after high words in a scrivener’s shop, ‘Burbage did there strike him with his fist and so they went together by the eares in somuch that this deponent could herdly part them’.[1112] On 12 July 1578 they submitted their differences to arbitrators, who decided that, with the exception of 10_s._ weekly for Brayne’s housekeeping and 8s. for Burbadge’s out of the profits of ‘such playes as should be playd there vpon Sundaies’, the first charge upon the rents and profits of the property should be the repayment of debts due upon the theatre. Thereafter Brayne should take them ‘till he shuld be answered suche somes of money which he had lade out for and vpon the same Theatre more then the said Burbage had done’. And when this claim too was discharged, the rents and profits should ‘go in devydent equallye betwene them’. Should it be necessary to raise money on mortgage, it should be a joint mortgage, and its redemption would then come in as the first claim on the rents and profits. Burbadge gave Brayne a further bond of £200 for the keeping of this award.[1113] On 26 September 1579 a mortgage was in fact entered into for a loan of £125 from John Hyde, grocer, to be repaid in a year. The amount, however, was not forthcoming, and although Hyde made an arrangement to take £5 a week out of the profits, he only got it for four or five weeks. In June 1582 he arrested Burbadge and got £20 out of him. Shortly afterwards he claimed forfeiture of the lease, and as Burbadge warned him that Brayne ‘wold catch what he cold’, appointed one of his own servants with Burbadge ‘to gather vp v^{li} wekely during the tyme of playes’. In this way he got back another £20 or £30. There was, however, still at least £30 outstanding when Brayne died in August 1586.[1114] His widow Margaret claimed a moiety of the interest under the lease as his heir. At first, we hear, Burbadge allowed her ‘half of the profittes of the gallaries’, but only so long as she could lay out money ‘to the necessary vse of the said playe howsse’, and when she had so spent £30, he said that he must take all the profits until the debts were paid, made her gather as a servant, and finally thrust her out altogether.[1115] Meanwhile Hyde was getting impatient for his money. He had promised Mrs. Brayne that, if he were satisfied, he would reassure the lease to her and Burbadge jointly, but not to either party separately. But now he said that he must convey it to whichever would pay him first, and being approached through Walter Cope, the master of Burbadge’s son Cuthbert, he did in fact, on some promise that Mrs. Brayne should not be wronged, take his £30 and make over the lease to Cuthbert Burbadge on 7 June 1589.[1116] Henceforward Cuthbert, and not his father, was the ostensible tenant of the property. This transaction stimulated Mrs. Brayne to assert her claims. About a year before the Burbadges had brought an action against her in Chancery, apparently in the hope of enforcing the alleged promise of Brayne to leave his interest to his sister’s children; and she now retorted with a counteraction against James and Cuthbert, in which she claimed to have an assignment of a moiety of the lease.[1117] Her chief witness was the Robert Miles on whose statements this narrative has already drawn. He was not of unimpeachable reputation. His long association with Brayne had ended in a quarrel. Brayne had ‘charged Miles with his deathe, by certaine stripes geven him by Miles’. The widow had accused him before the coroner and procured his indictment as ‘a comon barreter’. Afterwards they had become friends, and he was now maintaining Mrs. Brayne in her suit.[1118] Much of his evidence, however, received corroboration from his son Ralph, from William Nicoll, a notary who had prepared the deeds connected with the partnership, and from Edward Collins, who had acquired Brayne’s grocery business in Bucklersbury. Burbadge, on the other hand, relied largely on one Henry Bett, who had had an opportunity of perusing Mrs. Brayne’s papers, and had then transferred his services to the other side. We cannot perhaps assume that all the evidence in the cross-suits is preserved. So far as what we have goes, there seems to have been no attempt on Burbadge’s part to defend himself against the charge of indirect dealing during the early years of partnership. Nor were the main facts as to the history of the lease much in dispute. The chief issue was as to Mrs. Brayne’s equitable claim to an interest in it, and this of course turned largely on the state of the account between Brayne and Burbadge at the death of the former. Miles asserted that the expenditure on the building of the Theatre in cash and credit had been practically all Brayne’s, that he had started as a rich man, but had had to sell his lease and stock in Bucklersbury and pawn his own wardrobe and his wife’s to get the work finished, that he was ruined, and that Mrs. Brayne was now ‘vtterlye vndone’ by the suit, and owed 500 marks to her friends.[1119] On the other side it was claimed that Brayne’s wealth, variously reputed at from £500 to £1,000, had been exaggerated, that he was already involved when he took the Theatre in hand, and that his downfall was largely due to unfortunate investments outside the partnership, especially in a soap-making business carried on with Miles at the George, where in fact Burbadge had incurred losses in helping him.[1120] Bett, moreover, said that, while Brayne ‘would never plainlie declare’ what his profits on the Theatre had been, ‘yt seemed by his taulke, that he had gayned and receyved a grete deale of monye, more than he had disbursed’.[1121] The actual figures produced in the course of the case, which are sufficient to enable us to arrive at a fair estimate of the main position, do not quite bear out this suggestion. Towards the original outlay Burbadge seems to have found about £50; Brayne as much and £239 more, which he claimed as due to him from the partnership. In addition there were outside debts outstanding at the time of his death to the amount of at least £220. Something, moreover, had already been spent out of takings before 1586 in payments on Hyde’s mortgage. So that we may perhaps reasonably accept the total cost of the building as being somewhere about the 1,000 marks (£666) at which common repute estimated it.[1122] A certain amount of building material, worth perhaps 100 marks, was still in hand. All that Brayne could be shown to have received as against his considerable outlay was a sum of £135 1_s._, for which his receipt was produced. What Burbadge had received it is difficult to say. A comparison of various estimates suggests that after Brayne’s death it may have been between £100 and £200 a year.[1123] On the other hand, he had paid off the debt of £220 which Brayne had left outstanding. And throughout he had been responsible, without aid from Brayne, for certain outgoings independent of the structure of the Theatre, for which he was entitled to claim credit. He had paid £230 in rent and laid out at least £220 in putting the tenements in order, as well as at least £30 early in 1592 on the repair of the Theatre itself.[1124]

The fortunes of the case in Chancery were various. In 1590 the Court seemed inclined to grant a sequestration of half the profits; but instead made an order that the arbitrament of 1578 should be observed.[1125] On the strength of this Mrs. Brayne and Miles came to the Theatre on more than one occasion, and claimed to appoint collectors, including one Nicholas Bishop, who was asked to stand ‘at the door that goeth vppe to the gallaries of the said Theater to take and receyve for the vse of the said Margarett half the money that shuld be gyven to come vppe into the said gallaries at that door’. They were, however, refused access, and on 16 November 1590 there was a row royal, of which independent witness was borne by John Alleyn, of the Admiral’s men, who were then playing at the Theatre. James Burbadge, ‘looking out at a wyndoe vpon them’, joined his wife in reviling them as a murdering knave and whore, and expressed his contempt for the order of Chancery; Cuthbert, who came home in the middle of the fray, backed him up; while Richard Burbadge, the youngest son, snatched up a broom-staff, and as he afterwards boasted, paid Robert Miles his moiety with a beating. He also threatened Nicholas Bishop, ‘scornfully and disdainfullye playing with this deponentes nose’. James said that at their next coming his sons should provide pistols charged with powder and hempseed to shoot them in the legs.[1126] Both Cuthbert and James were summoned on 28 November for contempt before the court, which instead of dealing with this charge proceeded to take the whole case into further consideration.[1127] This was something of a triumph for Burbadge, who continued to resist the order, and repeated with oaths that twenty contempts and as many injunctions would not force him to give up his property. This was heard by John Alleyn in the Theatre yard about May 1591, and about eight days later ‘in the Attyring housse or place where the players make them ready’, on the occasion of a dispute with the Admiral’s men about some of ‘the dyvydent money between him and them’ which he had detained, Burbadge was equally irreverent before Alleyn and James Tunstall about the Lord Admiral himself, saying ‘by a great othe, that he cared not for iij of the best lordes of them all’.[1128] Margaret Brayne died in 1593, leaving her estate to Miles, who thus became a principal in the suit.[1129] And on 28 May 1595 the court came to the decision that it could not entertain the case, until Miles had endeavoured to obtain relief at common law, by suing on the two bonds which Burbadge had given to Brayne in 1578.[1130] He does not seem to have thought it worth while to do this, probably because he saw very little chance of recovering money from James Burbadge, while Cuthbert, who now held the lease, was not a party to the bonds.[1131]

It is the personality of Burbadge rather than the conduct of the Theatre that these details illumine. But we may gather that the building was constructed mainly of timber with some ironwork, that it had a tiring-house and galleries, one at least of which was divided into upper rooms, where spectators could sit as well as stand, and that money was taken by appointed gatherers, placed in locked boxes, and subsequently shared out amongst those entitled to it.[1132] From other sources it appears that 1_d._ was charged for admission to the building and 1_d._ or 2_d._ more for a place in the galleries.[1133] Apparently the players took the entrance fee and the owners of the house the whole or an agreed proportion of the gallery money. In the winter of 1585 an interesting arrangement was entered into between Burbadge and Brayne on the one hand and Henry Lanman, owner of the neighbouring Curtain, on the other, by which during a period of seven years the Curtain was taken ‘as an Esore’ to the Theatre, and the profits of both houses pooled and equally divided between the two

## parties. This arrangement was still operative in 1592.[1134] Kiechel

tells us that the number of galleries was three, and De Witt that the shape was that of an ‘amphitheatrum’.[1135] It is impossible to trace with any certainty the successive occupation of the Theatre by various companies of players or to reconstruct the list of plays produced upon the boards. Its occupants were Burbadge’s ‘fellows’ at the time of his frauds of 1576–8, and may reasonably be identified with Leicester’s, of whom he was certainly one in 1574.[1136] Stephen Gosson tells us in 1579 that amongst plays then ‘vsually brought in to the Theater’, were _The Blacksmith’s Daughter_ and his own _Catiline’s Conspiracies_, and in 1582 assigns to the same house Lodge’s, if it was Lodge’s, _Play of Plays and Pastimes_ given on the last 23 February, the play of _The Fabii_ and possibly the history of _Caesar and Pompey_.[1137] Presumably _The Fabii_ is _The Four Sons of Fabius_, presented by Warwick’s men at Court on 1 January 1580. Warwick’s men had therefore probably replaced Leicester’s at the Theatre, and it was the same men, then in the service of the Earl of Oxford, who were concerned in a riot at the Theatre on 10 April 1580.[1138] In 1582 came the controversy between Edmund Peckham and Giles Allen about the freehold of the Theatre site, as a result of which Burbadge was ‘disturbed and trobled in his possession’, and ‘the players for sooke the said Theater to his great losse’.[1139] So there was probably another change at this time. And in 1583 there was a complete reshuffling of all the London companies on the formation of the Queen’s men. Professor Wallace, who is primarily considering that part of the evidence which he has himself discovered, says that the Queen’s did not act at the Theatre.[1140] But most certainly they did. It is true that, when an inhibition against the Theatre and Curtain was obtained on 14 June 1584, the owner of the Theatre, ‘a stubburne fellow’, described himself as Lord Hunsdon’s man. Nevertheless the only companies named as concerned are the Queen’s and Arundel’s, and Burbadge may not himself have been then acting.[1141] And as to the presence of the Queen’s in the Theatre at some date there is no doubt. Tarlton is not traceable in any other company than the Queen’s, and it was at the Theatre that Tarlton made jests of Richard Harvey’s _Astrological Discourse upon the Conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter_, published in 1583.[1142] The Queen’s certainly did not confine themselves to the Theatre; but that they were there again in 1589 may be inferred from a mock testament of Martin Marprelate in _Martins Month’s Mind_, in which he is made to admit that he learned his twittle tattles ... at the Theater of Lanam and his fellows’. A marginal note in the same pamphlet indicates that it was at the Theatre that the ‘Maygame’ representing the ‘launcing and worming’ of Martin was staged, and there is other evidence that Laneham, then one of the Queen’s men, was one of the players who took a part in the ribald controversy.[1143] Gabriel Harvey’s scoff at Lyly as ‘the Foolemaster of the Theatre’ may perhaps indicate his authorship of plays for the house. In 1590–1 it is clear that the Admiral’s men, probably already associated with Strange’s, were at the Theatre, and their quarrel with Burbadge doubtless led them to cross the river and join Henslowe at the Rose. After the reconstitution of the companies in 1594, James Burbadge’s son Richard became a leading member of the Chamberlain’s men, and it is probable that, when this company left the Rose about the middle of June, it was to the Theatre that they went. Here _Hamlet_, which certainly belonged to them, was being acted in 1596.[1144] It must be added that the Theatre was not strictly reserved for the purposes of the legitimate drama. It was built for ‘activities’, amongst other things, according to Stowe, and prizes of the School of Defence were played at it between 1578 and 1585.[1145] On 22 February 1582, there took place at the Theatre ‘a scurvie play set oot al by one virgin, which there proved a fyemarten without voice, so that we stayed not the matter’.[1146]

It was a natural consequence of the success of Burbadge’s new departure that the Theatre and its immediate successor, the Curtain, had to bear the brunt of the Puritan denunciations of the stage. These incidentally bore witness to the costly elaborateness of the new accommodation provided for the players.[1147] Apart from the moral corruption upon which the Puritans laid most stress, there is some evidence that the position of the Theatre, with a great space of open ground before it, made it a natural focus for the disorderly elements of society. As early as 5 October 1577, just after the resumption of plays for the autumn, the Mayor and Recorder Fleetwood were listening to ‘a brabell betwene John Wotton and the Leuetenuntes sonne of the one parte, and certain ffreholders of Shordyche, for a matter at the Theater’. There was serious trouble in the course of 1584. Fleetwood wrote to Burghley how on 8 June, ‘very nere the Theatre or Curten, at the tyme of the playes, there laye a prentice sleping upon the grasse and one Challes _alias_ Grostock dyd turne upon the too upon the belly of the same prentice; whereupon the apprentice start up, and after wordes they fell to playne bloues’; and how on 10 June, ‘one Browne, a serving man in a blew coat, a shifting fellowe, having a perrelous witt of his owne, entending a spoile if he cold have browght it to passe, did at Theatre doore querell with certen poore boyes, handicraft prentises, and strooke some of theym; and lastlie he with his sword wondend and maymed one of the boyes upon the left hand; whereupon there assembled nere a ml. people’.[1148] Unscrupulous characters might find congenial companions in the throng. Somewhere in 1594 a diamond, which had gone astray from the loot of a Spanish vessel, was shown in Finsbury Fields by a mariner to certain goldsmiths, who said that they had met him by chance at a play in the Theatre at Shoreditch.[1149] But James Burbadge had obtained for himself a tactical advantage by building outside the jurisdiction of the City and within that, less organized or more easy-going, of the Middlesex magistrates. The Corporation were powerless, except in so far as, directly by persuasion, or indirectly by invoking the Privy Council, they could stir the county bench to

