administratours, and assignes, dothe convenaunt, promise, and
graunt to and with the saide Phillipe Henslowe and Jacobe Maide
and either of them, thexecutors, administratours, & assigns of
them and either of them, by theise presentes in manner and forme
following: That he the saied Gilbert Katherens, his executours,
administratours, or assignes shall and will, at his or theire
owne proper costes and charges, vppon or before the last daie of
November next ensuinge the daie of the date of theise presentes
above written, not onlie take downe or pull downe all that same
place or house wherin Beares and Bulls haue been heretofore
vsuallie bayted, and also one other house or staple wherin Bulls
and horsses did vsuallie stande, sett, lyinge, and beinge vppon
or neere the Banksyde in the saide parishe of S^t Saviour in
Sowthworke, comonlie called or knowne by the name of the Beare
garden, but shall also at his or theire owne proper costes and
charges vppon or before the saide laste daie of November newly
erect, builde, and sett vpp one other same place or Plaiehouse
fitt & convenient in all thinges, bothe for players to playe
in, and for the game of Beares and Bulls to be bayted in the
same, and also a fitt and convenient Tyre house and a stage to
be carryed or taken awaie, and to stande vppon tressells good,
substanciall, and sufficient for the carryinge and bearinge of
suche a stage; And shall new builde, erect, and sett vp againe
the saide plaie house or game place neere or vppon the saide
place, where the saide game place did heretofore stande; And to
builde the same of suche large compasse, fforme, widenes, and
height as the Plaie house called the Swan in the libertie of
Parris garden in the saide parishe of S^t Saviour now is; And
shall also builde two stearecasses without and adioyninge to the
saide Playe house in suche convenient places, as shalbe moste
fitt and convenient for the same to stande vppon, and of such
largnes and height as the stearecasses of the saide playehouse
called the Swan nowe are or bee; And shall also builde the
Heavens all over the saide stage, to be borne or carryed without
any postes or supporters to be fixed or sett vppon the saide
stage, and all gutters of leade needfull for the carryage of
all suche raine water as shall fall vppon the same; And shall
also make two Boxes in the lowermost storie fitt and decent for
gentlemen to sitt in; And shall make the particions betwne the
Rommes as they are at the saide Plaie house called the Swan;
And to make turned cullumes vppon and over the stage; And shall
make the principalls and fore fronte of the saide Plaie house of
good and sufficient oken tymber, and no furr tymber to be putt
or vsed in the lower most, or midell stories, except the vpright
postes on the backparte of the saide stories (all the byndinge
joystes to be of oken tymber); The inner principall postes of
the first storie to be twelve footes in height and tenn ynches
square, the inner principall postes in the midell storie to be
eight ynches square, the inner most postes in the vpper storie
to be seaven ynches square; The prick postes in the first storie
to be eight ynches square, in the seconde storie seaven ynches
square, and in the vpper most storie six ynches square; Also
the brest sommers in the lower moste storie to be nyne ynches
depe, and seaven ynches in thicknes, and in the midell storie to
be eight ynches depe and six ynches in thicknes; The byndinge
jostes of the firste storie to be nyne and eight ynches in
depthe and thicknes, and in the midell storie to be viij and
vij ynches in depthe and thicknes. Item to make a good, sure,
and sufficient foundacion of brickes for the saide Play house
or game place, and to make it xiij^{teene} ynches at the leaste
above the grounde. Item to new builde, erect, and sett vpp the
saide Bull house and stable with good and sufficient scantlinge
tymber, plankes, and bordes, and particions of that largnes and
fittnes as shalbe sufficient to kepe and holde six bulls and
three horsses or geldinges, with rackes and mangers to the same,
and also a lofte or storie over the saide house as nowe it is.
And shall also at his & theire owne proper costes and charges
new tyle with Englishe tyles all the vpper rooffe of the saide
Plaie house, game place, and Bull house or stable, and shall
fynde and paie for at his like proper costes and charges for
all the lyme, heare, sande, brickes, tyles, lathes, nayles,
workemanshipe and all other thinges needfull and necessarie for
the full finishinge of the saide Plaie house, Bull house, and
stable; And the saide Plaiehouse or game place to be made in
althinges and in suche forme and fashion, as the saide plaie
house called the Swan (the scantling of the tymbers, tyles,
and foundacion as ys aforesaide without fraude or coven). And
the saide Phillipe Henslow and Jacobe Maide and either of
them for them, thexecutors, administratours, and assignes of
them and either of them, doe covenant and graunt to and with
the saide Gilbert Katherens, his executours, administratours,
and assignes in manner and forme followinge (That is to saie)
That he the saide Gilbert or his assignes shall or maie haue,
and take to his or theire vse and behoofe, not onlie all the
tymber, benches, seates, slates, tyles, brickes, and all other
thinges belonginge to the saide Game place & Bull house or
stable, and also all suche olde tymber whiche the saide Phillipe
Henslow hathe latelie bought, beinge of an old house in Thames
street, London, whereof moste parte is now lyinge in the yarde
or backsyde of the saide Beare-garden; And also to satisfie
and paie vnto the saide Gilbert Katherens, his executors,
administratours, or assignes for the doinge and finishinges of
the workes and buildinges aforesaid the somme of Three Hundered
and three score poundes of good and lawffull monie of England,
in manner and forme followinge (That is to saie) In hande at
thensealinge and delivery hereof, Three score pounds which
the saide Gilbert acknowlegeth him selfe by theise presentes
to haue receaued; And more over to paie every weeke weeklie,
duringe the firste six weekes, vnto the saide Gilbert or his
assignes, when he shall sett workemen to worke vppon or about
the buildinge of the premisses the somme of Tenne poundes of
lawffull monie of Englande to paie them there wages (yf theire
wages dothe amount vnto somuche monie); And when the saide plaie
house, Bull house, and stable are reared, then to make vpp the
saide wages one hundered poundes of lawffull monie of England,
and to be paide to the saide Gilbert or his assignes; And when
the saide Plaie house, Bull house, and stable are Reared,
tyled, walled, then to paie vnto the saide Gilbert Katherens
or his assignes one other hundered poundes of lawffull monie
of England; And when the saide Plaie house, Bull house, and
stable are fullie finished, builded, and done in manner and
forme aforesaide, then to paie vnto the saide Gilbert Katherens
or his assignes one other hundred Poundes of lawffull monie of
England in full satisfacion and payment of the saide somme of
CCClx^{li}. And to all and singuler the covenantes, grauntes,
articles, and agreementes above in theise presentes contayned,
whiche on the parte and behalfe of the saide Gilbert Katherens,
his executours, administratours, or assignes are ought to be
observed, performed, fulfilled, and done, the saide Gilbert
Katherens byndeth himselfe, his executours, administratours, and
assignes vnto the saide Phillipe Henslowe and Jacob Maide and to
either of them, thexecutours, administratours, and assignes of
them or either of them, by theise presentes. In witnes whereof
the saide Gilbert Katherens hath herevnto sett his hande and
seale, the daie and yere firste above written
The mark G K of Gilbert Katherens
Sealed and Delivered in the presence of
witnes Moyses Bowler
Edwarde Griffin
The execution of the contract must have been delayed, for the rebuilt
Bear Garden is fairly to be identified with the Hope, of which no
mention is made in the petition of the spring of 1614 described by
Taylor in _The True Cause of the Watermen’s Suit_, although it had
certainly come into use by the following autumn.[1434] Here was
arranged for 7 October a trial of wit between this same Taylor and the
shifty rhymer William Fennor.[1435] The latter failed to turn up, and
Taylor, who, according to his own account, had advertised ‘this Bear
Garden banquet of dainty conceits’ and collected a great audience, was
left ‘in a greater puzzell then the blinde beare in the midst of all
her whip-broth’. After acting part of what he had intended, he resigned
the stage to the regular company:
Then came the players, and they play’d an act,
Which greatly from my action did detract,
For ’tis not possible for any one
To play against a company alone,
And such a company (I’ll boldly say)
That better (nor the like) e’r played a play.
This company was no doubt the Lady Elizabeth’s, as reconstituted in
the previous March under an agreement with Nathaniel Field on their
behalf, of which a mutilated copy exists. To it Meade was a party, and
there is nothing to establish a connexion between Meade and any other
theatre than the Hope.[1436] Jonson names the Lady Elizabeth’s men as
the actors of _Bartholomew Fair_, and in the Induction thereto, after
a dialogue between the Stage-keeper, who is taunted with ‘gathering
up the broken apples for the beares within’, and the Book-holder,
a Scrivener reads ‘Articles of Agreement, indented, between the
Spectators or Hearers, at the Hope on the Bankeside, in the County of
Surrey on the one party; and the Author of Bartholmew Fayre in the
said place, and County on the other party: the one and thirtieth day
of Octob. 1614’. According to Jonson the locality was suitable for a
play on Bartholomew Fair, for it was ‘as durty as _Smithfield_, and
as stinking euery whit’.[1437] There were disputes between Henslowe
and the company, partly arising out of an arrangement that they should
‘lie still’ one day a fortnight for the baiting, and the combination
broke up. Some of its members, apparently then Prince Charles’s men,
are found after Henslowe’s death signing an agreement with Alleyn and
Meade to play at the Hope, and to set aside a fourth of the gallery
takings towards a sum of £200 to be accepted in discharge of their debt
to Henslowe. Alleyn had of course resumed his part proprietorship of
the house as executor and ultimate heir to Henslowe. Meade probably
took actual charge of the theatre, and there is an undated letter from
Prince Charles’s men to Alleyn, written possibly in 1617, in which
they explain their removal from the Bankside as due to the intemperate
action of his partner in taking from them the day which by course was
theirs. I suppose that this dispute also was due to the competition
of baiting with the plays. In 1619 some disputes between Alleyn and
Meade had to be settled by arbitration, and from Alleyn’s memoranda in
connexion with these it appears that Meade was his deputy under his
patent as Master of the Game, and had also a lease from him of the
house at £100 a year.[1438] The Hope is mentioned from time to time,
chiefly as a place of baiting, up to the civil wars.[1439] It is one of
the three Bankside theatres alluded to in _Holland’s Leaguer_ (1632),
where it is described as ‘a building of excellent hope’ for players,
wild beasts, and gladiators. Bear-baiting was suppressed by the House
of Commons in 1642,[1440] and the house was dismantled in 1656. The
manuscript continuation of Stowe’s _Annales_ describes its end and the
slaughter of the bears, but gives the date of its erection erroneously
as 1610 instead of 1613.[1441]
After the Restoration the Bear Garden was restored, and a lane called
Bear Gardens, running from Bankside to New Park Street, and a sign
therein of The White Bear still mark its name.[1442] Its site is pretty
well defined in the seventeenth-century maps as to the west of the
Globe and, where that is shown, the Rose, and generally as a little
nearer Maid Lane than the latter. This is consistent with a notice in
the Sewers records for 5 December 1595 of a sewer which ran to the Bear
Garden from a garden known to have lain a little farther east along
Maid Lane than the Globe.[1443]
The traditional day for baiting was Sunday. Crowley in 1550 describes
it as taking place on ‘euerye Sondaye’.[1444] Naturally this did not
pass without Puritan comment, to which point was given by the fall
of Paris Garden on a Sunday in 1583.[1445] A general prohibition of
shows on Sunday seems to have followed, from which it is not likely
that bear-baiting was excepted. It may be inferred that Thursday
was substituted, for a Privy Council order of 25 July 1591 called
attention, not only to a neglect of the rule as to Sunday, but also
to the fact that every day ‘the players do use to recite their plays
to the great hurt and destruction of the game of bear-baiting and
like pastimes, which are maintained for Her Majesty’s pleasure if
occasion require’, and forbade plays both on Sunday and on Thursday,
on which day ‘those other games usually have been always accustomed
and practised’.[1446] Henslowe’s diary seems to show that up to 1597
he kept the Sunday prohibition and disregarded the Thursday one,
which is a little odd, as he was interested in the Bear Garden.
But a proclamation of 7 May 1603 on the accession of James repeats
the warning that there was neglect of the Sabbath, and renews the
prohibition both for baiting and for plays.[1447] Henslowe and Alleyn
in their petition of about 1607 for increased fees lay stress on this
restraint as a main factor in their alleged loss.[1448] It seems from
the notes of Stowe’s manuscript _continuator_ that during the first
half of the seventeenth century Tuesday and Thursday became the regular
baiting days.[1449] But the agreements made by Henslowe and Meade with
the Lady Elizabeth’s men in 1614 profess only to reserve one day in
fourteen for this purpose, of which apparently notice was to be given
on the previous Monday.[1450]
xvi. PORTER’S HALL
Authority was given for the erection of a new theatre by the following
patent of 3 June 1615:[1451]
[Sidenote: De concessione regard Phillippo Rosseter et aliis.]
Iames by the grace of God &c. To all Maiors, Sheriffes,
Iustices of peace, Bayliffes, Constables, headboroughes, and
to all other our Officers, Ministers, and loving Subiectes,
to whome these presentes shall come, greeting. Whereas wee by
our letteres Patentes sealed with our great seale of England
bearing date the ffourth day of Ianuary in the seaventh yeare
of our Raigne of England Fraunce and Ireland and of Scotland
the three and ffortieth for the consideracions in the same
letteres patentes expressed did appoint and authorise Phillipp
Rosseter and certaine others from tyme to tyme to provide,
keepe, and bring vppe a convenient nomber of children, and them
to practise and exercise in the quallitie of playing by the
name of the children of the Revelles to the Queene, within the
white ffryers in the Suburbs of our Cittie of London, or in any
other convenient place where they the said Phillipp Rosseter
and the rest of his partners should thinke fitting for that
purpose, As in and by the said letteres patentes more at large
appeareth, And whereas the said Phillipp Rosseter and the rest
of his said partners have ever since trayned vppe and practised
a convenient nomber of children of the Revelles for the purpose
aforesaid in a Messuage or mansion house being parcell of
the late dissolved Monastery called the white ffryers neere
Fleetestreete in London, which the said Phillipp Rosseter did
lately hold for terme of certaine yeres expired, And whereas the
said Phillipp Rosseter, together with Phillipp Kingman, Robert
Iones, and Raphe Reeve, to continue the said service for the
keeping and bringing vppe of the children for the solace and
pleasure of our said most deere wife, and the better to practise
and exercise them in the quallitie of playing by the name of
children of the Revelles to the Queene, have latelie taken in
lease and farme divers buildinges, Cellers, sollars, chambers,
and yardes for the building of a Play-house therevpon for the
better practising and exercise of the said children of the
Revelles, All which premisses are scituate and being within the
Precinct of the Blacke ffryers neere Puddlewharfe in the Suburbs
of London, called by the name of the lady Saunders house, or
otherwise Porters hall, and now in the occupation of the said
Robert Iones. Nowe knowe yee that wee of our especiall grace,
certaine knowledge, and meere mocion have given and graunted,
And by theise presentes for vs, our heires, and successors,
doe give and graunte lycense and authoritie vnto the said
Phillipp Rosseter, Phillipp Kingman, Robert Iones, and Raphe
Reeve, at their proper costes and charges to erect, build, and
sett vppe in and vppon the said premisses before mencioned one
convenient Play-house for the said children of the Revelles,
the same Play-house to be vsed by the Children of the Revelles
for the tyme being of the Queenes Maiestie, and for the Princes
Players, and for the ladie Elizabeths Players, soe tollerated or
lawfully lycensed to play exercise and practise them therein,
Any lawe, Statute, Act of Parliament, restraint, or other matter
or thing whatsoever to the contrary notwithstanding. Willing and
commaunding you and every of you our said Maiors, Sheriffes,
Iustices of peace, Bayliffes, Constables, headboroughes and
all other our officers and ministers for the tyme being, as
yee tender our pleasure, to permitt and suffer them therein,
without any your lettes, hinderance, molestacion, or disturbance
whatsoever. In witnes whereof, &c. Witnes our selfe at
Westminster the third day of Iune.
per breve de priuato sigillo &c.
The statements made in the patent as to the objects of the promoters
can be confirmed from other sources. We know that the lease of the
Whitefriars expired at the end of 1614, that there had been an
amalgamation of the Queen’s Revels and the Lady Elizabeth’s men in
1613, and that in all probability this arrangement was extended to
bring in Prince Charles’s men during 1615. Unfortunately for Rosseter
and his associates, the patent had hardly been granted before it was
called in question. Presumably the inhabitants of the Blackfriars,
who had already one theatre in their midst, thought that that one was
enough. At any rate the Corporation approached the Privy Council, and
alleged divers inconveniences, in particular the fact that the theatre,
which was described as ‘in Puddle Wharfe’, would ‘adjoine so neere
vnto’ the church of St. Anne’s as to disturb the congregation.[1452]
The Council referred the patent to the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Edward
Coke, no friend of players, or of the royal prerogative which expressed
itself in patents; and when he found a technical flaw, in that the
Blackfriars, having been brought within the City jurisdiction by the
charter of 1608, was not strictly within ‘the suburbs’, ordered on
26 September 1615 that the building, which had already been begun,
should be discontinued. Nevertheless, the work must have gone so
far as to permit of the production of plays, for the title-page of
Field’s _Amends for Ladies_ (1618) testifies that it was acted ‘at the
Blacke-Fryers both by the Princes Servants and the Lady Elizabeths’.