## action. They lost no opportunity, which brawls or plague afforded, of

attempting this.[1150] An exceptionally troublous year was 1580. It began with an indictment of John Brayne and James Burbadge ‘yeomen’ of Shoreditch, at the Middlesex sessions, for bringing unlawful assemblies together on 21 February and other days ‘_ad audienda et spectanda quaedam colloquia sive interluda vocata_ playes or interludes’ by them and others ‘_exercitata et practicata_’ at the Theatre in Holywell, with the result of affrays and tumults leading to a breach of the peace.[1151] On 6 April was the great earthquake, which threw down chimneys in Shoreditch, and according to one account ‘shaked not only the scenical Theatre, but the great stage and theatre of the whole land’.[1152] Four days later was the riot between Lord Oxford’s men and the Inns of Court, and the two events gave the Lord Mayor an excellent opportunity of pointing out to the Council that the players of plays which were used at the Theatre were ‘a very superfluous sort of men’ and of securing a suspension of performances until after Michaelmas. The riot of 8 June 1584 similarly led to the inhibition by the Council and Fleetwood already noticed, although it is clear that this was not so permanent as the City probably hoped, when the authority for ‘the suppressing and pulling downe of the Theatre and Curten’ reached them. Matters came to a crisis again in 1597 with the production of _The Isle of Dogs_ on the Bankside, and an appeal of the City on 28 July was answered on the same day by mandates of the Council, of which one was addressed to the Middlesex justices, and directed them to send for the owners of the Theatre and Curtain, and enjoin them to ‘plucke downe quite the stages, gallories and roomes that are made for people to stand in, and so to deface the same as they maie not be ymploied agayne to suche use’.[1153]

It is unlikely that the Theatre was ever opened again. It is certain that the Chamberlain’s men had moved to the Curtain before the end of 1597, and the abandonment of the old house is referred to unmistakably enough in a satire published in 1598.[1154] The explanation is to be found in the relations of the Burbadges to their ground landlord, Giles Allen. The following account is taken in the main from Cuthbert Burbadge’s allegations in litigation of 1600. On 1 November 1585, shortly before the termination of the first ten years of the lease, James Burbadge, as he was entitled to do, presented Allen with a draft of a new twenty-one years’ lease. This Allen evaded signing, apparently alleging that it was not in verbatim agreement with the old lease, and probably also that some of Burbadge’s covenants under the old lease had remained unfulfilled.[1155] By way of precaution, Burbadge thought it desirable to put on record in his account-book some evidence that he had spent the £200 in improving the tenements, upon which his right to remove the structure of the Theatre depended. He called in expert craftsmen, and took two ‘views’, one on 20 November 1585, another, after some further work had been done, on 18 July 1586. The first estimate was £220, the second £240. This last was later confirmed by a third view taken in connexion with the Brayne litigation in July 1591.[1156] The money had been spent, partly on ordinary repairs,

## partly on converting the old barn into tenements, partly on putting up

two new houses, one of which was for Burbadge’s own occupation.[1157] The matter of the new lease now slumbered until the expiration of the old one on 13 April 1597 drew near. In 1596 negotiations took place between landlord and tenant, and a compromise was mooted, by which the new lease was to be granted, but for an increased rent of £24 instead of £14. Allen afterwards asserted and Cuthbert Burbadge denied that there was a proviso that after five years the building should be converted to some other use than that of a play-house.[1158] Cuthbert continued the negotiations after James Burbadge’s death in February 1597, but they finally broke down, and for a year or so the tenancy was only on sufferance.[1159] Finally, in the autumn of 1598, when Cuthbert had agreed to demands which he thought extortionate, Allen refused to accept his brother Richard as security, and all hope of a settlement disappeared.[1160] Cuthbert now resolved to avail himself of the covenant of the expired lease, under which the tenant was entitled to pull down and remove the Theatre. This he began to do, in spite of a protest from Allen’s representative, on 28 December 1598, with the concurrence of his mother and brother, and the financial aid of one William Smith of Waltham Cross.[1161] The work was still in progress on 20 January 1599, when Burbadge’s agent, Peter Street, carpenter, entered the close with ten or twelve men, and carried the timber to the other side of the river for use in the erection of the Globe. For this act Allen brought an action of trespass against Street in the Queen’s Bench, alleging that he had trampled down grass in the close to the value of 40_s._, and claiming damages for £800 in all, of which £700 represented his estimate of the value of the Theatre.[1162] Burbadge applied to the Court of Requests to stop the common law suit, alleging in effect that he was equitably entitled to act upon the covenant, even though the lease had expired, on account of the unreasonable refusal of Allen to grant the new lease when applied for, under the terms of the old one, in 1585.[1163] The issue really turned upon whether this refusal was reasonable. Allen said that James Burbadge had been a troublesome tenant, that he had converted the barn into eleven tenements, whose inhabitants became a nuisance to the parish by begging for their 20_s._ rents, that he had not repaired the building but only shored it up, that he had not spent the stipulated £200, and that £30 rent was in arrear at the time of the application of 1585 and was still unpaid.[1164] Probably these last two were the only allegations to which the court attached importance. Allen claimed that he had no remedy against James Burbadge’s estate, for he had made deeds of gift to his sons of his property, and his widow and administratrix was without funds. Burbadge, however, produced evidence of the estimates of 1585 and 1586, and suggested that his father had a counter-claim against the rent in the expense to which he had been put in maintaining his possession at the time of Peckham’s claim to the freehold. On 18 October 1600 the Court decided in his favour.[1165] Allen brought a Queen’s Bench action against him in 1601 for breach of agreement, and in 1601 complained to the Star Chamber of perjury on the part of the expert witnesses and other wrongs done him in the course of the earlier proceedings; but, although the conclusions of these suits are not on record, it is not likely that he succeeded in obtaining a favourable decision.[1166]

vii. THE CURTAIN

[_Bibliographical Note._--Some rather scanty material is brought together by T. E. Tomlins, _Origin of the Curtain Theatre and Mistakes regarding it_ in _Sh. Soc. Papers_, i. 29, and Halliwell-Phillipps, _The Theatre and Curtain_ (_Outlines_, i. 345).]

The Curtain is included with the Theatre in Stowe’s general description of Holywell as ‘standing on the South-west side towards the field’. That it was somewhat south of the Theatre is indicated by a reference to it in 1601 as in Moorfields, a name given to the open fields lying south of and adjacent to Finsbury Fields. But, although it stood in the parish of Shoreditch and the liberty of Holywell, it was not, like the Theatre, actually within the precinct of the dissolved priory. _Curtina_ is glossed by Ducange as ‘_minor curtis, seu rustica area, quae muris cingitur_’, and the description is sufficiently met by the piece of land lying outside the southern gate of the priory, and on the other side of Holywell Lane into which that gate opened.[1167] A priory lease to the Earl of Rutland of his town house in 1538 described it as ‘_infra muros et portas eiusdem monasterii_’, and part of the holding consisted of stables and a hay-loft ‘_scituata et existentia extra portas eiusdem monasterii prope pasturam dictae Priorissae vocatam_ the Curtene’. Post-dissolution conveyances refer to a ‘house, tenement or lodge’ called the Curtain, and to a parcel of ground, enclosed with a wall on the west and north, called the Curtain close, which lay south of the Earl of Rutland’s house, and on which by 1581 stood various tenements, which were described as ‘sett, lyeng and being in Halliwell Lane’. The property in question formed part of the possessions of Sir Thomas Leigh of Hoxton at his death in 1543 and had formerly been conveyed to him by Lord Wriothesley. Through Leigh’s daughter Katharine it passed to her husband Lord Mountjoy. On 20 February 1567 it was sold for £40 to Maurice Long and his son William, being then in the occupation of one Wilkingeson and Robert Manne. On 23 August 1571 Maurice Long conveyed it for £200 to Sir William Allen, then Lord Mayor, possibly by way of mortgage in connexion with building speculations, since on 18 March 1581 it was in the hands of William Long, who then sold it to Thomas Herbert. There had evidently been an increase in the number of tenements on the site, and Thomas Wilkinson, Thomas Wilkins, Robert Medley, Richard Hicks, Henry Lanman, and Robert Manne are named as tenants.[1168] As Henry Lanman or Laneman had the profits of the theatre in 1585, there can be little doubt that it stood on part of the land dealt with in the conveyances. Halliwell-Phillipps thinks that it must have been situated ‘in or near the place which is marked as Curtain Court in Chassereau’s plan of Shoreditch, 1745’,[1169] and is now known as Gloucester Street. If so, it was very near the boundary between Holywell and Moorfields, much along the line of which now runs Curtain Road. But it must be remembered that Curtain Court may also have taken its name from the ‘house, tenement or lodge’ which already existed in 1567 and is mentioned as the Curtain House in the Shoreditch registers as late as 1639; and certainly in Ryther’s map (_c._ 1636–45) the theatre, though still bordering on Moorfields, is shown a good deal farther, both to the east and the south, than the point indicated by Halliwell-Phillipps.[1170]

The Burbadges claimed that James was the first builder of play-houses, but the Curtain must have followed very soon after the Theatre. It is not mentioned by name with its predecessor in the Privy Council order of 1 August 1577, but is in Northbrooke’s treatise of the following December. Up to 1597 its history is little more than a pendant to that of the Theatre, with which it is generally coupled in the Puritan attacks and in the occasional interferences of authority. From 1585 to 1592, indeed, it was used as an ‘easer’ to the Theatre, and the profits of the two houses were pooled under an arrangement between Henry Lanman and the Burbadges.[1171] The companies who occupied the Curtain can for the most part only be guessed at.[1172] At the time of the inhibition of 14 June 1584 it was probably occupied by Lord Arundel’s men. Tarlton appeared at it, but not necessarily after the formation of the Queen’s company.[1173] Prizes of the School of Defence were occasionally played at it from 1579 to 1583.[1174] Unlike the Theatre, the Curtain was certainly reopened after the inhibition of 1597. It is likely that the Chamberlain’s men repaired to it in October of that year, and remained at it until the Globe was ready in 1599. The same satirist, who tells us that the Theatre was closed in 1598, tells us that the Rose, which was continuously occupied by the Admiral’s men, and the Curtain were open;[1175] and a clue to the actors at it is given by Marston’s reference to ‘Curtain plaudities’ in the closest connexion with _Romeo and Juliet_.[1176] In 1600 Robert Armin, of the Chamberlain’s men, published his _Fool upon Fool_, in which he called himself ‘Clonnico de Curtanio Snuffe’. In the 1605 edition he changed the name to ‘Clonnico del Mondo Snuffe’. The direct connexion of the Chamberlain’s men with the Curtain probably ended on the opening of the Globe. But a share in it belonged to Thomas Pope, when he made his will on 22 July 1603, and another to John Underwood, when he made his on 4 October 1624. Both were of the Chamberlain’s men, although Underwood cannot have joined them until about 1608.

The Curtain did not go entirely out of use when the Chamberlain’s left it. It must have been the theatre near Bishopsgate at which Thomas Platter saw a play in September or October 1599.[1177] It is possible that Kempe (q.v.) was then playing there. In March 1600 one William Hawkins, barber, of St. Giles’s without Cripplegate was charged at the Middlesex Sessions with taking a purse and £1 6_s._ 6_d._ at the Curtain, and Richard Fletcher, pewterer, of Norwich, was bound over to give evidence.[1178]

On 22 June 1600, when the Privy Council gave authority for the opening of the Fortune, they were given to understand by the Master of the Revels that it would replace the Curtain, which was therefore to be ‘ruinated or applied to some other good use’. This arrangement seems to suggest that the Curtain was in some way under the control of Alleyn or Henslowe. It was, however, departed from, and apparently with the tacit consent of the Council, as although they had occasion on 10 May 1601 to instruct the Middlesex justices to suppress a libellous play produced at ‘the Curtaine in Moorefeilds’, they did not take, as they might have done, the point that no play ought to have been produced there at all. On 31 December they were again insisting on the limitation of the theatres in use to two; and on 31 March 1602 they again departed from their own principles by licensing Oxford’s and Worcester’s men to play at the Boar’s Head. Henceforward three companies of men players were regularly tolerated, and when a draft licence was prepared for Worcester’s, or as they had then become Queen Anne’s, men early in the following year the Curtain and the Boar’s Head were named as ‘there now usuall howsen’. The Curtain is also specified for them in the Council’s warrant for the resumption of plays on 9 April 1604. About 1606 they also took into use the Red Bull, and thereafter but little is heard of the Curtain. The Queen’s men, however, played Day, Wilkins, and Rowley’s _The Travels of Three English Brothers_ there at some time before its entry on 29 June 1607. It was still theirs in April 1609, but may perhaps soon have passed to the Duke of York’s men. It is mentioned, with the Globe and Fortune, in Heath’s _Epigrams_ of 1610, and plays heard ‘at _Curtaine_, or at Bull’ and ‘a Curtaine Iigge’ are objects of ridicule in Wither’s _Abuses Stript and Whipt_ of 1613.[1179] It was used by an amateur company for a performance of Wentworth Smith’s _Hector of Germany_ in 1615, and it is obscurely referred to in I. H.’s _This World’s Folly_ of the same year.[1180] Malone gathered from Sir Henry Herbert’s office-book that it was used by Prince Charles’s men in 1622, and soon thereafter only by prize-fighters. It was still in use in 1624, and still standing in 1627.[1181]

viii. NEWINGTON BUTTS

A theatre, of which the history is very obscure, but which may have been built soon after the Theatre and Curtain, stood at Newington, a village one mile from London Bridge, divided from the Bankside by St. George’s Fields, and reachable by the road which continued Southwark High Street.[1182] Here there were butts for the practice of archery. Plays at Newington Butts, outside the City jurisdiction, are first mentioned in a Privy Council letter of 13 May 1580 to the Surrey justices. A similar letter of 11 May 1586 speaks more precisely of ‘the theater or anie other places about Newington’. A third letter, undated, but probably belonging to 1591 or 1592, recites an order of the Council restraining Strange’s men from playing at the Rose, and enjoining them to play three days a week at Newington Butts, and rescinds it, ‘by reason of the tediousness of the way, and that of long time plays have not there been used on working days’.[1183] Possibly the theatre had come into Henslowe’s hands, for his diary records that it was at Newington that the combined companies of the Admiral’s and Chamberlain’s men began their first season after the plague of 1592–4, apparently playing there from 5 to 15 June 1594, and then going their separate ways to the Rose and the Theatre respectively. The theatre is mentioned in the list given by Howes in 1631.[1184] It is said to have been ‘only a memory’ by 1599.[1185] A bad pun is called a ‘Newington conceit’ in 1612.[1186]

ix. THE ROSE

[_Bibliographical Note._--All the more important documents are printed or calendared from the _Dulwich MSS._ with a valuable commentary in Greg, _Henslowe’s Diary_ and _Henslowe Papers_, and in Collier, _Memoirs of Alleyn_ and _Henslowe’s Diary_.]