Moreover, on 27 January 1617 the Privy Council wrote again to the Lord
Mayor, enjoining him to see to the suppression of a play-house in the
Blackfriars ‘neere vnto his Majestyes Wardrobe’, which is said to be
‘allmost if not fully finished’.[1453]
It does not appear possible to say exactly where in the Blackfriars’
precinct the Porter’s Hall once occupied by Lady Saunders stood. It
was certainly not the porter’s lodge at the north-west corner of the
great cloister, for this was still in 1615, as it had been since 1554,
part of the Cobham house. One Ninian Sawnders, a vintner, took a lease
of the chancel of the old conventual church from Sir Thomas Cawarden
in 1553, and this would have been close to St. Anne’s, which stood at
the north-east corner of the great cloister. But Ninian died in 1553
and never got knighted. On the other hand, the rooms on the south
side of the great cloister, generally described as Lygon’s lodgings,
had been in the tenure of one Nicholas Saunders shortly before their
sale by Sir George More to John Freeman and others in 1609. Nicholas
Saunders is said to have been knighted in 1603.[1454] These lodgings
adjoined More’s own mansion house, and might at some time have served
as a lodge for his porter.[1455] But I do not feel that they would very
naturally be described either as ‘near’ or ‘in’ Puddle Wharf, or as
‘near’ the Wardrobe. These indications suggest some building approached
either from Puddle Wharf proper or from the hill, afterwards known as
St. Andrew’s Hill, which ran up from it to the Wardrobe, outside the
eastern wall of the Priory precinct. The Cawarden estate did not extend
to this wall, and the Saunders family may quite well, in addition to
Lygon’s lodgings, have had a house, either on the site of the old
convent gardens, or higher up the hill on the Blackwell estate, near
where Shakespeare’s house stood, and near also to St. Anne’s. Perhaps
there had been a porter’s lodge on the east of the old prior’s house.
XVII
THE PRIVATE THEATRES
i. THE BLACKFRIARS
[_Bibliographical Note._--Many documents bearing upon the
history of the theatre are preserved at Loseley, and the most
important are collected by Professor A. Feuillerat in vol. ii
of the _Malone Society’s Collections_ (1913). A few had been
already printed or described by A. J. Kempe in _The Loseley
Manuscripts_ (1835), by J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps in _Outlines_,
i. 299, by J. C. Jeaffreson in the 7th _Report of the Hist.
MSS. Commission_ (1879), by Professor Feuillerat himself in
_Shakespeare-Jahrbuch_, xlviii (1912), 81, and by C. W. Wallace,
with extracts from others, in _The Evolution of the English
Drama up to Shakespeare_ (1912, cited as Wallace, i). In the
same book and in _The Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars_
(1908, cited as Wallace, ii), Professor Wallace prints or
extracts documents from other sources, chiefly lawsuits in
the Court of Requests and elsewhere, which supplement those
discovered by J. Greenstreet and printed in F. G. Fleay,
_Chronicle History of the London Stage_ (1890). The references
to the theatre in J. P. Collier, _History of English Dramatic
Poetry_ (1837 and 1879), are seriously contaminated by
forgeries. Some material for the general history of the precinct
is furnished in the various editions of John Stowe, _Survey of
London_ (1598, 1603, ed. Munday, 1618, ed. Strype, 1720, ed.
Kingsford, 1908), in W. Dugdale, _Monasticon_ (1817–30), by M.
Reddan in the _Victoria History of London_, i. 498, and in the
_Athenaeum_ (1886), ii. 91. A. W. Clapham, _On the Topography
of the Dominican Priory of London_ (_Archaeologia_, lxiii.
57), gives a valuable account of the history and church of
the convent, but had not the advantage of knowing the Loseley
documents, and completely distorts the plan of the domestic
buildings and the theatre. An account by J. Q. Adams is in _S.
P._ xiv (1917), 64. The status of the liberty is discussed by
V. C. Gildersleeve, _Government Regulation of the Elizabethan
Drama_, 143.]
The Dominicans, also called the ‘preaching’ or ‘black’ friars, came
to England in 1221. Their first house was in Holborn.[1456] In 1275
they acquired a site on the sloping ground between St. Paul’s and the
river, just to the east of Fleet ditch, and obtained leave to divert
the walls of the City so as to furnish a north and north-west boundary
to their precinct. Here grew up a very famous convent, the motherhouse
of all the Dominican settlements in the country. It received favours
from several sovereigns, notably from Edward I and his Queen Eleanor,
who were regarded as its founders; and in return held its great
buildings available for national purposes. In 1322–3 it furnished a
depository for state records. It housed divers parliaments, at first
in its church and later in a great chamber which will be of singular
interest to us, and from as early as 1311 was often found a convenient
meeting-place for the Privy Council. In 1522 it was the lodging of the
Emperor Charles V, and a wooden bridge and gallery were carried over
the Fleet, to facilitate communications with his train in Bridewell
palace. In 1529 its parliament chamber was the scene of the legatine
sittings which tried the case of divorce between the same Emperor’s
niece Katharine and the conscience-stricken Henry VIII.[1457]
By this time the friars had ceased to be a power in the land. Those
of the convent had numbered seventy in 1315; there were no more than
sixteen or seventeen in 1538.[1458] Parts of the buildings, now
all too spacious, were let out as residences. It was, perhaps, the
neighbourhood of the Wardrobe, whose Master had an official residence
contiguous to the east wall of the precinct, which made the Blackfriars
a favourite locality for those about the Court. A list of ‘them that
hath lodgings within the Blak Freers’, which was drawn up in 1522,
probably in connexion with the imperial visit, contains the names of
Lord Zouch of Harringworth, Lord Cobham, Sir William Kingston, then
carver and afterwards comptroller of the household, Sir Henry Wyatt,
afterwards treasurer of the chamber, Sir William Parr, Sir Thomas
Cheyne, afterwards warden of the Cinque ports and treasurer of the
household, Jane, widow of Sir Richard Guildford, formerly master of
the horse, and Christopher More, a clerk of the exchequer.[1459]
It is to be feared that some of these tenants cast a covetous eye
upon the fee-simple of their dwellings, and that it was not all zeal
for church reform which made Lord Cobham, for example, write to Sir
Thomas Wyatt, the poet and son of Sir Henry, on 7 October 1538, ‘No
news, but I trust there shall not be a friar left in England before
you return’.[1460] Cobham and his friends had not long to wait. The
deed by which the friars surrendered their property into the hands
of the King is dated 12 November 1538. The annual income, derived
from the rented premises, was reckoned as £104 15_s._ 5_d._, but of
course this in no way represents the capital value of the site and
buildings.[1461] The partition of spoils, under the supervision of
the Court of Augmentations, followed in due course. Cobham got his
house, although not immediately, at nine years’ purchase; and between
1540 and 1550 some sixteen other parcels of the estate, many of them
very substantial, were similarly alienated.[1462] Finally, on 12 March
1550, during the liberal distribution of crown lands for which the
authority of Henry VIII was alleged by his executors in the Privy
Council, a comprehensive grant was made of all that still remained
unalienated in the precinct to Sir Thomas Cawarden, the Master of the
Revels, whose office had for some years past been established within
its walls. Apparently Cawarden paid nothing for it, but on the other
hand the King owed him a good deal for moneys spent in the service of
the Revels.[1463]
The Blackfriars long remained an anomaly in the local government of
London. Like all monastic establishments, the friars had maintained
extensive privileges within their own precinct. Nightly their porter
had shut their four gates upon the city. They had done their own
paving. The Lord Mayor had claimed a jurisdiction, but if this was
admitted, it was only in cases of felony. The ordinary functions of
civil magistracy had been exercised, when called for, by Sir William
Kingston and other important tenants.[1464] Naturally there had been
friction from time to time with the Corporation, and on the surrender
the latter, like the tenants, hoped that their opportunity was come.
They addressed a petition to Henry, in which they expressed their
gratification that he had ‘extirped and extinct the orders of Freers
to the great exaltacion of Crystes doctryne and the abolucion of
Antecriste theyr first founder and begynner’, and asked for a grant of
the church and the whole precinct of the Blackfriars, together with
those of the three other London friaries, to be used for the special
benefit of non-parishioners and of those infected by pestilence.[1465]
Henry, however, had not gone to the trouble of obtaining a surrender
merely to inflate the powers and the revenues of a municipality. He
is reported to have replied that ‘he was as well hable to keep the
liberties as the Friers were’, and to have handed the keys to Sir
John Portinari, one of his gentlemen pensioners, who dwelt in the
precinct.[1466] The Blackfriars, therefore, continued to be an exempt
place or ‘liberty’, an enclave within the walls of the City, but not
part of it, and with a somewhat loose and ill-defined organization
of its own. The inhabitants agreed together and appointed a porter
and a scavenger. A constable was appointed for them by the justices
of the verge.[1467] The precinct was constituted an ecclesiastical
parish, known as St. Anne’s after a chapel which had once served its
inhabitants; and was provided with a church.[1468] Petty offences
were tried, and any exceptional affairs managed, as might have been
done in a rural parish, by the justices, and it was to these that
any administrative orders thought necessary by the Privy Council
were ordinarily addressed.[1469] It perhaps goes without saying that
the City were not content with a single rebuff. They attempted to
interfere at the time of a riot in 1551, and were snubbed by the Privy
Council.[1470] Under Mary they promoted legislation with a view to
annexing the liberties, but without success.[1471] In 1562 a sheriff,
who entered the liberty to enforce a proclamation, was shut in by the
prompt action of the constable, and faced with an inhibition which
one of the justices hurried to obtain from a privy councillor.[1472]
The city remained persistent. In 1574 the Council had again to
intervene.[1473] In 1578 a controversy arose as to the right of the
City to dispose of the goods of felons and other escheats. It was
referred to two chief justices, who made a report to the effect that,
while the inhabitants of both the Blackfriars and the Whitefriars
enjoyed certain immunities from civic levies and liabilities,
nevertheless the soil of the precincts lay within the City, and the
City was entitled to exercise jurisdiction therein. It may be doubted
whether effect was given to this opinion.[1474]
In 1587 the Council ordered another inquiry, in order to ascertain
the precise nature of the Queen’s title in the Blackfriars.[1475]
There had been a petition for redress of inconveniences from the
inhabitants.[1476] About the same time the chief landowner, Sir William
More, appears to have suggested that the liberty should be converted
into a manor, and manorial rights conferred upon him.[1477] These are
signs that residence in a liberty hard by a thronging population had
disclosed a seamy side. Undesirable persons were bound to throng to a
district where the Lord Mayor’s writ did not run. An open space, for
example, filled with immemorial trees planted by the friars, had been
ruined to house alleys for bowling and other unlawful games.[1478]
Doubtless there were those who resented the fact that the attempt of
the City to discourage interludes had been met by the establishment of
a Blackfriars theatre in 1576, which lasted until 1584. It appears to
have been a protest from the inhabitants which led the Privy Council
to forbid the public theatre contemplated by James Burbage in 1596,
although some years later they winked at the opening of the building
as a private house. In 1596 the church fell down, and in appointing a
commission to apportion the responsibility for repairs, the council
also instructed them to consider the government of the liberty, ‘which
being grown more populus than heretofore and without any certaine and
knowen officer to keepe good orders there, needeth to be reformed in
that behalfe’.[1479] The nature of the commission’s findings is not
upon record, but that the ultimate solution lay in the incorporation
of the liberty in the City could hardly be doubtful. As far back as
1589 the Council had found it convenient to use the Lord Mayor as
an agent for securing a proper contribution from the Blackfriars
towards a levy. From 1597 onwards they showed an increased tendency to
make similar use of an administrative machinery far more completely
organized than that of the justices of the peace. In that year the Lord
Mayor was instructed to make a collection in aid of the Blackfriars
church repairs. In 1600 it again fell to him to assess the share of
the liberty in a levy of men and money. In 1601 it is he who is called
upon to suppress plays in Blackfriars during Lent.[1480] The final step
was, however, deferred until 20 September 1608, when the new Jacobean
charter formally extended the jurisdiction of the city to various
liberties, including both the Blackfriars and the Whitefriars, with
certain exemptions as regards assessments and the tenure of offices,
but with none as regards responsibility for petty offences and the
keeping of the peace.[1481]
I have anticipated, in order to get the question of jurisdiction out
of the way. I must now return to the topography. Sir Thomas Cawarden
died on 29 August 1559. He had no son, and his executors, Lady Cawarden
and Sir William More, personally took over the Blackfriars estate in
survivorship, as part of the settlement of his affairs.[1482] Lady
Cawarden’s death on 20 February 1560 left More sole owner. He retained
the property until his own death in 1601, and the muniment room of his
house at Loseley near Guildford contains innumerable documents relating
to the business transactions in which it involved him, together with
some of earlier date which he inherited from Cawarden. The researches
of Professor Feuillerat in these archives render it possible to
reconstruct with some minuteness the arrangement of the Blackfriars
and its buildings at the time of the surrender, to trace many of the
changes of the next half-century, and, as part of the process, to
indicate pretty definitely the locality and nature of the structures
which were turned to theatrical uses.
The precinct covered a space of about five acres.[1483] In shape it was
a rough parallelogram, wider at the north than at the south. The great
gate was towards the east end of the north boundary. It was reached
by a short entry on the south of Bowier Row, now Ludgate Hill, just
east of Ludgate. This seems to have been called Gate Street. It is now
the north end of Pilgrim Street.[1484] From here the boundary was the
city wall, westwards for about 450 ft. to the Fleet ditch, and then
southwards for about 800 ft. along the east side of the ditch. There
were towers at intervals. One of these stood about 200 ft. down from
the angle, and immediately south of this was the bridge over the Fleet
towards Bridewell. The south and east boundaries were also walled.
Between the south wall and the river ran Castle Lane, which was not
within the precinct.[1485] A gate in the south wall gave access across
the lane to the Blackfriars ‘bridge’ or ‘stairs’, a common landing
place, originally built by the Prior of St. John’s, from whom, in some
way not clear to me, the Friars held their estate.[1486] The south-east
angle of the precinct was near Puddle Wharf, and from here the boundary
ran up the west side of St. Andrew’s Hill to Carter Lane, bending out
eastwards near the top, where the buildings of the Wardrobe joined it
by an arch over the roadway, was then driven in sharply westwards by
the end of Carter Lane, which was butt up against a turngate in the
friars’ wall, and finally ran in an irregularly diagonal line from the
junction of Creed and Carter Lanes north-west to the great gate again.
Internally the precinct was unequally divided by an irregular highway
which ran north and south, from the great gate to the Blackfriars
stairs. This started out of Gate Street as High Street, and lower down
became Water Lane.[1487] All the conventual buildings lay on the east
of the highway. Here was the larger division of the precinct, measuring
about 450 ft. from east to west. The western division, measuring about
150 ft., contained only a few houses and gardens. Across it ran from
Bridewell Bridge to Water Lane a strip of unoccupied land, containing
nothing but a ruined gallery, probably part of the provision made
for the accommodation of Charles V in 1522. One of Cawarden’s first
acts, when he got his property, was to make a new road, with tenements
and gardens to the south of it, along this strip. It became known as
Bridewell Lane, and is represented by the present Union Street.[1488]
It must have joined Water Lane just south of a little place or
_parvis_ which lay in front of the west porch of the church and the
adjoining entrance to the cloister. The _parvis_ contained one or
two houses and shops, and formed part of the continuous thoroughfare
from north to south, communicating by gateways with High Street and
Water Lane.[1489] The conventual church itself divided the eastern
portion of the precinct from west to east, extending not quite so
far east as the present Friar Street. It was 220 ft. long and 66 ft.
wide, and had two aisles and a chancel, which, as usual in conventual
churches, was as long as the nave. There was a square porch tower over
the west end. Over the junction of nave and chancel stood a belfry,
visible in Wyngaerde’s drawing of _c._ 1543–50, and to the north of
the chancel a chapel, probably the quasi-parochial chapel of St. Anne,
and a vestry.[1490] Beyond these was the churchyard.[1491] This was
300 ft. long by 90 ft. deep, and occupied about two-thirds of the
space between the High Street on the west, the church on the south,
and the north-eastern boundary of the precinct. A group of houses
stood between it and the great gate towards Ludgate, and three others
separated it from the High Street at the south west corner.[1492] One
of these, built up against the church and the High Street gateway, was
a recluse’s cell or Ankerhouse.[1493] Cawarden cut a new road across
the churchyard, 20 ft. north of the site of the chancel and just north
of the Ankerhouse and the High Street gate. This continued Carter Lane,
the turngate at the end of which was converted into a gate practicable
for carts, and with Bridewell Lane provided a thoroughfare across the
Blackfriars from east to west in addition to that from north to south.
That part of the existing Carter Lane, west of Creed Lane, which was
formerly known as Shoemakers’ Row, doubtless represents Cawarden’s new
way.[1494]
On the south of the nave stood the great cloister, entered by a
porter’s lodge in its north-west corner. It was 110 ft. square. Its
eastern alley was probably in a line with a way across the church under
the belfry to a door into the churchyard, and this line, preserved by
Cawarden in order to provide access to the cloister from his new way,
is represented by the existing Church Entry.[1495] The north side of
the cloister was formed by the wall of the nave. Behind the other three
sides were ranged the domestic buildings of the convent. On the east
were the ample Prior’s lodging, which stretched back over the space
south of the chancel, and farther to the south the Convent garden,
covering an acre. Over part of this lodging and over the cloister alley
itself was the east dorter of the friars, communicating direct with
the church by a stairway.[1496] The east side of the cloister also
contained the Chapter-house, which probably stood in the middle, and to
the south of this a school-house.[1497] Behind the south-east corner
were the provincial’s lodging, a store-house, the common jakes, and
another garden, known as the hill garden.[1498] Another dorter stood
over the south cloister alley and over some ground-floor buildings of
uncertain use, which divided this alley from an inner cloister, flanked
on the east by the library, and in part on the west by the infirmary,
behind which were the bakehouse, brewhouse, and stables. The western
end of the south alley of the main cloister formed a lavabo, and was
apparently sunk to a lower level than the rest.[1499] Down the western
side of both cloisters extended a continuous range of buildings, the
details of which will require subsequent examination. These formed two
main blocks. The northern, flanking the main cloister, contained the
buttery and parts of the guest-house and porter’s lodge; the southern,
flanking the inner cloister, was devoted to the refectory, the lower
end of which, owing to the slope of the hill, seems to have stood over
the infirmary. The irregular outline of Water Lane, jutting a good deal
to the west after it emerged from the _parvis_ in front of the church
porch, left a space of some 84 ft. at its widest between this range
of buildings and the lane itself. The guest-house and porter’s lodge
extended back into this space; it also held the convent kitchen and
other subsidiary buildings.[1500]
When Cawarden got his grant in 1550, a great deal of the property had
already been disposed of.[1501] Except for the strip where he laid
out Bridewell Lane and two small garden plots, nothing was left for
him in the western division of the precinct. To the north the group
of houses between the churchyard and the great gate had gone. To
the south, Cobham had taken the rooms over the porter’s lodge, with
a closet window looking into the church, and he and one Sir George
Harper had divided the rest of the guest-house block--‘fayer great
edifices’, says Cawarden--that lay behind.[1502] Sir Francis Bryan had
taken the Prior’s lodging and the convent garden, and from him they
had passed to the Bishop of Ely and then to one William Blackwell.