The Rose owed its name to the fact that it stood in what had been, as recently as 1547–8, a rose garden.[1187] On 3 December 1552 Thomasyn, widow of Ralph Symonds, fishmonger, granted to trustees, for her own use during life and thereafter to the charitable uses of the parish of St. Mildred, Bread Street, her ‘messuage or tennement then called the little rose with twoe gardens’ formerly in St. Margaret’s and then in St. Saviour’s, Southwark. St. Mildred’s still has a plan of the estate, which extended to about three roods.[1188] A ‘tenement called the Rose’ is referred to in a recital of a lease of Henry VIII’s reign as the eastern boundary of other tenements, by name the Barge, the Bell, and the Cock, which lay ‘vppon the banke called Stewes’ in St. Margaret’s, afterwards St. Saviour’s, parish, between the highway next the Thames on the north and Maiden Lane on the south.[1189] It is located by Mr. Rendle just to the east of the still existing Rose Alley. The site therefore lay in the Liberty of the Clink midway between those afterwards occupied by the Globe on the east and the Hope on the west. On 20 November 1574 the parish let the property for thirty-one years at £7 annually to William Griffin, vintner. Griffin assigned it on 11 December 1579 to Robert Withens, vintner, and Withens on 24 March 1585 to Henslowe.[1190] There was as yet no theatre. The first mention of one as in contemplation is in an agreement of 10 January 1587 between Henslowe and one John Cholmley, citizen and grocer of London, for partnership during the next eight years and three months, should both parties live so long, in a garden plot ninety-four feet square on the Bankside in the parish of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, and ‘a playe howse now in framinge and shortly to be ereckted and sett vppe vpone the same’. Under this Henslowe undertook to have ‘the saide play house with all furniture thervnto belonginge’ set up ‘with as muche expedicion as maye be’ by John Grigges, carpenter, to pay all rents due on the premisses, and to repair the bridges and wharves belonging to them before the following Michaelmas. Cholmley undertook to bear his share of any further cost of maintaining the premises, and also to pay Henslowe the sum of £816 in quarterly instalments. In consideration of this, he was to take half of all such profits as ‘shall arysse grow be colectted gathered or become due for the saide parcell of grounde and playe howse when and after yt shalbe ereckted and sett vpe by reason of any playe or playes, that shalbe showen or played there or otherwysse howsoever’. The partners are jointly to appoint ‘players to vse exersyse & playe in the saide playe howse’, and collect sums themselves or by deputy of all persons coming to the performances ‘excepte yt please any of the saide partyes to suffer theire frendes to go in for nothinge’. Cholmley is also to have the sole right of selling food or drink on the premises and a small house already in his tenure on the south of the plot close to Maiden Lane, ‘to keepe victualinge in’ or for any other purpose, and with a right of ingress from Thames side by Rose Alley.[1191] The deed does not name the property, but it cannot be doubted that it refers to a part of the Little Rose. Presumably the theatre was to be built on a garden at the back of the holding, and the existing tenement on Bankside was not to be interfered with. Henslowe had ‘Rosse rentes’ of a residential character in 1602 or 1603.[1192] Norden’s map (1593) puts the Rose farther from the river than the Bear Garden. The Delaram and Merian drawings, on the other hand, put it very near the river, and these, although of less authority than Norden, are followed in Mr. Rendle’s plan. Probably Norden’s Bear Garden was an older one than that which afterwards became the Hope.[1193] The provision as to the wharfs and bridges seems to indicate an intention to open the Rose at Michaelmas 1587, and I see no reason to doubt that it was in fact ready for occupation by about that date. On 29 October the Privy Council called the attention of the Surrey justices to complaints from Southwark of breaches of the rule against plays on Sunday, ‘especiallie within the Libertie of the Clincke and in the parish of St. Saviour’s in Southwarke’. There may, of course, have been plays at inns in the Clink, but it is more natural to take the protest as one against the newly opened Rose. No other regular theatre existed in the Clink at this time. That the Rose was built by 1588 appears from a record of the Sewer Commission for Surrey.[1194] It is not in Smith’s plan of 1588, but this may easily not have been quite up to date.

The next that is heard of the Rose is probably in 1592.[1195] In March and April of that year Henslowe, who had recently taken his famous ‘diary’ into use as a financial memorandum book, noted in it some building expenditure, and a little later set out ‘a note of suche carges as I haue layd owt a bowte my playe howsse in the yeare of our lord 1592’.[1196] Henslowe is not known to have owned Newington Butts, or any other theatre except the Rose, and it is reasonable to assume that this is what he meant by ‘my playe howsse’. The work probably began in or before January, as an entry halfway through the list is dated on 6 February. It entailed the purchase of a barge and a certain amount of breaking up and paling and wharfing. Henslowe appears to have done the work himself and not by contract. He bought a mast, turned balusters, boards and laths, in part from the carpenter Grigges who is named in the agreement with Cholmley, and in part from a ‘timber man’ called Lee. He bought bolts, hinges, and nails from the ironmonger at the Fryingpan in Southwark and from one Brader. He bought lime, sand, chalk, and bricks. He paid wages to carpenters, workmen, and labourers, and employed painters and a thatcher. The exact nature and extent of the work are not specified, but it included the painting of the stage, the ceiling of ‘my lords rome’, and ‘the rome ouer the tyerhowsse’, and the ‘makeinge the penthowsse shed at the tyeringe howsse doore’. It has sometimes been supposed that the Rose never got built in 1587, and that these are the accounts, or part of them, for the original construction. This seems to me most unlikely. The total expense, with the exception of a small number of items lost by the mutilation of a page, only amounted to about £108. This could not cover more than repairs. On the other hand, these were clearly substantial repairs, and the fact that they were needed suggests that the building cannot have been a very new one. The lapse of five years since 1587 would, however, be consistent with the necessity for them. Almost simultaneously with the earliest dated entries in the building account, begins on 19 February 1592 the record of performances by Lord Strange’s men, which continues to the following 22 June. If these were at the Rose, the paint on the stage can hardly have been dry in time for them, unless, as Dr. Greg suggests, the payments made in March and April were for work done a little earlier. That it was at the Rose that Strange’s men played seems indicated by the Privy Council order, reciting the restraint of this company ‘from playinge at the Rose on the Banckside’, which it is difficult to assign to any year but 1591 or 1592.[1197] It is a little curious that nothing more is heard of John Cholmley, and I think the natural inference is that he was dead and that the partnership had thereby, in accordance with the terms of the agreement, been automatically dissolved.[1198]

The assumption, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that until he acquired a share in the Fortune Henslowe had no proprietary interest in any other theatre must explain the assignment to the Rose of all the playing recorded in the diary between 1592 and the autumn of 1600, with the exception of the few performances definitely stated to have been at Newington Butts. The further conjecture must, I think, be accepted that the season begun by the Admiral’s and Chamberlain’s men at Newington Butts in the summer of 1594 was transferred, so far as the Admiral’s men were concerned, to the Rose after 15 June. If so, the Rose housed Strange’s men again from 29 December 1592 to 1 February 1593, Sussex’s from 26 December 1593 to 6 February 1594, the Queen’s and Sussex’s together from 1 to 9 April 1594, and the Admiral’s from 14 to 16 May 1594, and then regularly from the following June until their transference to the Fortune in 1600. The only actual mentions of the theatre by name in the diary during this period are in the agreements of 1597 between Henslowe and the players Jones and Borne, in which Henslowe specifies ‘the Rosse’ as ‘my howsse’ in which they are to play. It was no doubt in use when Guilpin’s _Skialetheia_ (S. R. 8 September 1598) was written.[1199] In the Lenten interval of 1595 Henslowe made ‘A nott of what I haue layd owt abowt my playhowsse ffor payntynge & doinge it abowt with ealme bordes & other repracyones’. The expenditure reached a total of £108 19_s._, which was much about the same as that of 1592, and was supplemented in the following June by a further £7 2_s._ for carpenters’ work, including ‘mackinge the throne in the heuenes’.[1200] The accounts of 1592 and 1595 suggest that the building was of wood and plaster on a brick foundation, and this is consistent with Hentzner’s statement of 1598. Part of it, at least, was thatched. If the maps can be trusted, it was octagonal. In 1600 Henslowe had to find new occupants for the Rose. He records that Pembroke’s men began to play there on 28 October, but only enters two unprofitable performances. Possibly the Privy Council, who had decreed in the previous July a limitation of houses to one on each side of the river, interfered. But this limitation was certainly not permanent. There is a receipt for a play bought for Worcester’s men ‘at the Rose’, and they probably used the house during the term of their account with Henslowe between August 1602 and May 1603. Subsequently they moved to the Curtain and Boar’s Head. Henslowe’s lease of the site was due to expire at the end of 1605, and this explains to some extent the following entry in the diary:

‘The 25 of June 1603 I talked with M^r. Pope at the scryveners shope wher he lisse consernynge the tackynge of the leace a new of the littell Roosse & he showed me a wrytynge betwext the pareshe & hime seallfe which was to paye twenty pownd a yeare rent & to bestowe a hundred marckes vpon billdinge which I sayd I wold rather pulle downe the playehowse then I wold do so & he beade me do & sayd he gaue me leaue & wold beare me owt for yt wasse in him to do yt.’[1201]

It is impossible to say whether ‘Mr. Pope’ was Thomas Pope of the King’s men at the neighbouring Globe, or Morgan Pope, who was formerly interested in the Bear House, or some other Pope; nor is it clear how he was in a position to authorize Henslowe to pull down the theatre. Dr. Greg draws the natural inference from the wording that he may have given his consent as a prospective lessee of the property.[1202] In any case the Rose was not pulled down until two or three years later. The Sewers records show that in January 1604 not Philip but Francis Henslowe was amerced 6_s._ 8_d._ for it, which may mean that Lennox’s men were playing there; that on 4 October 1605 Philip Henslowe was amerced, but return was made that it was ‘out of his hands’; that on 14 February 1606 Edward Box, of Bread Street, London, was amerced for it; and that on 25 April 1606 Box was amerced for the site of ‘the late play-house in Maid lane’.[1203]

There is no record of plays at the Rose after 1603.[1204] It is in the Delaram engravings, but not in any later views except those of the Merian group, where it appears, flagged but unnamed, on the river edge.[1205] Nor is it mentioned with the Hope, Globe, and Swan in _Holland’s Leaguer_ (1632). The explanation may perhaps be that the Merian engraver followed some out-of-date authority, such as Delaram, which had got the house farther north than Norden puts it, and as it had long ceased to exist, did not know its name. On the other hand, it is also just conceivable that for a short period the Rose, or some other building at the north end of the Rose site, had a renewed life as a place of public entertainment. Alleyn was paying ‘tithe dwe for the Rose’ in 1622.[1206] And Malone cites Herbert’s ‘office-book’ for a statement that after 1620 the Swan and the Rose were ‘used occasionally for the exhibition of prize-fighters’.[1207]

x. THE SWAN

[_Bibliographical Note._--John de Witt’s description and plan are published in K. T. Gaedertz, _Zur Kenntnis der altenglischen Bühne_ (1888), and more exactly by H. B. Wheatley in _On a Contemporary Drawing of the Swan Theatre_, 1596 (_N. S. S. Trans. 1887–92_, 215). They are discussed by H. Logemann in _Anglia_, xix. 117, by W. Archer in _The Universal Review_ for June 1888, by W. Rendle in _7 N. Q._ vi. 221, by J. Le G. Brereton, _De Witt at the Swan_ (1916, _Sh.-Homage_, 204), by myself in a paper on _The Stage of the Globe_ in _The Stratford Town Shakespeare_, x. 351, and in most recent treatises on Elizabethan staging; cf. chh. xviii, xx. Earlier material is collected by W. Rendle in _The Play-houses at Bankside in the Time of Shakespeare_ (_Antiquarian Magazine and Bibliographer_, 1885, vii. 207). The facts as to Langley’s purchase and the pleadings and order in the suit of _Shawe et al. v. Langley_ before the Court of Requests in 1597–8 (cited as _S. v. L._) are given by C. W. Wallace, _The Swan Theatre and the Earl of Pembroke’s Servants_ (1911, _E. S._ xliii. 340). T. S. Graves, _A Note on the Swan Theatre_ (_M. P._ ix. 431), discusses the light thrown on the internal arrangements of the Swan by the accounts of _England’s Joy_ in 1602.]