Lady Kingston had taken the inner cloister, with part of the south
dorter and the rooms beneath it, the library, the infirmary, the
brewhouse, bakehouse, and stables. Others had taken the school-house,
some more of the south dorter, the provincial’s lodging, the jakes,
the store-house, and the hill garden, and these ultimately passed to
Lady Grey. Sir Thomas Cheyne, the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, had
taken some of the buildings west of the frater. Everything farther
south, down towards the river, had also been alienated. What was left
for Cawarden consisted mainly of the church itself and the churchyard,
the ankerhouse, the great cloister, the chapter-house, the east dorter,
the porter’s lodge and buttery block, with all the rooms over these
except Cobham’s, the frater, the kitchen, and such buildings standing
between the frater and Water Lane, as did not belong to Cheyne.[1503]
Much trouble was caused to Cawarden’s successors by uncertainty as to
the extent of Cheyne’s claim.[1504] No doubt the grant constituted
Cawarden the chief landowner in the district, but he complained that
hardly any of his property was ‘mansionable’, and even at the time of
his death he had only brought the annual value up to £70.[1505] The
survey taken for the purposes of the grant puts it at no more than
£19. On the other hand, the value of the stone and timber and other
material of the buildings is estimated in the same survey at £879
3_s._ 4_d._, including an item of £709 11_s._ 0_d._ for lead alone.
Evidently it was from the site-value and the judicious erection of new
buildings and conversion of old ones, with the aid of this material,
into ‘mansionable’ property, that Cawarden’s profit was to come. A
convinced Protestant, he looked upon the church as a quarry. He pulled
it down, with the exception of the south wall of the nave, which was
to serve him as a garden wall, and the porch which he turned into a
tenement. Other tenements were built on the site, and the rest of it,
with so much of the churchyard as was not required for the new road,
was let off. One of the tenants appears to have made tennis-courts on
the site of the chancel. The demolition included St. Anne’s Chapel.
This had been closed during Henry’s reign and used as a store-house
for the Offices of Tents and Revels. For a while the inhabitants were
allowed to worship in a room under an old gallery, presumably that
which became the site of Bridewell Lane; but now this passed into
Cawarden’s hands and he evicted them. When they plucked up heart, under
Mary, to protest, he first offered them a site in the churchyard and
a roof if they would be at the expense of building, and ultimately
gave them an upper room, apparently at the north end of the east
dorter. This fell down in 1597, and was rebuilt by the parishioners,
who finally bought it, with a piece of the site of the old conventual
church as a churchyard, from Sir George More in 1607–8.[1506] Cawarden
effected an adjustment of boundaries on the east of the cloister with
the Bishop of Ely.[1507] He then proceeded to build dwelling rooms
along the south and east sides of the cloister.[1508] They must have
been fairly shallow, for they left him a great square garden, but
no doubt the recess of the chapter-house permitted increased depth
towards the east. Under the west wing of the new building, adjoining
the buttery, was a great vaulted room, 57 ft. by 25, which must, I
think, have been the lavabo of the friars.[1509] East of this was a
set of rooms capable of use as a separate dwelling, which came to be
known as Lygon’s lodgings.[1510] The rest formed the capital mansion
of the property, the ‘great house’, and was clearly intended for
Cawarden’s own residence. It seems to have been sometimes let and
sometimes occupied by Sir William More.[1511] The great garden must
have been pleasant enough, with the north and west cloister alleys
left standing, and a tinkling conduit in the west end, filled by a pipe
from Clerkenwell.[1512]
The important part of the Blackfriars, from the point of view of
theatrical topography, is the range of buildings on the western side of
the two cloisters, parallel to Water Lane. The two blocks constituting
this range, or so much of them as passed to Cawarden, are referred to
in the surveys of 1548 and 1550 as the ‘olde butterie’ and the ‘vpper
ffrater’.[1513] From the details given in these surveys and in the
leases and other documents preserved at Loseley, it is possible to form
a very fair notion of their structure and uses. The chief rooms in
both blocks were upon an upper floor. The northern block was 110 ft.
in length from north to south and 36 ft. in width. The upper rooms,
however, were only 26 ft. wide, as 10 ft. was taken up by a high stone
gallery which ran along the west of the building, and was perhaps
connected with the wooden gallery leading to the Fleet.[1514] These
rooms were four in number. That to the north, 21 ft. long, belonged to
Cobham, and had a closet window looking into the church upon the south
wall of which, for 20 ft. of its width, the block abutted.[1515] Then
came two central rooms, a large and a small one, measuring together 52
ft. in length, and then a southern one, which with an entry measured
47 ft.[1516] The surveys treat the three rooms which fell to Cawarden
as a single ‘hall place’. All four rooms had probably formed part of
the guest-house of the convent, and had lodged Charles V. The ground
floor held low rooms pierced at intervals by entries and with cellars
underneath them. The chief entry or gate-house was at the southern
end and served Cawarden’s mansion house when that was built.[1517]
North of this came the buttery proper and a pantry, occupying with a
small entry connecting them 29 ft.;[1518] then another stepped entry
into the cloister serving afterwards as Cawarden’s garden gate;[1519]
then probably more rooms under the two central upper rooms; then a
staircase to Cobham’s upper room;[1520] and finally rooms belonging to
the porter’s lodge, which were 21 ft. in length. This lodge extended
backwards towards Water Lane, and over and around it were other
rooms of Cobham’s and yet others forming the house of Sir George
Harper.[1521] Some or all of these had also probably been part of the
guest-house. Together with a garden of Cobham’s, they occupied rather
less than half the space between the northern block and Water Lane.
South of them, and included in Cawarden’s grant, were the convent
kitchen with a room over it, and the kitchen yard, forming a space 84
ft. wide, and in length 74 ft. at the buttery end and 68 ft. at the
lane end.
The northern block, being 110 ft. long, extended right down to the
southern line of the cloister, which was 110 ft. square. Here it
abutted upon the southern block. This was 52 ft. wide. The length
of the upper frater is given in the surveys as 107 ft., and in two
of More’s leases as 110 ft.[1522] The latter figure is probably the
right one.[1523] The north end of this block contained a ‘great
stair’, which gave access both to the frater and to the guest-house,
and was itself convenient of approach both from the gate-house entry
and from the lavabo at the south-west angle of the cloister. Probably
this end was built in the form of a tower, as there were rooms on
and over the staircase and over the adjoining Duchy Chamber, and
garrets over those.[1524] There was a garret also over the south end
of the northern block.[1525] It is doubtful whether anything stood
over the main portion of the southern block.[1526] This had a flat
leaded roof, whereas the northern block, as its lead is not mentioned
in the survey, probably had a gabled and tiled roof. Apart from the
staircase tower, the upper floor of the southern block consisted of
the ‘upper’ frater or refectory, a spacious apartment, which had been
used for Parliaments and the legatine trial of Henry VIII’s divorce
case, and was sometimes known as ‘the Parliament chamber’.[1527] The
ground floor is a little more difficult. The survey of 1548 assigns to
it a ‘blind’, that is, I suppose, a windowless, or at any rate dark,
parlour, which came next the buttery block, and a hall, to which the
parlour served as an entry.[1528] These are said to be ‘vnder the seide
frater of the same lengethe and breddethe’. This might naturally be
taken to mean that they were, together, of the same size as the frater
above. In fact it must, I think, mean that they were of the same size
as each other, for we know from another source that the south end of
the frater was over a room not belonging to Cawarden at all but to
Lady Kingston, and itself standing over the infirmary, which, owing
to the fall of the ground, formed at that end a lower story of the
block.[1529] The survey does not say what the sizes of the parlour and
hall were, but a later document suggests that together they underlay
over two-thirds of the frater and occupied a space of 74 ft. from north
to south and 52 ft. from east to west.[1530] Under Cawarden’s part of
the southern block were cellars. To the west lay what was known as the
Duchy Chamber, probably from some official use in connexion with the
Duchy of Lancaster. This was a two-story building, 50 ft. long by 16
ft. wide, jutting out at right angles to the extreme north end of the
frater. South of it was a house, apparently belonging to Sir Thomas
Cheyne and occupied by Sir John Portinari, which touched the frater
at one end, and at the other had a parlour, interposed between the
end of the Duchy Chamber and Water Lane, and bounded on the north, as
the Duchy Chamber itself must have been, by the kitchen yard. South
of this again were a little chamber and a kitchen, with an entry from
Water Lane, probably between Portinari’s parlour and another house
belonging to Cheyne.[1531] The little chamber and kitchen were used
in conjunction with the hall under the upper frater. This hall, which
was paved and stood ‘handsome to’ the buttery, had also been a frater,
serving as a breakfast room for the friars, and in the little chamber
had lived their butler.[1532] Now it is noted in the surveys that Sir
Thomas Cheyne had laid claim to the paved hall, the ‘blind’ parlour,
the little chamber, and the kitchen, and it seems very doubtful whether
they were covered by the specifications of Cawarden’s grant.[1533] He
succeeded, however, in occupying them; and the inevitable lawsuit was
left for his successor.
Cawarden had had the buttery, frater, kitchen, and Duchy chamber
on lease since 4 April 1548.[1534] Some of these, as well as other
conventual buildings, he had occupied from a still earlier date in
his capacity as Master of the Tents and Revels. For these offices the
propinquity of the Wardrobe rendered the Blackfriars very convenient.
Already in 1511 temporary use had been made of some room in the
precinct to prepare a pageant in for a joust at Westminster.[1535]
Before Cawarden became Master, the regular store-house of the Revels
office had been at Warwick Inn.[1536] The transfer to Blackfriars
was not completed until February 1547, but it perhaps began earlier,
since the papers of the Court of Augmentations contain receipts by
John Barnard, for sums spent by the King’s surveyor on ‘the reparayng
and amendyng of the Blacke Fryers in London store howse for the seyd
tentes and revelles’ during 1545.[1537] The Chapel of St. Anne had
been requisitioned with other houses ‘to laye in tentes, maskes and
revels’ before the end of Henry VIII’s reign.[1538] As to the exact
location of the Tents there is some interesting, although conflicting,
evidence. An order of the Augmentations in 1550 allowed Sir Thomas
Cheyne £5 a year for the use of his great room by the Tents from
25 March 1545 onwards.[1539] The room intended was undeniably the
paved hall or breakfast room under the frater, but Sir William More
maintained in 1572 that the payment by the Augmentations was an
irregular one, and that the paved hall had never been used for the
Revels and was never in fact Cheyne’s.[1540] Sir John Portinari gave
evidence that for some time after the surrender of the convent it had
remained empty, and that he had himself kept the keys until Cawarden
took possession of it in 1550. Cawarden then invited him to a supper
and a play in the hall.[1541] The Revels seem to have had the use of
the upper frater or parliament chamber during Henry VIII’s reign.[1542]
But the surveys of 1548 and 1550 locate them to the north of this, in
the southernmost of the four halls of the old guest-house. The two
central halls, together with the convent kitchen, had been tenanted as
far back as 1539 by successive Lords Cobham, to whose house they were
adjacent.[1543] In 1554, however, Cawarden sold the two rooms to George
Lord Cobham, together with the porter’s lodge, which underlay his
original holding, and received as part of his consideration a release
from any claim which Cobham may have had to the kitchen yard and to
the property granted to Cawarden on the west side of Water Lane.[1544]
With the upper rooms transferred to Cobham went ‘appurtenances’, which
probably included the corresponding ground-floor rooms, as these are
not traceable in More’s possession and apparently formed part of the
Cobham estate when that was disposed of in the next century.[1545]
The porter’s lodge was all on the ground floor. It had a frontage of
21 ft. on the cloister and ran back for 47 ft. towards Water Lane.
At the time of Cawarden’s grant in 1550 it had been occupied by John
Barnard, clerk comptroller of the Tents and Revels, but he had died in
the same year.[1546] Naturally it was convenient for the officers of
the Revels to live in the Blackfriars. John Holt, the yeoman, had a
house to the north of the churchyard. Thomas Philipps, the clerk, had
the ‘little chamber’ west of the frater. The paved hall served him as
a wood store, and from time to time some of Cawarden’s servants lay
there. About 1552 Cawarden moved Philipps to the Ankerhouse, and put
into the little chamber the deputy clerk, Thomas Blagrave, who found
it too small, and rented an adjoining chamber from Cheyne.[1547] The
paved hall was then let, with other neighbouring rooms on more than
one floor, to one Woodman, who kept an ordinary in the hall and did a
good deal of damage to the property.[1548] Meanwhile, the Revels had
apparently been moved from this first-floor hall where they lay in
1550, for when this hall is recited as the south boundary of Cobham’s
purchase in 1554, it is described as a house in the tenure of Sir John
Cheke or his assigns.[1549] So long as the Tents and Revels continued
to be housed in Crown property, the offices had of course nothing
to pay for rent. But after 1550 Cawarden, as naturally, claimed an
allowance for rent, and in 1555 he was permitted to charge six years’
arrears from Michaelmas 1549 at the rate of £3 6_s._ 8_d._ a year each
for the official residences of the comptroller, clerk, and yeoman, £6
13_s._ 4_d._ for his own, £6 13_s._ 4_d._ for the office of the tents,
and £6 13_s._ 4_d._ for the ‘store and woorke howses of the revelles’.
In the accounts for 1555–9 similar charges recur annually, but the
allowance for Cawarden’s own house is raised to £10 and that for the
houses of the other officers to £5 each; and the £6 13_s._ 4_d._ for
the Revels office is specified as being ‘for the rente of fyve greate
roomes within the Blackefryers for the woorke and store howses of the
Revelles’.[1550] About 1560 the store-house was certainly not the hall
over the buttery, but the great vaulted room in the south-west corner
of the cloister, which had been the lavabo of the friars.[1551] On the
other hand, Sir John Cheke’s tenure of his house had ceased and the
vacated rooms had become available for workhouses. This is evident
from the terms of a lease of the same rooms to Sir Henry Neville,
executed on 10 June 1560, just after the Revels had been removed to
St. John’s.[1552] Cawarden had died on the previous 29 August, and the
lease was one of the first dealings of William More with the property.
The principal rooms leased were precisely four in number. They had
been ‘lately called or knowen by the name of Mr. Chekes lodginge and
sythence vsed by Sir Thomas Cawarden knight deceased for the office
of the Quenes Maiesties Revelles’. They were bounded on the north by
Lord Cobham’s house, on the east by the houses of More and of Sir
Henry Jerningham, who was Lady Kingston’s son and heir, and on the
west by another house of More’s in the occupation of Richard Frith,
and by the way leading to More’s house and garden and a piece of void
ground. Under them and leased with them were the buttery and pantry;
and the lease also covered a cellar and a ‘greate rome in manner of a
grete seller having a chimpney’ which I suppose to have been the late
Revels store-house. The upstairs rooms were approximately 157 ft. long,
27 ft. wide at the north end, and 22 ft. wide at the south end.[1553]
The length agrees approximately with the sum of the lengths of the
upper frater and of the hall over the buttery not included in Cobham’s
purchase of 1554; and it was evidently from these that Neville’s
holding was taken. But the head of the staircase must have interfered
with his width in the middle, and it will be observed that, while he
had the full width of the northern block, he had less than half the
full width (52 ft.) of the frater. Evidently Cawarden had partitioned
the frater to make it ‘mansionable’, and in particular had divided it
into two tenements by a partition from north to south. Neville’s was
the eastern division. The western division and the rooms at the top of
the staircase tower were in the tenure of Richard Frith, who had taken
a twenty-four years’ lease from Cawarden in April 1555 and had obtained
a renewal from More on 24 December 1559. Here, in 1561, Frith kept a
dancing-school.[1554] Neville’s lease also gave him a share in More’s
water-supply, a strip of the void ground, formerly the convent kitchen
yard, between the northern block and Water Lane, and a right of way
to the buttery and pantry through the rest of that ground, which was
reserved to More. Neville’s strip lay just south of Cobham’s garden
wall. That reserved by More was partly taken up by ways to his garden
and gate-house entries. In the space between these was erected in 1561
a public conduit, which received the water-supply after it left More’s
tap, and passed it on to the Earl of Pembroke’s house at Baynard’s
Castle. Here also stood a tennis ground, tenanted with a cellar under
the northern block by Frith.[1555] The gate-house entry, or at least
the way to it, served Frith’s house, as well as More’s own. Near it
were certain rooms, reserved for More’s use or that of his servant John
Horley, which may have been constructed out of the ‘blind’ parlour.
The great stairs in the tower between the two blocks were probably
assigned to Frith. They were not included in Neville’s lease, and he
was specifically debarred from any right of access through More’s
house or garden except by More’s licence. It was probably contemplated
that he would build stairs to the upper floor for himself, and this is
perhaps why More exacted no fine on the execution of the lease.[1556]
At any rate Neville did build stairs on the west of the house, placing
them not in his own strip of yard but in More’s, with his water-cock in
a little room at the stair foot. The pale of Frith’s tennis court was
altered to allow of access between it and Neville’s stairs from More’s
garden entry to his gate-house entry.[1557] In his own strip Neville
built a kitchen and another set of stairs behind it which must have led
into the extreme north end of his house, as the site of the kitchen
underlay, not Neville’s own rooms, but those purchased by Cobham in
1554. The rest of the strip served as a woodyard, and had a privy
in it. Presumably the original convent kitchen acquired by Cawarden
had been pulled down. Within the house Neville put up partitions,
turning his four rooms into six, of which it may be inferred that
two lay in the northern block and four in the southern, and adorning
one of these latter with wainscoting most of the way round, and with
a great round portal.[1558] About Lady Day 1568 More bought back
the lease from Neville for £100, doubtless in consideration of the
improvements.[1559] For a time it seems to have been occupied by the
Silk Dyers Company.[1560] On 6 February 1571 it was let to William Lord
Cobham, the terms of whose lease closely resemble those of Neville’s,
but record the changes made during his predecessor’s tenancy.[1561]
Cobham gave up the house in 1576, and on 27 August of that year Neville
wrote to More to recommend a new applicant for the tenancy, his friend
Richard Farrant. With it came an application from Farrant himself.