The Swan stood in the Liberty and Manor of Paris Garden, at the western end of the Bankside. This manor, from which the royal ‘game’ of bear-baiting took its traditional appellation, had come into the hands of the Crown as part of the possessions of the dissolved monastery of Bermondsey. It was granted in 1578 to nominees of Henry, Lord Hunsdon, conveyed by them to the Cure family, and sold for £850 on 24 May 1589 by Thomas Cure the younger to Francis Langley, a citizen and goldsmith of London. Langley, who was brother-in-law to Sir Anthony Ashley, one of the clerks to the Privy Council, held the office of Alnager and Searcher of Cloth, to which he had been appointed by the Corporation on the recommendation of the Privy Council and Sir Francis Walsingham in December 1582.[1208] The site of the theatre can be precisely identified from a plan of the manor dated in 1627, but based on a survey of 1 November 1624.[1209] It was in the north-east corner of the demesne, east of the manor-house, twenty-six poles due south of Paris Garden stairs, and immediately west of a lane leading to a house called Copt Hall. The outline shown is that of a double circle, or perhaps dodecahedron, divided into twelve compartments, with a small porch or tiring-house towards the road. The exact date of building is unknown. On 3 November 1594 the Lord Mayor wrote to Burghley that Langley ‘intendeth to erect a niew stage or Theater (as they call it) for the exercising of playes vpon the Banck side’, and detailed the usual civic objections to the stage as arguments in favour of the suppression of the project.[1210] It is probable that Burghley refused to intervene and that Langley proceeded at once with the erection of the Swan, which may then have been ready for use in 1595. It is impossible, without the Swan, to make up the tale of four ‘spielhäuser’ seen by the Prince of Anhalt in 1596 (360). To 1596 again is assigned, although with probability rather than certainty, the visit of John de Witt, who not only names but also describes and delineates the Swan.[1211] In any case the Swan had already been in use by players before February 1597, when Langley entered into an arrangement for its occupation by Lord Pembroke’s men.[1212] The terms of the lease provided that he should make the house ready and furnish apparel, which he alleged cost him £300, and should get his return for this expenditure out of the company’s moiety of the gallery takings, in addition of course to the other moiety which in accordance with theatrical custom went to him as rent.[1213] The enterprise was rudely interrupted by the production of _The Isle of Dogs_ at the Swan itself, and the restraint of 28 July 1597 which was the result. The leading members of Pembroke’s company joined or rejoined the Admiral’s at the Rose, and became involved in litigation with Langley on account of their breach of covenant.[1214] For a time Langley succeeded in keeping a company together, and the Swan remained open.[1215] It was perhaps the intention of the Privy Council order of 19 February 1598, against an intrusive ‘third company’ which was competing with the Chamberlain’s and the Admiral’s, to close it.[1216] If so, Langley may still for a time have found means of evasion, since on the following 1 May the vestry of St. Saviour’s were viewing new buildings of his, and at the same time negotiating with Henslowe and Meade for money for the poor ‘in regarde of theire playe-houses’.[1217] During the next few years, however, such notices as we get of the Swan, while showing that it was still in existence and available for occasional entertainments, carry no evidence of any use by a regular company. Francis Meres, in his _Palladis Tamia_ of 1598, tells us that it was the scene of a challenge in ‘extemporall’ versifying by Robert Wilson.[1218] It was one of the wooden theatres which were seen by Hentzner in the same year, and no doubt the one near which he describes the royal barge as lying.[1219] On 15 May 1600 the Council sanctioned its use for feats of activity by Peter Bromvill.[1220] On 7 February 1602 it was occupied by fencers, and while two of these, by names Turner and Dun, were playing their prizes upon its stage, Dun was unfortunate enough to receive a mortal wound in the eye.[1221] On 6 November 1602 it was chosen by Richard Vennar for his impudent mystification of _England’s Joy_. The accounts of this transaction show that it was fitted with ‘hangings, curtains, chairs, and stools’, and capable of scenic effects, such as the appearance of a throne of blessed souls in heaven and of black and damned souls with fireworks from beneath the stage.[1222] Meanwhile Langley had died in 1601 and in January 1602 the Paris Garden estate was sold to Hugh Browker, a protonotary of the Court of Common Pleas, in whose family it remained to 1655.[1223] About 1611 it was once more taken into use for plays. _The Roaring Girl_ (1611), itself a Fortune play, has an allusion to a knight who ‘lost his purse at the last new play i’ the Swan’,[1224] and the accounts of the overseers of Paris Garden contain entries of receipts from ‘the play house’ or ‘the Swan’ in each April from 1611 to 1615.[1225] The last entry is of so small an amount that it probably only covered a fraction of a year, and I think the inference is that the Swan was disused on the opening of the Hope in 1614.[1226] If so, it had probably been taken over by Henslowe for the use of the Lady Elizabeth’s men, who came into existence in 1611, and whose _Chaste Maid in Cheapside_ was published in 1630 as ‘often acted at the Swan on the Bankeside’. The Hope itself was modelled structurally upon the Swan. Its measurements were the same, and it had similar partitions between the rooms and external staircases. Its heavens, however, were to be supported without the help of posts from the stage, since this had to be removable on days of bear-baiting. It is obviously illegitimate to infer from this specification that the stage of the Swan, which was not used for bear-baiting, was also removable. The accounts of the overseers show one more payment from the ‘players’ in 1621, which perhaps supports the statement contained in one of Malone’s notes from Sir Henry Herbert’s office-book, that after 1620 the Swan was ‘used occasionally for the exhibition of prize-fighters’.[1227] The theatre is marked ‘Old Play-house’ in the manor map of 1627. The last notice of it is in _Holland’s Leaguer_ (1632) as a famous amphitheatre, which was ‘now fallen to decay, and like a dying swanne hanging downe her head seemed to sing her own dierge’.[1228]

Many of the maps of the Bankside do not extend far enough west to take in the Swan. It is named and shown as an octagonal or decagonal building by Visscher (1616) and in maps of the Merian group (1638), but not by Hollar (1647).

xi. THE GLOBE

[_Bibliographical Note._--The devolution of the Globe shares can be traced in the documents of three lawsuits: (_a_) _Ostler v. Heminges_, in the Court of King’s Bench in 1616 (_Coram Rege Roll_ 1454, 13 Jac. I, Hilary Term, m. 692), described by C. W. Wallace in _The Times_ of 2 and 4 Oct. 1909, and in part privately printed by him in _Advance Sheets from Shakespeare, the Globe, and Blackfriars_ (1909), here cited as _O. v. H._; (_b_) _Witter v. Heminges and Condell_, in the Court of Requests (1619–20), described by C. W. Wallace in _The Century_ of Aug. 1910, and printed by him in _Nebraska University Studies_, x (1910), 261, here cited as _W. v. H._; and (_c_) the proceedings before the Lord Chamberlain in 1635 known as the _Sharers Papers_, and printed by Halliwell-Phillipps in _Outlines_, i. 312. Professor Wallace’s descriptive articles require some corrections from the texts of his documents. Much evidence bearing upon the site of the theatre was collected by W. Rendle in _The Bankside, Southwark, and the Globe Play-house_ (1877), printed by the N. S. S. as an appendix to Harrison, pt. ii (cited as Rendle, _Bankside_), in _Walford’s Antiquarian_, viii (1885), 209, and in _The Anchor Brewery_ (1888, _Inns of Old Southwark_, 56), by G. Hubbard in _Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects_, 3rd series, xvii. 26, and _London and Middlesex Arch. Soc. Trans._ n. s. ii (1912), pt. iii, and most fully by W. Martin in _Surrey Archaeological Collections_, xxiii (1910), 149. Some additional facts, from records of the Sewers Commission for Kent and Surrey in the possession of the London County Council, and from deeds concerning the Brend estate, were published by Dr. Wallace in _The Times_ of 30 April and 1 May 1914, and led to discussion by Dr. Martin, Mr. Hubbard, and others in _11 N. Q._ x. 209, 290, 335; xi. 447; xii. 10, 50, 70, 121, 143, 161, 201, 224, 264, 289, 347, and by W. W. Braines in _The Site of the Globe Play-house_ (1921). A paper by the present writer on _The Stage of the Globe_ is in the _Stratford Town Shakespeare_, x. 351.]

In the building of the Globe use was made of the materials of the old Theatre (q.v.) which, according to _Allen v. Burbadge_ (1602), the Burbadges, with Peter Street and others, pulled down on 28 December 1598, carried ‘all the wood and timber therof unto the Banckside in the parishe of St. Marye Overyes, and there erected a newe playehowse with the sayd timber and woode’.[1229] An earlier account gives the date of the audacious proceeding as 20 January 1599. The formal lease of the new site from the freeholder, Nicholas Brend of West Molesey, was executed on 21 February 1599. No doubt Street, who had assisted in the transfer, was the builder and had finished his job when on 8 January 1600 he contracted with Henslowe and Alleyn to put up the Fortune (q.v.) on the model, with certain modifications, of ‘the late erected plaiehowse on the Banck in the saide parishe of St. Saviours called the Globe’. This contract allowed twenty-eight weeks for the work. Probably the Globe took about the same time, for it is described as ‘de novo edificata’ in the inquisition on the property left by the lessor’s father, Thomas Brend, which is dated on 16 May 1599.[1230] It may not then have been quite finished, but it was doubtless ready for the occupation of the Chamberlain’s men by the beginning of the autumn season of 1599. One of the earliest plays there produced by them was Shakespeare’s _Julius Caesar_ which on 21 September Thomas Platter crossed the water to see ‘in dem streüwinen Dachhaus’.[1231] Whether the Globe or its predecessor the Curtain was the ‘wooden O’ of _Henry V_, 1, prol. 13, must be more doubtful, as the prologue to Act V of the same play contemplates the triumphant return of Essex from Ireland, and in fact Essex left England on 27 March and returned, not triumphant, on 28 September 1599.[1232] Jonson refers to ‘this faire-fild Globe’ as the scene of his _Every Man Out of his Humour_, produced in the autumn of 1600.[1233] The Privy Council order of the previous 22 June, which enacts that there shall be one allowed house only ‘in Surrey in that place which is commonlie called the Banckside or there aboutes’, goes on to recite that the Chamberlain’s men had chosen the Globe to be that one. The allowance of the house ‘in Surrey called the Globe’ is confirmed by the Privy Council letter of 27 December 1601. The order of 9 April 1604 authorizes the opening after the plague of ‘the Globe scituate in Maiden Lane on the Banckside in the Countie of Surrey’. This order evidently contemplates that the King’s men will use the house, which was assigned to them by name as ‘theire nowe vsual howse called the Globe within our County of Surrey’ by the terms of the patent of 19 May 1603. The precedent is followed in the later patents of 1619 and 1625, and there is nothing to indicate that any other company than the Chamberlain’s or King’s men ever performed, even temporarily, at the theatre.

The Globe was held by a syndicate, composed mainly of members of the company, on a leasehold tenure. The site, which had been garden ground, was described in the original lease with some minuteness as follows:[1234]

‘totam illam parcellam fundi nuper praeantea inclusam & factam in quatuor separalia gardina nuper in tenuris & occupacionibus Thomae Burt & Isbrand Morris diers & Lactantii Roper Salter civis Londoniae continentem in longitudine ab oriente vsque occidentem ducentos & viginti pedes assisae vel eo circiter iacentem & adiungentem viae sive venellae ibidem ex vno latere & abbuttantem super peciam terrae vocatam the Parke super boream & super gardinum tunc vel nuper in tenura siue occupacione cuiusdam Johannis Cornishe versus occidentem & super aliud gardinum tunc vel nuper in tenura sive occupacione cuiusdam Johannis Knowles versus orientem cum omnibus domibus aedificiis structuris vijs easiamentis commoditatibus & pertinentiis adinde spectantibus vel aliquo modo pertinentibus quae dicta praemissa sunt scituata iacentia & existentia infra parochiam sancti Salvatoris in Southwarke in Comitatu Surria aceciam totam illam parcellam terrae nuper praeantea inclusam & factam in tria separalia gardina vnde duo eorundem nuper in tenura sive occupacione cuiusdam Johannis Robertes carpenter ac aliud nuper in occupacione cuiusdam Thomas Ditcher civis & mercatoris scissoris Londoniae scituatam iacentem & existentem in parochia praedicta in praedicto comitatu Surria continentem in longitudine ab oriente ad occidentem per estimacionem centum quinquaginta & sex pedes assisae vel eo circiter & in latitudine a borea ad austrum centum pedes assisae per estimacionem vel eo circiter iacentem & adiungentem super alio latere viae sive venellae praedictae & abbuttantem super gardinum ibidem tunc vel nuper praeantea in occupacione Willelmi Sellers versus orientem & super vnum aliud gardinum ibidem tunc vel nuper praeantea in tenura Johannis Burgram sadler versus occidentem & super venellam ibidem vocatam Mayden lane versus austrum cum omnibus domibus aedificijs structuris vijs easiamentis commoditatibus & pertinentiis ultimis recitatis praemissis seu alicui parti vel parcellae inde spectantibus seu aliquo modo pertinentibus simul cum libero ingressu egressu & regressu & passagio ... per & trans praedictam viam sive venellam iacentem & existentem inter praemissa praedicta.’

The lease was granted for a term of thirty-one years from Christmas 1598 to Christmas 1629, and conveyed the property in two equal moieties, the one to Cuthbert and Richard Burbadge and the other to William Shakespeare, Augustine Phillips, Thomas Pope, John Heminges, and William Kempe.[1235] With the exception of Cuthbert Burbadge these were all members of the Chamberlain’s company. Each moiety was charged with a ground-rent of £7 5_s._ There is nothing to show how the funds for building were found. ‘Wee’, said the Burbadges in 1635, ‘at like expence built the Globe, with more summes of money taken up at interest, which lay heavy on us many yeeres; and to ourselves wee joyned those deserveing men, Shakspere, Hemings, Condall, Philips, and others, partners in the profittes of that they call the House, but makeing the leases for twenty-one yeeres hath beene the destruction of ourselves and others, for they dyeing at the expiration of three or four yeeres of their lease, the subsequent yeeres became dissolved to strangers, as by marrying with their widdowes and the like by their children.’[1236] This is, however, not a strictly accurate account of what took place in 1599, for Condell was not one of the original ‘housekeepers’, and the original lease was for thirty-one, not twenty-one, years. In any case, the Burbadges contributed the woodwork of the Theatre.

Between the execution of the lease and the completion of the play-house, Shakespeare and his four fellows assigned their moiety to William Levison and Thomas Savage, who ‘reassigned to euerye of them seuerally a fift parte of the said moitie’, so that after the building each of the five had a ‘ioynt tenancie’ with the other four in a moiety of the ground and galleries, and was also ‘tenant in common’ during the term of the lease.[1237] Professor Wallace explains that ‘the purpose of a joint-tenancy was to prevent the breaking up and scattering of an estate into fractions by keeping the property always in the hands of the members, or the longest survivors, or survivor, of them all, thus not allowing it to descend to heirs’. The legal distinction is no doubt sound, but we shall find that, whatever the intention of the assignment and reassignment may have been, the Globe shares did in fact descend to heirs, and that a good deal of trouble and litigation was thereby caused.[1238]

Shortly after the house was built Kempe, no doubt on his withdrawal from the company, assigned his interest to Shakespeare, Heminges, and Phillips, who by further assignments to and from one Thomas Cressey brought in Pope, with the result that each of the four now held a fourth part of the moiety.[1239] Pope died before 13 February 1604 and left his interest to Mary Clark, _alias_ Wood, and Thomas Bromley. Mary Clark must have married John Edmonds, another legatee under the will, for in 1612 an interest corresponding to Pope’s was held by John and Mary Edmonds and Basil Nicoll.[1240] Nicoll, who was Pope’s executor, was presumably acting as trustee for Thomas Bromley. Edmonds, though an actor, belonged not to the King’s men, but was a Queen’s man by 1618. One-eighth of the house, therefore, was alienated from the company in 1604. A further alienation, which proved particularly troublesome in its results, took place on the death of Phillips in May 1605. The exact facts became a matter of legal dispute. But it appears that Phillips’ interest passed first to his widow Anne as executrix, and, when her marriage in the course of 1606 to the spendthrift John Witter became known, to Heminges, who succeeded her as executor under the terms of the will. In this capacity Heminges leased an interest to the Witters on 14 February 1611 for a term of eighteen years from Christmas 1610.[1241] This interest was not a fourth, but only a sixth of the moiety, since at some date between the death of Phillips and that of Sly on 16 August 1608 the moiety had been redivided to allow of the introduction of Henry Condell and William Sly into the syndicate of housekeepers.[1242] A similar transaction took place on 20 February 1612, when Basil Nicoll and John and Mary Edmonds, then holding one-sixth of the moiety, Shakespeare and Witter, each also holding one-sixth, and Heminges and Condell, holding three-sixths, joined to convey one-seventh of the moiety to William Ostler.[1243] It must, I think, be assumed that Heminges and Condell had together purchased the share left by Sly to his son Robert.

The acquisition of the Blackfriars by the King’s men in 1608 did not, at first at least, detract from the importance of the Globe as the leading London theatre. It is so accepted by foreign visitors in 1610 and again in 1611.[1244]

On 29 June 1613 the house was ‘casually burnt downe and consumed with fier’.[1245] The event was important enough to find a record in Howes’ continuation of Stowe’s _Annales_:[1246]

‘Upon S. Peters day last, the play-house or Theater, called the Globe, upon the Banckside near London, by negligent discharging of a peal of ordinance, close to the south-side thereof, the thatch took fire, and the wind sodainly disperst the flame round about, and in a very short space the whole building was quite consumed, and no man hurt; the house being filled with people to behold the play, viz. of Henry the Eighth. And the next spring it was new builded in far fairer manner than before.’

Many other contemporary accounts exist. Thus Thomas Lorkin wrote to Sir Thomas Puckering on 30 June:[1247]

‘No longer since than yesterday, while Burbage’s company were

## acting at the Globe the play of Henry VIII, and there shooting

off certain chambers in way of triumph, the fire catched and fastened upon the thatch of the house, and there burned so furiously, as it consumed the whole house, all in less than two hours, the people having enough to do to save themselves.’

On 2 July Sir Henry Wotton wrote to his nephew Sir Edmund Bacon:[1248]

‘Now, to let matters of state sleep, I will entertain you at the present with what has happened this week at the Bank’s side. The King’s players had a new play, called _All is True_, representing some principal pieces of the reign of Henry VIII, which was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty, even to the matting of the stage; the Knights of the Order with their Georges and garters, the Guards with their embroidered coats, and the like: sufficient in truth within a while to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous. Now, King Henry making a masque at the Cardinal Wolsey’s house, and certain chambers being shot off at his entry, some of the paper, or other stuff, wherewith one of them was stopped, did light on the thatch, where being thought at first but an idle smoke, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very grounds. This was the fatal period of that virtuous fabric, wherein yet nothing did perish but wood and straw, and a few forsaken cloaks; only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broiled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottle ale.’

On 8 July John Chamberlain wrote to Sir Ralph Winwood:[1249]

‘The burning of the Globe, or play-house, on the Bankside, on St. Peter’s day, cannot escape you; which fell out by a peal of chambers (that I know not upon what occasion were to be used in the play), the tamplin or stopple of one of them lighting in the thatch that covered the house, burn’d it down to the ground in less than two hours, with a dwelling-house adjoining, and it was a great marvaile and fair grace of God, that the people had so little harm, having but two narrow doors to get out.’

Nor was poetic chronicles of the disaster lacking. On the day after the fire took place, two ballads about it were entered in the Stationers’ Register.[1250] Neither is known in print, but the use of the word ‘doleful’ suggests that one of them, of which the author was William Parrat, is probably identical with the following set of verses, preserved in manuscript:[1251]

_A Sonnett upon the pittiful burneing of the Globe playhowse in London._

Now sitt the downe, Melpomene, Wrapt in a sea-cole robe, And tell the dolefull tragedie, That late was playd at Globe; For noe man that can singe and saye [But ?] was scard on St. Peters daye. Oh sorrow, pittifull sorrow, and yett all this is true.

All yow that please to understand, Come listen to my storye, To see Death with his rakeing brand Mongst such an auditorye; Regarding neither Cardinalls might, Nor yett the rugged face of Henry the Eight. Oh sorrow, &c.

This fearfull fire beganne above, A wonder strange and true, And to the stage-howse did remove, As round as taylors clewe; And burnt downe both beame and snagg, And did not spare the silken flagg. Oh sorrow, &c.

Out runne the knightes, out runne the lordes, And there was great adoe; Some lost their hattes, and some their swordes; Then out runne Burbidge too; The reprobates, though druncke on Munday, Prayd for the Foole and Henry Condye. Oh sorrow, &c.

The perrywigges and drumme-heades frye, Like to a butter firkin; A wofull burneing did betide To many a good buffe jerkin. Then with swolne eyes, like druncken Flemminges, Distressed stood old stuttering Heminges. Oh sorrow, &c.

No shower his raine did there downe force In all that Sunn-shine weather, To save that great renowned howse; Nor thou, O ale-howse, neither. Had itt begunne belowe, sans doubte, Their wives for feare had pissed itt out. Oh sorrow, &c.

Bee warned, yow stage-strutters all, Least yow againe be catched, And such a burneing doe befall, As to them whose howse was thatched; Forbeare your whoreing, breeding biles, And laye up that expence for tiles. Oh sorrow, &c.

Goe drawe yow a petition, And doe yow not abhorr itt, And gett, with low submission, A licence to begg for itt In churches, sans churchwardens checkes, In Surrey and in Midlesex. Oh sorrow, pittifull sorrow, and yett all this is true.

John Taylor, the water-poet, has his epigram on the theme:[1252]

As gold is better that’s in fier try’d, So is the Bankside _Globe_, that late was burn’d; For where before it had a thatched hide, Now to a stately theator ’tis turn’d: Which is an emblem, that great things are won By those that dare through greatest dangers run.

Ben Jonson, in his _Execration upon Vulcan_, writes as if he had been an eye-witness:[1253]

Well fare the wise men yet, on the Bank side, My friends the watermen! they could provide Against thy fury, when to serve their needs, They made a Vulcan of a sheaf of reeds, Whom they durst handle in their holiday coats, And safely trust to dress, not burn their boats. But O those reeds! thy mere disdain of them Made thee beget that cruel stratagem, Which some are pleased to style but thy mad prank, Against the Globe, the glory of the Bank: Which, though it were the fort of the whole parish, Flanked with a ditch, and forced out of a marish, I saw with two poor chambers taken in, And razed; ere thought could urge this might have been! See the World’s ruins! nothing but the piles Left, and wit since to cover it with tiles. The Brethren they straight nosed it out for news, ’Twas verily some relict of the Stews; And this a sparkle of that fire let loose, That was raked up in the Winchestrian goose, Bred on the Bank in time of Popery, When Venus there maintained the mystery. But others fell with that conceit by the ears, And cried it was a threatning to the bears, And that accursed ground, the Paris-garden: ‘Nay,’ sighed a sister, ‘Venus’ nun, Kate Arden, Kindled the fire!’ But then, did one return, No fool would his own harvest spoil or burn! If that were so, thou rather wouldst advance The place that was thy wife’s inheritance. ‘Oh no,’ cried all, ‘Fortune, for being a whore, Scaped not his justice any jot the more: He burnt that idol of the Revels too. Nay, let Whitehall with revels have to do, Though but in dances, it shall know his power; There was a judgement shewn too in an hour.’

The Puritans did in fact draw such morals as Jonson satirized. Prynne, for example, finds the hand of God in ‘the sudden feareful burning, even to the ground, both of the Globe and Fortune play-houses, no man perceiving how these fires came’.[1254]

The Globe was at once rebuilt. It was open again by 30 June 1614, when John Chamberlain wrote to Alice Carleton that he had called upon her sister Williams, and found her ‘gone to the new Globe, to a play. Indeed’, he says, ‘I hear much speech of this new play-house, which is said to be the fairest that ever was in England, so that if I live but seven years longer, I may chance to take a journey to see it’.[1255] The manuscript continuator of Stowe, describing the end of the theatre, says that the rebuilding was ‘at the great charge of King Iames, and many Noble men and others’.[1256] The lawsuit documents contain no indication that any part of the burden fell upon any one but the ‘housekeepers’, who being bound under their lease to ‘mainteyne and repaire’ the house, resolved to ‘reedifie the same’. The first estimate of cost seems to have been about £700 to £800, for a levy of ‘50^{li} or 60^{li}’ was called upon each seventh share of the moiety.[1257] Witter was unable to meet this demand, and as he was also behindhand with his share of the ground-rent and other payments, Heminges resumed possession of the seventh and gave half of it ‘gratis’ to Henry Condell. By this time it had been ascertained that the re-edifying would be ‘a verie greate charge’, and Heminges claims that the re-edifying of Witter’s ‘parte’ had in fact cost himself and Condell ‘about the somme of cxx^{li}’.[1258] This would mean a total cost of about £1,680.[1259] Heminges appears to have taken a sub-lease at 20_s._ a year from his partners of two small parcels of the land in 1615, and to have built on them a house, probably a taphouse, as a private enterprise.[1260]

Ostler died in December 1614, and Heminges took possession of his interest and drew the profits until October 1615, when his daughter Thomasina, Ostler’s widow, brought an action against him for them, the result of which is unknown.[1261] Shakespeare died in April 1616, and his interest, if not previously alienated, would have passed under his will, with other ‘leases’ to John and Susanna Hall.[1262] At some time earlier than April 1619, probably when he joined the company about 1616, Field was admitted to be a housekeeper, and the moiety was then divided into eighths instead of sevenths.[1263] In April 1619 Witter brought an action against Heminges and Condell in the Court of Requests, to recover the interest which he had forfeited at the time of the rebuilding. He estimated the present annual value of the seventh, which he had held, at £30 to £40, and in the course of the proceedings expressed his willingness either to pay a rent of £13 6_s._ 8_d._ for the half of that seventh which Heminges had not passed over to Condell, or, alternatively, to take the profits of the houses on the site, other than the theatre, and in return for those to become responsible for the whole of the ground-rents due under the principal leases. The defence consisted in a denial of Witter’s claim to benefit under the will of Augustine Phillips, and an assertion that, after Heminges had allowed him to draw considerable sums in respect of the share, he had deserted his wife, at whose death Heminges ‘out of charitie was at the charges of the buryeing of her’. The depositions of the witnesses, who included Thomas Woodford and one James Knasborough, are unfortunately missing. Ultimately Witter failed to proceed with his case, and on 29 November 1620 the Court gave judgement for the defendants.

In October 1624 died John Underwood and left a share in the Globe in trust for his children to Condell and others as his executors. It must be supposed that he had succeeded to Field’s eighth, when the latter left the King’s men in 1619. Condell himself died in December 1627 and left his interest to his son William until he should have made £300 out of it, and thereafter to his widow. Heminges died in October 1630, and his interest passed to his son William as his executor. During the last years of their lives Heminges and Condell, following out the policy of absorption which has already been illustrated, appear to have acquired in one way or another the whole of the shares formerly held by Shakespeare, by Basil Nicoll and John Edmonds as successors of Sly, and by Underwood. This fact emerges from the records known as the _Sharers Papers_, which start with a petition from Robert Benfield, Eliard Swanston, and Thomas Pollard, then important members of the King’s company, to the Lord Chamberlain in 1635, to be admitted to shares as ‘housekeepers’ in the profits of the Globe and the Blackfriars.[1264] The allegations show that the Globe had been ‘formerly’ divided into sixteen shares, of which eight were held by Cuthbert Burbadge and Richard Burbadge’s widow Winifred, now Mrs. Robinson, in her own right and that of her son William, four by Mrs. Condell, and four by William Heminges. Afterwards Joseph Taylor and John Lowin were allowed to acquire shares, and later still the remaining Heminges interest was ‘surreptitiously’ purchased by John Shank. At the date of the petition, therefore, the Burbadges held seven shares, Mrs. Condell two, Shank three, and Taylor and Lowin two each. The case furnishes valuable information as to the organization of the theatre, and as to the division of outgoing and profits between the housekeepers and the actors as such. It is pretty evident that by 1635 the Globe took a secondary place to the Blackfriars in the economy of the King’s men.[1265] Shank admitted that he had bought a two years’ term of one Globe share in 1633 and a one year’s term of two more in 1634, together with interests in the Blackfriars, and seems to have thought that the £506 which he gave was full value for the purchases.[1266] The Burbadges protested against being called upon to part with any part of their property to ‘men soe soone shott up’ and not having the ‘antiquity and desert’, which had customarily been looked for in housekeepers. In support of their plea they recalled the early services of their father in the building of theatres and the claims of their family to profit by ‘the great desert of Richard Burbadge for his quality of playing’. They suggested that ‘makeing the leases for twenty-one yeeres’ to their fellows, whose widows or children subsequently alienated the profits from the company, had been their ‘destruction’. The Lord Chamberlain, however, directed that the Burbadges should transfer two shares and Shank one to the three petitioners, ‘at the usual and accustomed rates, and according to the proportion of the time and benefit they are to injoy’. This the order states, in the case of the Globe, as five years. Probably there is an error here. The terms bought by Shank were to expire in 1635, but at the time of the petition a suit was pending in the Court of Requests for the confirmation of a ‘lease paroll’ from Sir Matthew Brend for a further nine years from 25 March 1635. The original lease of 1599 from Nicholas Brend was for thirty-one years and would have expired in 1629. But on 26 October 1613, when the rebuilding of the theatre was in hand, a fresh lease extending the term to 1635 had been granted by Sir John Bodley as trustee for Nicholas’s son Matthew, who was then a minor. Not content with this, the syndicate had procured a promise of a further extension to 1644 from young Matthew himself, which he now repudiated.[1267] I think that Bodley must have taken the opportunity in 1613 to raise the ground-rent from £14 10_s._ to £20. A draft for a return of new and divided houses, made for the Earl Marshal in 1634, has the following entry:

‘The Globe play-house nere Maid lane built by the company of players, with the dwelling-house thereto adjoyninge, built with timber, about 20 yeares past, upon an old foundation, worth 14^{li} to 20^{li} per ann., and one house there adjoyning built about the same tyme with timber, in the possession of W^m Millet, gent., worth per ann. 4^{li} [_In margin_, Play-house & house, S^r Mathew Brend’s inheritance].’