Apparently his tenancy entailed the removal of an Italian, who may have
been one of the silk dyers, and he desired to be allowed to take down
one of the partitions. On 17 September he wrote to ask that a small
room, 6 ft. by 4½ ft., occupied by More’s man Bradshaw might be added
to his holding.[1562] His lease was executed on 20 December.[1563] It
gives him all the rooms which Neville had had, with the exception of
the former Revels store-house, which is now described as ‘that great
rome nowe vsed for a wasshynge howse’; and it adds the little room
specially asked for, which had been contrived by throwing together a
privy and a coal-house. Richard Farrant was Master of the Children of
Windsor Chapel, and deputy to William Hunnis as Master of the Children
of the Chapel Royal, and his object in taking the house was to have a
room in which the children could give public representations for profit
of the plays which they were afterwards to perform at Court. He carried
out his plan, and so the old frater of the friars, once the parliament
chamber of the realm, became the first Blackfriars theatre.[1564]
More, according to his own account, was not best pleased at the use
made of his house. He complained that Farrant, after pretending that
he only meant to teach the children in it, had made it a ‘continuall
howse for plays’ to the offence of the precinct, and to fit it for
the purpose had pulled down and defaced Neville’s partitions, spoiled
the windows, and brought the house to great ruin. He had also sublet
certain portions, and, as he was not entitled to do this under his
lease without licence, More claimed the forfeiture of the lease. At
this moment, on 30 November 1580, Farrant died, leaving the house to
his widow Anne. For some months there were no plays in the theatre.
Then Hunnis resolved to carry on Farrant’s enterprise himself, and on
a recommendation from the Earl of Leicester More appears to have given
at least a tacit consent to a sub-letting by Anne to Hunnis and one
John Newman on 20 December 1581. They were to do repairs and pay her
£6 13_s._ 4_d._ in rent more than the £14 due to More. An unfortunate
slip of the scrivener’s pen cut Mrs. Farrant’s profit down to £6 6_s._
8_d._ They also gave bonds of £100 each for the due fulfilment of
their covenants, and according to Newman’s statement to More, paid
£30 down. According to Mrs. Farrant they neglected their repairs and
were extremely irregular with their rent, so that she was put to great
shifts in order to satisfy Sir William More, disposing of a small
reversion given her by the Queen, pawning her plate and jewels, selling
a dozen of gold buttons here and a set of viols there, and borrowing of
powerful friends such as Lord Cobham or Henry Sackford, the Master of
the Tents. Meanwhile Hunnis and Newman disposed of their interest to
one Henry Evans, a scrivener, and More, incensed at this, took definite
steps in the spring of 1583 to recover his house by executing a fresh
lease to one of his men, Thomas Smallpiece, and setting Smallpiece to
sue for the ejectment of Evans. The latter tried to elude him by a
further transfer of the sub-lease to the Earl of Oxford, who passed it
on to John Lyly, the poet; and thus, says More, the title was ‘posted
over from one to another from me’ contrary to the conditions of the
original lease. Doubtless Hunnis, Lyly, and Evans were all working
together under the Earl’s patronage, for a company under Oxford’s name
was taken to Court by Lyly in the winter of 1583–4 and by Evans in the
winter of 1584–5, and it seems pretty clear that in 1583–4, at any
rate, it was in fact made up of boys from the Chapel and Paul’s.[1565]
More, however, pursued his point, and about Easter 1584 recovered legal
possession of his house. Some months before, Anne Farrant, in despair,
had appealed to Sir Francis Walsingham, and had also brought actions at
common law against Hunnis and Newman for the forfeiture of their bonds.
They applied to the Court of Requests to take over the case, and there
is no formal record of the outcome. But in January 1587 Mrs. Farrant
was again complaining to the Privy Council, and Sir John Wolley was
asked to bring about a settlement between her and More, who was his
father-in-law.[1566]
So ends the story of the first Blackfriars theatre. The premises which
it had occupied came into the hands of Henry Lord Hunsdon, who was also
about the same time tenant of More’s mansion house and garden.[1567]
It would seem that Lord Oxford and Lyly had passed on to Hunsdon their
sub-leases from the Farrants and that, even when he recovered legal
possession from the court, More did not care to interfere with this
arrangement. But there was evidently some friction. The sub-leases were
due to expire in 1590 or 1591, and in April 1586 More refused to renew
them. His excuse was that ‘The howses yow had of Lyllye I determyne
that assone as theye bothe shall cum into my handes to kepe them to the
onelye vse of me and mye chylderne’. In acknowledging this decision,
Hunsdon complained that the pipe of water belonging to one of the
houses had been diverted to serve that of Lord Cobham. In 1590 he made
a fresh attempt to secure a renewal. More at first drafted a letter of
consent, but then changed his mind and told Hunsdon that he needed the
houses for his daughter Lady Wolley and for himself on his visits to
London. Hunsdon had suffered annoyance because the tenant of the next
house ‘having the vse of the leades, either by negligence or otherwise,
suffereth the boyes to cutt upp the lead with knifes or to boore yt
through with bodkyns wherby the rayne cometh throwghe’.[1568] This
allusion, together with that to the pipe of water, makes it clear that
Hunsdon’s houses included the rooms covered by Neville’s lease of 1560,
in which the right of dancing-master Frith to use the leads over the
southern block is expressly safeguarded. I think it is probable that
the two houses are merely the southern and northern sections of the
Farrant holding, separately sublet to Hunsdon. It is known that Farrant
himself, while in occupation of the theatre, had let off certain rooms.
More’s wish to retain the property for family reasons did not long
outlast its immediate purpose of decently covering a refusal to the
Lord Chamberlain. Frith’s tenancy also came to an end, and for some
period between 1590 and 1596 the rooms formerly constituting the upper
frater were reunited in the occupation of William de Laune, a doctor
of physic. The rooms to the north of them, after his appointment as
Chamberlain of the Exchequer on 23 November 1591, were used by More for
the purposes of the Pipe Office.[1569] The buttery and pantry beneath
were probably also relet in 1591.[1570]
I must now turn to the history of the ‘paved hall’ and ‘blind parlour’
under the upper frater and the little chamber and kitchen to the west
of these, all of which, when Cawarden obtained possession in 1550,
were under the shadow of a claim by Sir Thomas Cheyne. Blagrave’s
occupation of the little chamber terminated when the Revels Office
moved to St. John’s in 1560, and on 10 December 1564 More drafted a
lease of it to one Laurence Bywater, who had in fact been in occupation
since 1560.[1571] It is described as consisting of a hall, a chamber
above, a little room below, a kitchen, a yard, ‘a long entrie coming
in ouer the yard bourded and railed’, and a vault or cellar. The
paved hall had been let by 1572 to William Joyner, who used it as a
fencing-school. In this year Cheyne’s claim was renewed by one Henry
Pole and his wife Margaret, who was the widow of Cheyne’s eldest son.
The rooms chiefly in dispute were the paved hall and Bywater’s house,
but the Poles seem also to have claimed rooms in the tenures of Richard
Frith and Thomas Hale.[1572] It may be conjectured that these were the
rooms constructed out of the blind parlour. On the other hand More
made a counter-claim, probably not very serious, to Pole tenements in
the occupation of Christopher Fenton, Thomas Austen, and John Lewes.
Incidentally, it appears that Cawarden had not succeeded in removing
all signs of papistry from the Blackfriars, for Bywater’s house is
throughout described in the interrogatories taken as the little house
having chalices and singing cakes painted in the window. The matter
was referred to arbitration.[1573] Pole’s case rested entirely on the
question of fact as to what the holding of Cheyne and his predecessors
actually comprised in 1540, since the grant named no boundaries but
merely gave Cheyne the houses and lands then in his own occupation and
formerly in those of Jasper Fylole and of Thomas Ferebye and William
Lylgrave. Pole produced some witnesses who declared that before the
surrender by the friars one Purpointe had dwelt in Bywater’s house and
kept a tavern in the fencing-school, and that subsequently Ferebye and
Lylgrave had occupied these premises. They could not say that Cheyne
himself had ever had possession of them, but Pole was able to cite the
order of the Court of Augmentation in 1550 allowing Cheyne rent for his
large room as a store-house for the tents. In More’s view this rent
was paid under a misunderstanding, and he seems to have suggested
that the only houses occupied by Cheyne and his predecessors were
that afterwards occupied by Portinari and one ‘new built’ by Cheyne,
in which apparently Lord Henry Seymour was living at the time of the
suit. Moreover, he produced a number of witnesses, including Bywater,
Blagrave, Thomas Hale, groom of the Tents, Portinari himself, and
Elizabeth Baxter, widow of the former porter of the friars, who agreed
in deposing that the friars had never let these rooms, which were
essential as a breakfast room and a butler’s lodging to their daily
life, and gave a perfectly consistent account of the various uses of
them after the surrender by Cawarden, Woodman, Phillips, Blagrave, and
Bywater, which have already been indicated in this narrative. It does
not transpire that More confided to the arbitrators the suspicious
references to Cheyne’s claim in the surveys of 1548 and 1550. However
this may be, their decision was in his favour on the substantial issue.