A corrected return of 1637 runs:

‘The Globe play-house nere Maide lane built by the Company of Players with timber about 20 yeares past uppon an old foundacion, worth 20^{li} per ann. beinge the inheritance of S^r Mathew Brand, K^{nt}.’[1268]

The petitioners in the _Sharers Papers_ declare that up to Lady Day 1635 the rent for the Globe and Blackfriars together was not above £65. The original rent of the Blackfriars was £40, but this also may have been put up on the expiration of the first lease in 1629. The Court of Requests finally confirmed the extension of the lease to 1644, apparently at a still further increased rent of £55, as Shank states the combined rent of the two houses as £100. The Globe was ‘pulled downe to the ground, by Sir Matthew Brand, on Munday the 15 of April 1644, to make tenements in the room of it’; that is to say, immediately upon the expiration of the nine years’ term from Lady Day 1635 contemplated in the _Sharers Papers_.[1269]

The precise locality of the Globe has been matter of controversy. The various contemporary documents already quoted place it beyond doubt in Surrey, and ‘on the Bankside’, a term which must certainly be taken to cover, not merely the row of houses looking directly upon the river, but also the whole of the western part of Southwark lying behind and south of these. With somewhat greater minuteness, the parish of St. Mary Overies is specified in the lawsuit of _Allen v. Burbadge_, and the parish of St. Saviour’s in the Fortune contract. There is no inconsistency here. The two ancient parishes of St. Mary Magdalen and St. Margaret on the Hill were amalgamated under the name of St. Saviour’s at the Reformation.[1270] I do not know that the ancient boundaries are upon record. The Rose stood in what had been St. Margaret’s, and one would therefore expect to find the Globe nearer than the Rose to the old priory church of St. Mary’s. In the Privy Council order of 1604 the situation is described as ‘in Maiden lane’, and in the return to the Earl Marshal of 1637 as ‘nere Maide lane’. But, apart from the difference between ‘in’ and ‘nere’, Maiden Lane is a fairly long thoroughfare, and so far as these indications are concerned, the Globe may have been either to the north or the south of it. Local tradition, as elaborated by Southwark antiquaries, has been inclined to put it to the south, within the area occupied by what was formerly Thrale’s and is now Barclay and Perkins’s Anchor Brewery, of which Maiden Lane, now Park Street, forms the northern boundary. The main reason for this is the inclusion within the brewery of the course of a passage known as Globe Alley, which ran west from Deadman’s Place in a parallel line to Maiden Lane for about 360 feet and then turned northwards for another 100 feet until it debouched into the Lane. So far as measurements go, Globe Alley might be the _venella_ of the 1599 lease. The name first appears in the St. Saviour’s token book for 1614, where it is applied to houses formerly described as Brand’s Rents, and from 1613 onwards as Sir John Bodley’s Rents.[1271] Land south of Maiden Lane certainly formed part of the Brend estate, and a plot of it conveyed by Sir Matthew Brend to one Hilary Memprise in 1626 was bounded on the south by a sewer dividing it from the Bishop of Winchester’s park, and on the north by ‘the alley or way leading to the Gloabe Play-house commonly called Gloabe Alley’.[1272] A century later, property acquired for the brewery in 1732 is similarly described as ‘fronting a certain alley or passage called Globe Alley, in antient times leading from Deadman’s Place to the Globe Play-house’.[1273]

It was certainly a belief in the Thrale family that the site of the theatre itself had passed into their hands. Mrs. Piozzi, Johnson’s friend, who married Henry Thrale in 1763, left the following autobiographical note of her residence in Southwark between that date and her husband’s death in 1781:

‘For a long time, then--or I thought it such--my fate was bound up with the old Globe Theatre, upon the Bankside, Southwark; the alley it had occupied having been purchased and thrown down by M^r Thrale to make an opening before the windows of our dwelling-house. When it lay desolate in a black heap of rubbish, my Mother, one day, in a joke, called it the Ruins of Palmyra; and after that they laid it down in a grass-plot. Palmyra was the name it went by, I suppose, among the clerks and servants of the brewhouse.... But there were really curious remains of the old Globe Play-house, which though hexagonal in form without, was round within.’[1274]

Dr. Martin seems to think that the lady’s recollection was confused and that the garden called Palmyra stood on the east of Deadman’s Place opposite to Globe Alley. But, according to Concanen and Morgan it was ‘on the opposite side of the street’ to the brewery.[1275] However this may be, there are other notices which show that, however complete the demolition of 1644, the theatre or part of it was still regarded by tradition as standing a hundred years later amongst the tenements by which it was replaced.[1276] In 1787 the brewery was purchased by Barclay and Perkins, and the conveyance recites amongst other property a plot of ground between Globe Alley and a common sewer, from which had been cleared in 1767 some ‘ruinous and decayed’ tenements formerly occupied in 1715 by John Knowles and others.[1277] This is probably the clearance referred to by Mrs. Piozzi. Under Acts of 1786 and 1812 Globe Alley was closed, and it is now covered over within the brewery precinct. Horwood’s map of 1799 shows the eastern end already obliterated. The western end is called Globe Walk, and to the north of it is Globe Court, perhaps representing the space cleared in 1767.

On the assumption that the theatre stood in Globe Alley, there has been divergence of opinion as to the precise part of the Alley in which it stood. Mr. Rendle fixed on a spot on the north side, about 80 or 100 feet from the Deadman’s Place end.[1278] To this he was guided, partly by a further local tradition, according to which the site was occupied successively by a meeting-house and a windmill, and

## partly by an argument derived from the entries in the St. Saviour’s

token-book for 1621.[1279] Here, under the heading ‘Sir John Bodley’s Rentes’ are recorded in succession about ten names. Then comes a new heading, differently written, ‘Gloab Alley’, then two more names, then in the margin of the page the word ‘Gloabe’. This Mr. Rendle took to mean that the Globe was about twelve houses from the east end of the alley. If this is an indication of the site of the Globe at all, which is a mere conjecture, I should myself draw the inference that it stood, not twelve, but two houses from the end of the alley, and that a part, if not the whole, of Bodley’s Rents was outside the alley. And why should the enumerator be supposed to have worked from the east, rather than from the north end of the alley? Dr. Martin, in fact, turns Mr. Rendle’s argument round in this way, and uses the token-book to support a theory which places the theatre south of Globe Alley, just at the angle where it turns to the north, and 360 feet, instead of Mr. Rendle’s 80 or 100 feet, west of Deadman’s Place.[1280] Here it appears to be located in a borough history of 1795;[1281] and is certainly located in more than one early nineteenth-century plan.[1282] Dr. Martin has attempted to obtain confirmation of this siting from an investigation of the brewery title-deeds. From 1727 onwards the history of the angle site is clear. In that year it was transferred, subject to a mortgage, by Timothy Cason and his wife Elizabeth, heiress of the Brend estate, to certain parishioners of St. Saviour’s. Upon it was built the parish workhouse referred to by Concanen and Morgan. This stood just at the outer south-west angle of Globe Alley, which Dr. Martin conceives to have been occupied by the theatre. In 1774 a new workhouse was built, and the site of the old one bought by the Thrales. It was conveyed with the rest of the brewery to Barclay and Perkins in 1787, and was then described as the ground ‘on which lately stood all that great shop or workhouse formerly used for a meeting-house’. Dr. Martin thinks that this forgotten meeting-house may have been confused in local tradition with that further to the east along Globe Alley.[1283] Dr. Martin suggests that the property transferred by the Casons in 1727 is to be identified with that described in a deed executed by the same persons in 1706, of which a copy is also to be found amongst the brewery title-deeds, as consisting of tenements built ‘where the late play-house called the Globe stood and upon the ground thereunto belonging’. If this were so, he would of course have proved his point. The deed of 1706 seems to have been a family settlement covering various fragments of Brend property in Southwark, which had only just been brought together in the hands of Elizabeth Cason. The Globe site had been settled by Sir Matthew Brend in 1624 upon his wife Frances as a jointure. She died in 1673, and it then passed as a jointure to Judith, wife of Sir Matthew’s son Thomas and mother of Elizabeth, under a deed of 1655 in which the reference to ‘the late play-house called the Globe’, repeated in that of 1706, first occurs. Judith Brend had died in 1706.

As a matter of fact, it is almost impossible to reconcile the Southwark tradition that the Globe stood on the south of Maiden Lane, either in Mr. Rendle’s or in Dr. Martin’s interpretation of it, with more than one bit of evidence which we owe to the research of Professor Wallace. The first of these is the lease of 1599 itself, as recited in the pleadings of _Ostler v. Heminges_. This states quite clearly that the leased plot abutted on a piece of land called the Park ‘super boream’ and on Maiden Lane ‘versus austrum’, and it is difficult to take very seriously either the Latinity which makes ‘versus austrum’ mean that the leased plot was on the south, or the suggestion that the draughtsman was working carelessly from a plan which had the south instead of the north of the plot at the top of the sheet, and got the points of his compass wrong.[1284] I daresay that such things do sometimes happen in conveyancer’s offices, but it is hardly legitimate to call them in aid as a canon of interpretation. No doubt it is tempting to identify the piece of land called the Park with the Bishop of Winchester’s park, which lay at a reasonable distance to the south and not to the north of Maiden Lane, but after all this must once have extended nearly up to the Bankside, since Maiden Lane itself is known to have been cut out of it, and it is not at all improbable that some little strip of land retained the name.[1285] It can only have been a very little one. The lease describes the Globe site as consisting of two plots lying apparently on opposite sides of a way or alley (_venella_) by which access was obtainable to them. One of these, that next the Park, had been the gardens of Thomas Burt, Isbrand Morris, and Lactantius Roper. It was 220 feet in length and lay between the garden of John Knowles on the east and John Cornish on the west. The southern plot, bounded by Maiden Lane on the south, had similarly been the gardens of John Roberts and Thomas Ditcher. This was only 156 feet long and 100 feet deep, and lay between the gardens of William Sellers to the east and John Burgram to the west. Now the whole space between Maiden Lane and the Thames is only from 200 to 350 feet at various points, so that there could not have been room for much of a ‘park’ between the Globe site and the Bankside houses.

The evidence of the lease is confirmed in various ways by the records of presentments made by the Commissioners of Sewers for Kent and Surrey against negligent occupiers in this marshy neighbourhood. The most important entry is one of 14 February 1606:

‘It is ordered that Burbidge and Heminges and others, the owners of the Play-house called the Globe in Maid-Lane shall before the xx^{th} day of Aprill next pull vp and take cleane out of the Sewar the props or postes which stand vnder their bridge on the north side of Mayd-lane vpon paine to forfeit xx^s.’

This is endorsed ‘done’, but another order of the same day requiring the same men to ‘well and sufficientlye pyle boorde and fill vp viij poles more or lesse of theire wharfe against theire said Play-house’ needed a repetition on 25 April before it received attention.[1286] Earlier records, before the Globe came into existence, relate to some of the garden-holders named in the lease. A plot of John Bingham or Burgram abutted on a Maiden Lane sewer in 1596, and this is probably identical with the ‘common sewer leading from Sellors gardin to the beare garden’, which William Sellers and others were ordered to cleanse on 5 December 1595. Certainly the bear garden was to the north and not the south of Maiden Lane. There was also a sewer bordering upon the park, and on this Jasper Morris and Thomas Burt had encroached in 1593.[1287]

The old maps, as usual, do not give much help when it comes to a pinch, although the balance of their authority, for what it is worth, seems to me to be in favour of a northern site.[1288] Mr. Hubbard, calculating from Visscher’s map, would put the Globe on the site of the present Central Wharf, 15 feet south of the Bankside houses and 136 feet west of Bank End, and therefore not very near Maiden Lane at all.[1289] I do not think that he sufficiently recognizes the imperfections of the maps from a surveyor’s point of view. I doubt whether more is to be got out of them than that the Globe stood more to the east and probably more to the south than either the Hope or the Rose.[1290]

The foregoing paragraphs show the state of the controversy when the body of this chapter was written. Since then Mr. Braines has taken up the investigation where it was left by Dr. Martin, with the help of the brewery title-deeds and many other documents bearing on the distribution of tenements in Maiden Lane and Globe Alley over more than a century. It now seems clear that, in view of the known history of properties north of Maiden Lane, there is no room for the Globe plot there, that this plot did pass from the Casons to the workhouse and ultimately the brewery, and that it did lie at Dr. Martin’s angle site, being indeed precisely located on the map by Concanen and Morgan’s description of 1795. We must therefore assume that the points of the compass were, as Dr. Martin conjectured, inverted in the lease of 1599, east with west and north with south, and that the Globe company maintained a bridge over the sewer on the opposite side of Maiden Lane to the theatre, for the convenience of visitors coming down Horseshoe Alley from the river. The _venella_ of 1599 must have been a westward extension of Globe Alley, afterwards disused.

Some notion of the structural character of the Globe may be gleaned from the builder’s contract for the Fortune in 1600.[1291] The Globe was then the last new thing in theatres, and in entering into his agreement for the Fortune with Peter Street, the builder of both houses, Henslowe was careful to specify that the Globe should be taken as the model, alike as regards the arrangement of the galleries and staircases, the contrivances and fashioning of the stage, and all other minor points not particularly indicated. The only alterations of design set out in the agreement were that the scantlings or standard measurements of the timber should be rather stouter than those of the Globe, and that the main posts of the stage and auditorium should be shaped square and carved with figures of satyrs. It is probable, however, that a more important difference is passed without notice. The Fortune was rectangular; the Globe was almost certainly round. The reference to a circular house in _Henry V_ and _A Warning for Fair Women_, both plays of about 1599, may indeed belong to the Curtain rather than the Globe, but there are similar references in _E. M. O._ (1599) and in _The Merry Devil of Edmonton_ (1608), which are certainly Globe plays, and there seems no reason to doubt that the Globe is represented by the cylindrical buildings, windowless below, windowed and of narrower diameter above, which are shown in the maps of the Hondius group and in the background of Delaram’s portrait of James I.[1292] A few details are furnished by the various narratives of the fire of 1613. The roof was thatched, whence arose the accident. The walls were of timber, for nothing was burnt but wood and straw. The building was ‘flanked with a ditch, and forced out of a marish’. It had a stage-house ‘round as taylors clewe’, and carried a silken flag. There were two narrow doors, and hard by stood an alehouse. The new Globe built after the fire was tiled for greater safety. In other respects there was probably no great change. The building is described in 1634 as of timber, upon an old foundation. The maps, if they can be trusted, figure it as polygonal, rather than strictly round. No doubt it was round inside; an ‘amphytheator’, it is called in _Holland’s Leaguer_. The _Sharers Papers_ of 1635 mention the tiring-house door, at which money was taken. James Wright tells us that it was a summer house, large and partly open to the weather, and that the acting was always by daylight. Malone conjectured that the name ‘Globe’ was taken from the sign, ‘which was a figure of Hercules supporting the Globe, under which was written _Totus mundus agit histrionem_’.[1293] I do not know where he got this information.

xii. THE FORTUNE

[_Bibliographical Note._--Most of the documents are at Dulwich, and are printed in full or in abstract by W. W. Greg in _Henslowe Papers_, and by J. P. Collier in _Alleyn Memoirs_ and _Alleyn Papers_. The _Register_ of the Privy Council adds a few of importance. Valuable summaries of the history of the theatre are given by W. W. Greg, _Henslowe’s Diary_, ii. 56, and W. Young, _History of Dulwich College_ (1889), ii. 257. _The Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Muniments at Dulwich_ (1881–1903) by G. F. Warner and F. B. Bickley is also useful.]

The settlement of the Chamberlain’s men in 1599 at the Globe, hard by the Rose, on Bankside, probably led Henslowe and Alleyn to plan during the same year a countermove, by the transference of the Admiral’s men to a new theatrical locality in the rapidly growing districts on the north-west boundary of the City. The Rose, although not built fifteen years, was in decay, and the swamps of the Bankside had not, especially in bad weather, proved attractive to visitors. The new centre might be expected to serve in summer and winter alike, and, while in a place ‘remote and exempt’ from the City jurisdiction, would be convenient for the well-to-do population, which was establishing itself in the western suburbs, along the main roads of Holborn and the Strand. The Fortune on the north, and the Blackfriars, opened about the same time on the south, delimited a region which has remained almost to our own day the head-quarters of the stage. The actual site selected lay just outside Cripplegate between Golding or Golden Lane and Whitecross Street, in the county of Middlesex, the lordship or liberty of Finsbury, and the parish of St. Giles without Cripplegate. The title-deeds at Dulwich make it possible to trace the history of the property or part of it back to the reign of Henry VIII, but for the present purpose it is sufficient to begin with 11 July 1584, the date of a lease by Daniel Gill, son of William Gill, gardener, to Patrick Brewe, goldsmith, of five tenements on the east side of Golding Lane and one on the west side of Whitecross Street at a rent of £12 a year. This lease Brewe assigned to Alleyn on 22 December 1599, for a sum of £240. Subsequently, in 1610, Alleyn bought up a reversionary lease for £100, and also, after troublesome negotiations with the numerous descendants of Daniel Gill, the freehold of the property for £340.[1294] This purchase, however, and probably also the original lease, included a good deal more than the actual plot on which the theatre was built. The deed of sale recites six tenements on the east of Golden Lane and six on the west of Whitecross Street. It is pretty clear, from the boundaries described, as compared with those in a temporary assignment by Alleyn of the lease, that the property dealt with in 1584 and in 1610 was the same, and it is natural to conclude that Alleyn had himself added to the number of tenements.[1295] This is confirmed by a note of Alleyn’s that, in addition to building the play-house, he spent £120 ‘for other priuat buildings of myn owne’. One such building adjoined the south side of the play-house in 1601.[1296] Alleyn’s note gives the cost of the play-house itself as £520, making up with the private buildings and the purchase of leasehold, reversion, and freehold, a total expenditure of £1,320.[1297] The contract for building the framework was taken by Peter Street, carpenter, at £440, which presumably left Alleyn £80 for the painting and other decorative work excluded from the contract. The following is the text of the contract, which is preserved at Dulwich:[1298]

‘This Indenture made the Eighte daie of Januarye 1599, and in the Twoe and Fortyth yeare of the Reigne of our sovereigne Ladie Elizabeth, by the grace of god Queene of Englande, Fraunce and Irelande, defender of the Faythe, &c. betwene Phillipp Henslowe and Edwarde Allen of the parishe of S^{te} Saviours in Southwark in the Countie of Surrey, gentlemen, on thone parte, and Peeter Streete, Cittizen and Carpenter of London, on thother parte witnesseth That whereas the saide Phillipp Henslowe & Edward Allen, the daie of the date hereof, haue bargayned, compounded & agreed with the saide Peter Streete ffor the erectinge, buildinge & settinge upp of a new howse and Stadge for a Plaiehouse in and vppon a certeine plott or parcell of grounde appoynted oute for that purpose, scytuate and beinge nere Goldinge lane in the parishe of S^{te} Giles withoute Cripplegate of London, to be by him the saide Peeter Streete or somme other sufficyent woorkmen of his provideinge and appoyntemente and att his propper costes & chardges, for the consideracion hereafter in theis presentes expressed, made, erected, builded and sett upp in manner & forme followinge (that is to saie); The frame of the saide howse to be sett square and to conteine ffowerscore foote of lawfull assize everye waie square withoutt and fiftie fiue foote of like assize square everye waie within, with a good suer and stronge foundacion of pyles, brick, lyme and sand bothe without & within, to be wroughte one foote of assize att the leiste aboue the grounde; And the saide fframe to conteine three Stories in heighth, the first or lower Storie to conteine Twelue foote of lawfull assize in heighth, the second Storie Eleaven foote of lawfull assize in heigth, and the third or vpper Storie to conteine Nyne foote of lawfull assize in height; All which Stories shall conteine Twelue foote and a halfe of lawfull assize in breadth througheoute, besides a juttey forwardes in either of the saide twoe vpper Stories of Tenne ynches of lawfull assize, with ffower convenient divisions for gentlemens roomes, and other sufficient and convenient divisions for Twoe pennie roomes, with necessarie seates to be placed and sett, aswell in those roomes as througheoute all the rest of the galleries of the saide howse, and with suchelike steares, conveyances & divisions withoute & within, as are made & contryved in and to the late erected Plaiehowse on the Banck in the saide parishe of S^{te} Saviours called the Globe; With a Stadge and Tyreinge howse to be made, erected & settupp within the saide fframe, with a shadowe or cover over the saide Stadge, which Stadge shalbe placed & sett, as alsoe the stearecases of the saide fframe, in suche sorte as is prefigured in a plott thereof drawen, and which Stadge shall conteine in length Fortie and Three foote of lawfull assize and in breadth to extende to the middle of the yarde of the saide howse; The same Stadge to be paled in belowe with good, stronge and sufficyent newe oken bourdes, and likewise the lower Storie of the saide fframe withinside, and the same lower storie to be alsoe laide over and fenced with stronge yron pykes; And the saide Stadge to be in all other proporcions contryved and fashioned like vnto the Stadge of the saide Plaie howse called the Globe; With convenient windowes and lightes glazed to the saide Tyreinge howse; And the saide fframe, Stadge and Stearecases to be covered with Tyle, and to haue a sufficient gutter of lead to carrie & convey the water frome the coveringe of the saide Stadge to fall backwardes; And also all the saide fframe and the Stairecases thereof to be sufficyently enclosed withoute with lathe, lyme & haire, and the gentlemens roomes and Twoe pennie roomes to be seeled with lathe, lyme & haire, and all the fflowers of the saide Galleries, Stories and Stadge to be bourded with good & sufficyent newe deale bourdes of the whole thicknes, wheare need shalbe; And the saide howse and other thinges beforemencioned to be made & doen to be in all other contrivitions, conveyances, fashions, thinge and thinges effected, finished and doen accordinge to the manner and fashion of the saide howse called the Globe, saveinge only that all the princypall and maine postes of the saide fframe and Stadge forwarde shalbe square and wroughte palasterwise, with carved proporcions called Satiers to be placed & sett on the topp of every of the same postes, and saveinge alsoe that the said Peeter Streete shall not be chardged with anie manner of pay[ntin]ge in or aboute the saide fframe howse or Stadge or anie parte thereof, nor rendringe the walls within, nor seeling anie more or other roomes then the gentlemens roomes, Twoe pennie roomes and Stadge before remembred. Nowe theiruppon the saide Peeter Streete dothe covenant, promise and graunte ffor himself, his executours and administratours, to and with the saide Phillipp Henslowe and Edward Allen and either of them, and thexecutours and administratours of them and either of them, by theis presentes in manner & forme followeinge (that is to saie); That he the saide Peeter Streete, his executours or assignes, shall & will att his or their owne propper costes & chardges well, woorkmanlike & substancyallie make, erect, sett upp and fully finishe in and by all thinges, accordinge to the true meaninge of theis presentes, with good, stronge and substancyall newe tymber and other necessarie stuff, all the saide fframe and other woorkes whatsoever in and vppon the saide plott or parcell of grounde (beinge not by anie aucthoretie restrayned, and haveinge ingres, egres & regres to doe the same) before the ffyue & twentith daie of Julie next commeinge after the date hereof; And shall alsoe at his or theire like costes and chardges provide and finde all manner of woorkmen, tymber, joystes, rafters, boordes, dores, boltes, hinges, brick, tyle, lathe, lyme, haire, sande, nailes, lade, iron, glasse, woorkmanshipp and other thinges whatsoever, which shalbe needefull, convenyent & necessarie for the saide fframe & woorkes & euerie parte thereof; And shall alsoe make all the saide fframe in every poynte for Scantlinges lardger and bigger in assize then the Scantlinges of the timber of the saide newe erected howse called the Globe; And alsoe that he the saide Peeter Streete shall furthwith, aswell by himself as by suche other and soemanie woorkmen as shalbe convenient & necessarie, enter into and vppon the saide buildinges and woorkes, and shall in reasonable manner proceede therein withoute anie wilfull detraccion vntill the same shalbe fully effected and finished. In consideracion of all which buildinges and of all stuff & woorkemanshipp thereto belonginge, the saide Phillipp Henslowe & Edward Allen and either of them, ffor themselues, theire, and either of theire executours & administratours, doe joynctlie & seuerallie covenante & graunte to & with the saide Peeter Streete, his executours & administratours by theis presentes, that they the saide Phillipp Henslowe & Edward Allen or one of them, or the executours administratours or assignes of them or one of them, shall & will well & truelie paie or cawse to be paide vnto the saide Peeter Streete, his executours or assignes, att the place aforesaid appoynted for the erectinge of the saide fframe, the full somme of Fower hundred & Fortie Poundes of lawfull money of Englande in manner & forme followeinge (that is to saie), att suche tyme and when as the Tymber-woork of the saide fframe shalbe rayzed & sett upp by the saide Peeter Streete his executours or assignes, or within seaven daies then next followeinge, Twoe hundred & Twentie poundes, and att suche time and when as the saide fframe & woorkes shalbe fullie effected & ffynished as is aforesaide, or within seaven daies then next followeinge, thother Twoe hundred and Twentie poundes, withoute fraude or coven. Prouided allwaies, and it is agreed betwene the saide parties, that whatsoever somme or sommes of money the saide Phillipp Henslowe & Edward Allen or either of them, or the executours or assignes of them or either of them, shall lend or deliver vnto the saide Peter Streete his executours or assignes, or anie other by his appoyntemente or consent, ffor or concerninge the saide woorkes or anie parte thereof or anie stuff thereto belonginge, before the raizeinge & settinge upp of the saide fframe, shalbe reputed, accepted, taken & accoumpted in parte of the firste paymente aforesaid of the saide some of Fower hundred & Fortie poundes, and all suche somme & sommes of money, as they or anie of them shall as aforesaid lend or deliver betwene the razeinge of the saide fframe & finishinge thereof and of all the rest of the saide woorkes, shalbe reputed, accepted, taken & accoumpted in parte of the laste pamente aforesaid of the same somme of Fower hundred & Fortie poundes, anie thinge abouesaid to the contrary notwithstandinge. In witnes whereof the parties abouesaid to theis presente Indentures Interchaungeably haue sett theire handes and seales. Yeoven the daie and yeare ffirste abouewritten.

P S

Sealed and deliuered by the saide Peter Streete in the presence of me William Harris Pub[lic] Scr[ivener] And me Frauncis Smyth appr[entice] to the said Scr[ivener]

[_Endorsed_:] Peater Streat ffor The Building of the Fortune.

The constant references in the terms of the contract to the model of the Globe, while bearing testimony to the stimulus which the building of the Globe had given to theatrical competition, leaves some uncertainty as to many details of planning, and it is matter for regret that the ‘plot’ of the stage and staircases furnished to the builder has not itself been preserved. We learn, however, that the house was a square one, 80 feet each way by outside and 55 feet by inside measurement; that the stage was 43 feet wide and projected into the middle of the yard; that the framework was of wood, on a foundation of brick and piles, and with an outer coating of plaster; that the framework and stage were boarded within and strengthened with iron pikes; that there were three galleries rising to a total height of 32 feet, and that sections of these were partitioned off and ceiled as ‘gentlemens rooms’, of which there were four, and ‘two-penny rooms’; that the tiring-house had glazed windows; that there was a ‘shadowe or cover’ over the stage, and that this, with the galleries and staircases, were tiled and supplied with lead gutters to carry off the rain-water. Two divergences from the Globe model are specified: the timber work is to be stouter, and the principal posts of the frame work and stage are to be square and carved with satyrs. An ingenious attempt has been made by Mr. William Archer and Mr. W. H. Godfrey to reconstruct the plan of the theatre from these and other indications, with a liberal allowance of conjecture.[1299] It will be observed that Henslowe, as well as Alleyn, was a party to the contract; but it is pretty clear from Alleyn’s note already referred to that he found the money, and although Henslowe did in fact become his partner in the enterprise, this was under a lease of 4 April 1601, whereby he took over a moiety of the play-house and its profits for a term of twenty-four years from the previous 25 March at an annual rent of £8.[1300] This lease did not include Alleyn’s private tenements, but it did include some enclosed ‘growndes’ on the north and west of the house, and a passage 30 feet long by 14 feet wide running east from the south-west angle of the building ‘from one doore of the said house to an other’. It is, I think, to be inferred from this that the main approach to the earlier Fortune theatre was from the Golden Lane side. The contract with Street is dated on 8 January 1600 and provides for the completion of the work by the following 25 July, and for the payment of the price in two instalments, one when the framework was up and the other upon completion. In fact, however, the acquittances by Street and others, endorsed upon the Dulwich indenture, show that Henslowe acted as a kind of banker for the transaction, and made advances from time to time to Street, or to pay workmen or purchase materials, all of which were debited against the amounts payable under the contract. Work seems to have begun before 17 January. By 20 March Henslowe had paid £180 and by 4 May £240. It is therefore a little puzzling to find a payment ‘at the eand of the fowndations’ on 8 May. About £53 more was paid before 10 June, making nearly £300 in all by that date. The last entry is one of 4s. to Street ‘to pasify him’, which suggests that some dispute had taken place. Here the acquittances stop, but Henslowe’s _Diary_ indicates that he was frequently dining in company with Street from 13 June to August 8, and probably the work was completed about the latter date.[1301] Alleyn had had to face some opposition in carrying out his project. He began by arming himself with the authority of his ‘lord’, the Earl of Nottingham, who wrote in his favour to the Middlesex justices on 12 January 1600, explaining the reasons for leaving the Bankside and the general convenience of the new locality, and citing the Queen’s ‘special regarde of fauor’ towards the company as a reason why the justices should allow his servant to build ‘w^{th}out anie yo^r lett or molestation’. This action did not prove sufficient to avert a local protest. Lord Willoughby and others complained to the Council, who on 9 March wrote to the Middlesex justices informing them that the erection of a new play-house, ‘wherof ther are to manie allreadie not farr from that place’, would greatly displease the Queen, and commanding the project to be ‘staied’. Alleyn, however, was secure in the royal favour. He also, by offering a weekly contribution to the relief of the poor, succeeded in obtaining a certificate from the petty officials and other inhabitants of Finsbury of their consent to the toleration of the house; and on 8 April the Council wrote again to the justices, withdrawing their previous inhibition and laying special stress on Elizabeth’s desire that Alleyn personally should revive his services as a player, ‘wheareof, of late he hath made discontynuance’. The letter also referred to the fact that another house was pulled down instead of the Fortune, and a formal Privy Council order of 22 June, laying down that there shall in future be one house in Middlesex for the Admiral’s men, and one on the Bankside for the Chamberlain’s, makes it clear that the condemned theatre was the Curtain.[1302] Nevertheless, it is certain that neither the Curtain nor the Rose was in fact plucked down at this date.

The Fortune was opened in the autumn of 1600 by the Admiral’s men, probably with Dekker’s _1 Fortune’s Tennis_, and its theatrical history is closely bound up with that of the same company, who occupied it continuously, as the Admiral’s to 1603, then as Prince Henry’s men to his death in 1612, and finally as the Palsgrave’s men. It is only necessary to deal here with matters that directly concern the building. That it became something of a centre of disturbance in the peaceful suburbs of the north-west is shown by various entries in the records of the Middlesex Bench. On 26 February 1611, two butchers, Ralph Brewyn and John Lynsey, were charged with abusing gentlemen there. On 1 October 1612, the justices regarded it as the resort of cutpurses, and were thereby led to suppress the jigs at the end of plays, which especially attracted such persons. In 1613 a true bill was found against Richard Bradley for stabbing Nicholas Bedney there on 5 June.[1303] The upkeep of the structure was expensive. A note in Alleyn’s hand of sums laid out upon the play-house during the seven years 1602–8 shows an average amount of about £120. Only £4 2_s._ was spent during 1603, for the greater part of which year the theatres were closed, but £232 1_s._ 8_d._ in 1604.[1304] No doubt wooden buildings, open to the weather, perished rapidly. It is not unreasonable to suppose that the relations between the company and their landlords were much what they had been at the Rose; that is to say that the latter took half the gallery receipts and bore repairs, while the former took the rest of the receipts and met all other outgoings. An unexecuted draft lease to Thomas Downton of 1608 indicates that Alleyn and Henslowe then had it in mind to bind the company more closely to the theatre, by dividing a quarter of their interest amongst the eight members of the company.[1305] Possibly the plan was carried out. In asking a loan from Alleyn on a date apparently earlier than August 1613, Charles Massye, who was one of the eight, not only offers repayment out of his ‘gallery mony’ and ‘house mony’, but also the assignment of ‘that lyttell moete I have in the play housses’ as a security.[1306] Certainly the company took over the house after Henslowe’s death on 6 January 1616. His share in the building passed to his widow, who contemplated a sale of it to Gregory Franklyn, Drew Stapley, and John Hamond.[1307] But the deed remained unexecuted at her death in 1617, and the whole property was now once more in Alleyn’s hands. On 31 October 1618 he leased it to the company for £200 a year, to be reduced to £120 at his death. With it went a taphouse occupied by Mark Brigham, the rent of a two-room tenement held by John Russell, and a strip of impaled ground 123 feet by 17 feet, lying next the passage on the south.[1308] This is perhaps the garden in which, according to John Chamberlain, the players, ‘not to be overcome with courtesy’, banqueted the Spanish ambassador when he visited the theatre on 16 July 1621.[1309] John Russell is presumably the same whose appointment by Alleyn as a ‘gatherer’ lead to a protest from William Bird on behalf of the company.[1310] A few months after the ambassador’s visit, John Chamberlain records the destruction of the Fortune on 9 December 1621:[1311]

‘On Sonday night here was a great fire at the Fortune in Golden-Lane, the fayrest play-house in this towne. It was quite burnt downe in two howres, & all their apparell & play-bookes lost, wherby those poore companions are quite undone.’

Alleyn also notes the event in his diary.[1312] On 20 May 1622 he formed a syndicate, and leased to it the site at a rent of £128 6_s._, under an obligation to build a new theatre at a cost of £1,000.[1313] This, ‘a large round brick building’, was erected in the following year.[1314] The site conveyed covered a space of almost exactly 130 feet square, and on it had stood, besides the buildings named in the lease of 1618, other tenements, in one of which William Bird himself lived. Mr. Lawrence has suggested that the new Fortune may have been a roofed-in house, but his evidence is hardly sufficient to outweigh the explicit statement of Wright that it ‘lay partly open to the weather, and there they always acted by daylight’.[1315] This can hardly refer only to the earlier building. The Fortune was dismantled in 1649 and ‘totally demolished’ by 1662, and the façade still extant in 1819 cannot therefore have belonged to it, although it may have belonged to a Restoration ‘nursery’ for young actors, possibly upon the same site.[1316] No acting seems to have taken place at the Fortune after 1649.[1317]

xiii. THE BOAR’S HEAD

There appear to have been at least six city inns under this sign.[1318] The most famous was that on the south side of Great Eastcheap, in St. Michael’s, which seems to have been regarded in the middle of the sixteenth century as the traditional locality of the tavern scenes in _Henry IV_.[1319] This inn was in the occupation of Joan Broke, widow, in 1537, and in that of Thomas Wright, vintner, about 1588.[1320] Another Boar’s Head stood ‘without’ Aldgate, in the extra-mural Portsoken ward, which lay between that gate and the bars with which the liberties of the City terminated at Hog Lane. Here, according to Stowe, there were ‘certaine faire Innes for receipt of trauellers repayring to the Citie’.[1321] At the Aldgate inn had been produced in 1557 a ‘lewd’ play called _The Sackful of Newes_, which provoked the interference of Mary’s Privy Council.[1322] But it seems to me exceedingly improbable that either this or the Eastcheap inn was converted into the play-house, of which we have brief and tantalizing records in the seventeenth century. Both were within the City jurisdiction, where the licensing of play-houses seems to have definitely terminated in 1596. It is true that a Privy Council letter of 31 March 1602, which directs that the combined company of Oxford’s and Worcester’s men shall be allowed to play at the Boar’s Head, is addressed to the Lord Mayor.[1323] But so are other letters of the same type, the object of which is to limit plays to a small number of houses outside the liberties, and to restrain them elsewhere over the whole area of the City and the suburbs.[1324] And when, a year or two later, Worcester’s men became Queen Anne’s, and a draft patent was drawn up to confirm their right to play in the Curtain and the Boar’s Head, both houses are described, not as in the City, but as ‘within our County of Middlesex’.[1325] Presumably Anne’s men left the Boar’s Head when the Red Bull became available for their use in 1606, and Mr. Adams has explained a mention, which had long puzzled me, of the Duke of York’s men as ‘the Prince’s Players of Whitechapel’ in 1608 by the suggestion that they succeeded to the vacant theatre.[1326] If this is so, I think it affords further evidence for the theory that the Boar’s Head, although it may have taken its name from the Aldgate inn, was not itself that inn, and probably not a converted inn at all, but lay just outside and not just inside the City bars. For, although part of the street between Aldgate and Whitechapel is sometimes called, as in Ogilby’s map of 1677 and Rocque’s of 1746, ‘Whitechapel Street’, yet Whitechapel proper lay outside the liberties, farther to the east along the Mile End Road.[1327] The only other contemporary record of the Boar’s Head is a letter to Edward Alleyn from his wife Joan on 21 October 1603, in which she says, ‘All the companyes be come hoame & well for ought we knowe, but that Browne of the Boares head is dead & dyed very pore, he went not into the countrye at all’.[1328] This Browne cannot be identified, and it is perhaps idle to conjecture that he may have been related to Robert Browne, and that it may have been at the Boar’s Head that the latter played with Derby’s men in 1599–1601. The Boar’s Head seems to have been generally forgotten by the Restoration, but is recalled by the Marquis of Newcastle _c._ 1660.[1329]

xiv. THE RED BULL

[_Bibliographical Note._--The records of the suit of _Woodford v. Holland_ (1613) were printed by J. Greenstreet in the _Athenaeum_ for 28 Nov. 1885 from _Court of Requests Books_, xxvi, ff. 780, 890, and cxxviii, and therefrom by Fleay, 194; and more fully with those of the later suit of 1619 (misdated 1620) by C. W. Wallace in _Nebraska University Studies_, ix. 291 (cited as _W. v. H._). Collier, i. 374, mentions evidence on the same transactions as ‘in the Audit Office’, and misnames the complainant John Woodward.]

Our chief knowledge of the early history of the Red Bull is derived from disputes before the Court of Requests in 1613 and 1619 between Thomas Woodford and Aaron Holland. It appears that Holland held a lease of the site, which was at the upper end of St. John Street in the parish of St. James, Clerkenwell, from Anne, widow and executrix of Christopher Bedingfield, and had there built a play-house. The indication of a Red Bull Yard in Ogilby and Morgan’s map of 1677 to the west of St. John Street, and just north of the angle which it forms with Clerkenwell Green, no doubt defines the locality with some precision.[1330] In _3 Jac. I_, that is, at some date between 24 March 1605 and 23 March 1606, he assigned one-seventh of the house to Thomas Swynnerton, ‘with a gatherers place thereto belonging’. This Swynnerton transferred for £50 to Philip Stone.[1331] It was subject to a rent of £2 10_s._, and Holland gave Stone an indenture in February 1609, which was alleged not to constitute a proper lease. In 1612–13 Stone sold his seventh for £50 to Woodford, who took profits for a quarter, and then entrusted his interest to Holland, instructing his servant Anthony Payne to pay the rent. He alleged that Holland persuaded Payne to be behindhand with the rent, and withheld the profits, estimated at £30 a year. He therefore brought his action a little before May 1613. The Court called upon Holland to show cause why he should not account for the arrears of profits, and for 1_s._ 6_d._ a week due to the gatherer’s place.[1332] Holland replied, and the issues were referred to the arbitration of counsel, including Woodford’s ‘demaund of the eighteenth penny and the eighteenth part of such moneys & other comodities as should be collected or receaued ... for the profittes of the galleries or other places in or belonging to the play howse’.[1333] Counsel made an arrangement, but did not agree in their reports of its terms, and the Court ordered Holland to give Woodford an indenture similar to that given to Stone.[1334] Holland got a writ of prohibition from the King’s Bench, always jealous of the jurisdiction of the Court of Requests, on 6 November 1613, and Woodford began a suit against Holland in Stone’s name for not making a proper indenture in 1609. This, he says, Stone conspired with Holland to withdraw. In 1619 he brought another action for his profits before the Court of Requests, in which Holland describes him as ‘Woodford, _alias_ Simball’, but the result is unknown.

The Red Bull, then, was built not later and probably not much earlier than 1606, a little before the first recorded mention of it in the following passage from _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_, which was almost certainly produced in the winter of 1607:

_‘Citizen._ Why so sir, go and fetch me him then, and let the Sophy of Persia come and christen him a childe.

_‘Boy._ Beleeue me sir, that will not doe so well, ’tis stale, it has beene had before at the red Bull.’[1335]

The allusion is to an incident in the last scene of Day, Rowley, and Wilkins’ _Travels of the Three Brothers_.[1336] This, according to the entry in the Stationers’ Register on 29 June 1607, was played at the Curtain, and according to its title-page of 1607 by the Queen’s men. But there is no reason why it should not also have been played at the Red Bull, since both houses are specified as occupied by the Queen’s men in their patent of 15 April 1609. In their earlier draft patent of about 1603–4, the Boar’s Head and Curtain are named, and in a Privy Council letter of 9 April 1604 the Curtain only. Presumably, therefore, the Red Bull was taken into use by the Queen’s men, of whom Swynnerton was one, as soon as it was built at some date between 1604 and 1606. The Red Bull is one of the three houses whose contention is predicted in Dekker’s _Raven’s Almanack_ of 1608, and Dekker refers to it again in his _Work for Armourers_, written during the plague of 1609, when the bear garden was open and the theatres closed. He says, ‘The pide _Bul_ heere keepes a tossing and a roaring, when the _Red Bull_ dares not stir’.[1337] Its existence caused trouble from time to time to the Middlesex justices. At the end of May 1610, William Tedcastle, yeoman, and John Fryne, Edward Brian, Edward Purfett, and Thomas Williams, felt-makers, were called upon to give recognisances to answer for a ‘notable outrage at the play-house called the Red Bull’; and on 3 March 1614 Alexander Fulsis was bailed out on a charge of picking Robert Sweet’s pocket of a purse and £3 at this theatre.[1338] Further references to it are to be found in Wither’s _Abuses Stript and Whipt_ (1613), in Tomkis’s _Albumazar_ (1615), and in Gayton’s _Pleasant Notes on Don Quixot_ (1654).[1339]

An entry in Alleyn’s _Diary_ for 1617 has been supposed to indicate that he had an interest in the Red Bull. To me it only suggests that he sold the actors there a play.[1340]

The Queen’s men most likely occupied the Red Bull at least until 1617 when, as shown by the lawsuit of 1623, they were on the point of moving to the Cockpit in Drury Lane. Plays of theirs were printed as acted there in 1608, 1611, 1612, and 1615. _Swetnam the Woman Hater Arraigned by Women_, printed in 1620, was also played there, before Anne’s death in 1619. In 1637 Thomas Heywood, formerly one of the Queen’s men, included in his _Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas_, a Prologue and Epilogue, to which he prefixed the note ‘A young witty lad playing the part of Richard the third: at the Red Bull: the Author because hee was interessed in the play to incourage him, wrot him this Prologue and Epilogue’.[1341] This was probably, and certainly if the play was Shakespeare’s, some quite exceptional performance. Similarly the ‘companie of young men of this citie’, who are stated on the title-page of Wentworth Smith’s _Hector of Germany_ (1615) to have acted it at the Red Bull and Curtain, must be supposed to have used these theatres by some arrangement with the Queen’s men.

The Red Bull afterwards passed to other companies, continued in use up to, and even occasionally during, the Commonwealth, and had a revived life after the Restoration to 1663.[1342] Before 1633, and probably before 1625, it had been re-edified and enlarged.[1343] Mr. Lawrence suggests that at this time it became a roofed house, which it seems certainly to have been after the Restoration.[1344] But it is difficult to get away from Wright’s explicit statement that it ‘lay partly open to the weather, and there they always acted by daylight’.[1345] Nor need the quite modern identification of it with the roofed interior depicted in _The Wits_ rest upon anything but an incidental reference to the house in the text of the pamphlet.[1346] Nothing is known as to the shape or galleries of the Red Bull.

xv. THE HOPE

[_Bibliographical Note._--The Dulwich papers relating to the connexion of Henslowe and Alleyn with the bear-baiting and the Hope are to be found with a commentary in Greg, _Henslowe’s Diary_ and _Henslowe Papers_. Valuable material on the Bankside localities is in W. Rendle, _The Bankside, Southwark, and the Globe_, 1877 (Appendix I to Furnivall, _Harrison’s Description of England_,