The Poles were required to acknowledge his right to Bywater’s house and
the paved hall, as well as to the tenements of Frith and Hale. More, on
the other hand, was to abandon his claim to the tenements of Fenton,
Austen, and Lewes, and by way of compromise was to execute a lease of
Bywater’s house to the Poles at a nominal rent for fifty years or the
term of their lives. This he accordingly did. Nothing more is heard
of any of the premises involved until July 1584, just after More had
succeeded in putting an end to Lyly’s theatrical enterprise. By this
date both Bywater and Joyner had gone, and their places had been taken
by another fencing-master, an Italian, Rocco Bonetti by name.[1574]
Bonetti had acquired from Margaret Pole, now a widow, her life-interest
in the butler’s lodging. He had also taken over from Lyly two leases,
one of the fencing-school, the other of a house, the property of
More, immediately west of the butler’s lodging.[1575] The latter he
had repaired at some cost. He had even been rash enough to put up
additional buildings on More’s land. And he had not paid his workmen,
to whom he owed £200. The butler’s lodging is described as being in
great decay. But this also, or its site, he appears to have enlarged,
at the expense of his neighbouring tenement on the west. He feared the
expiration of his interests, and got his friends, of whom were Lord
Willoughby, Sir John North, and Sir Walter Raleigh, to approach More
for an extension of tenure. As regards the western house, More seems to
have consented, after much reluctance in view of Bonetti’s indebted
condition, to a lease for seven years in 1586.[1576] As regards the
butler’s lodging, he was mainly interested in the reversion after Mrs.
Pole’s death, and of this reversion he granted Bonetti a ten years’
term by a lease of 20 March 1585.[1577] The holding is described in
much the same terms as those used in Bywater’s lease of 1564. The
measurements, however, are also given. The length from north to south
was 25 ft. 2 in., and the width from east to west 22 ft. 6 in. But 4
ft. 6 in. of the length and 2 ft. of the width were not covered by Mrs.
Pole’s lease, and were taken, probably by an encroachment which the
lease was intended to regularize, from More’s tenement to the west.
For the sake of greater accuracy, the measurements and boundaries of
this western tenement are given. It was 33 ft. from north to south and
39 ft. 8 in. from east to west. It was bounded on the north by More’s
yard, on the south and west by a house of Mrs. Pole’s, on the south by
the way to Sir George Carey’s house, and on the east by More’s house in
Bonetti’s tenure, that is to say the house which is the subject of the
lease.[1578]
Sir George Carey was the eldest son of Lord Hunsdon, and himself
became Lord Hunsdon on 22 July 1596.[1579] He is not traceable in the
Blackfriars before 1585, but continued to reside there until his death
in 1603. The way to his house corresponds in position with the way to
Lady Kingston’s house of the 1548 survey, and he had pretty clearly
acquired some or all of her property, including the infirmary under
the upper frater.[1580] The way must have followed a line from Water
Lane, much the same as that of the present Printing House Lane. The
fencing-school was accessible from it by a door next to Carey’s.[1581]
Certain other data of the early surveys are a little difficult to
reconcile with those of the later documents. The surveys indicate three
parallel rows of buildings, of a comparatively insignificant character,
extending over a space roughly 80 ft. square between the frater block
and Water Lane. The north row consisted of the two-storied Duchy
Chamber, a narrow building 50 ft. by 17 ft., and the parlour of Sir
John Portinari’s house. These had a frontage on the kitchen yard.
South of them came the rest of Portinari’s house, and south of this
the little chamber, 26 ft. long by 10 ft. wide, the little kitchen, 23
ft. long by 22 ft. wide, and an entry to the latter, 30 ft. long by
17 ft. wide, which I suppose to have debouched upon Water Lane. The
little chamber and kitchen had their frontage on the way leading to
Lady Kingston’s. The house referred to as Cheyne’s in the 1550 survey
is probably that occupied by Portinari. But Cheyne must also have had
other property in the same neighbourhood, which the surveys do not
mention. There was the house, probably that described as ‘new built’ in
1572, which he occupied himself, and which afterwards passed to Lord
Henry Seymour.[1582] And there were the three tenements which More
claimed, but did not secure in 1572. These premises were leased as a
whole by the Poles to Christopher Fenton on 31 May 1571, and appear to
have been gradually cut up into smaller holdings. By 1610 there were
four tenants and by 1614 five. They bounded More’s property, and must
have lain in the angle of Water Lane and the way to Lady Kingston’s,
just south of the entry to the little kitchen.[1583]
The little chamber of 1548 is undoubtedly the butler’s lodging leased
to Bywater in 1564 and to Bonetti in 1585, which was a subject of the
lawsuit in 1572. But whereas it measured 26 ft. by 10 ft. in 1548, it
measured 22 ft. 6 in. by 25 ft. 2 in. in 1585, and the enumeration of
rooms in the two leases show that, although Bonetti may have built a
small additional room upon a bit of land filched from More, there had
been no substantial change since 1564. Further, while in 1548 it was
bounded on the north by Portinari’s holding, it was reached in 1564 by
a railed and boarded entry across its yard, and documents of 1596 and
1601 make it clear that this entry terminated in a small porch opening
on the kitchen yard.[1584] Similarly the little kitchen, 23 ft. by 22
ft., of 1548 had been replaced in 1584 by a house 33 ft. by 39 ft. 8
in., and of this also Portinari’s house had ceased to be the boundary,
and a yard of More’s had been substituted. Finally, More’s successor,
Sir George More, was in a position in 1603 to sell to one John Tice a
strip of land bounded by Tice’s house on the south, Water Lane on the
west, and the kitchen yard on the north and east, which must have been
just about where Portinari’s parlour stood at the time of the 1548
survey.[1585] I am now approaching the region of conjecture, but there
is only one way of accounting for the facts. More must have acquired
and pulled down Portinari’s house, and thus not only let light and
air into the somewhat congested district west of the frater, but also
left room for extensions in the rear of the little houses fronting on
the way to Lady Kingston’s. The extension of the little chamber he had
probably himself undertaken before 1564. It did not interfere with the
chalices and singing cakes in the window, or prevent the house from
being in decay in 1585. In 1572 it could be seen that the house had
been covered with lead, but presumably was so no longer.[1586] The
extension of the little kitchen seems to have been an enterprise of
Bonetti, of which More reaped the profits. The rest of the space gained
was utilized for the fencing-school kitchen, for a staircase behind the
Duchy Chamber, and for certain yards, all of which were in existence in
1596.[1587] It is just possible that More also pulled down the west end
of the Duchy Chamber.
By 1596 both the fencing-school and the butler’s lodging had passed
from the occupation of Bonetti. One Thomas Bruskett had the former and
one John Favour the latter. This is the year of James Burbadge’s great
enterprise of the second Blackfriars theatre. Our first intimation of
it is from Lord Hunsdon, in a letter to More of 9 January 1596.[1588]
He has heard that More has parted with part of his house for a
play-house, and makes an offer for ‘your other howse, which once I had
also’. The deed of sale by More to James Burbadge is dated 4 February
1596.[1589] The purchase money was £600. The rooms transferred are
carefully described, but only a few of the measurements and boundaries
are given. There were seven great upper rooms, ‘sometyme being one
greate and entire room’, enclosed with great stone walls, and reached
by a great pair of winding stairs from the great yard next the Pipe
Office. Other stone stairs reached leads above. These rooms had been
lately in the tenure of William de Laune, doctor of physic. Beneath
them, or beneath an entry between them and the Pipe Office, lay a
vault, of which Burbadge was to have the use only, by a ‘stoole and
tonnell’ contrived in the thickness of his north wall.[1590] Under some
part of De Laune’s seven rooms, and included in the sale, lay also
rooms 52 ft. long and 37 ft. wide, known as the ‘midle romes’ or ‘midle
stories’. These extended south to Sir George Carey’s house, and were
reached from a lane leading thereto, by a door next to Carey’s gate.
They had been in the tenure of Rocco Bonetti and were now in that of
Thomas Bruskett, together with a kitchen adjoining, and two cellars
reached by stairs from the kitchen, and lying under the north end of
the middle rooms. Bruskett had one of these, and the other was occupied
by John Favor, who dwelt in the house held for the term of her life by
Mrs. Pole. This house did not go to Burbadge, but he had one of two
small yards of which Favor had the other, between Mrs. Pole’s house and
the cellars. This yard was occupied by Peter Johnson, and Burbadge also
took four rooms tenanted by Johnson, and surrounded by his yard on the
south, Mrs. Pole’s entry on the west, and the great yard next the Pipe
Office on the north. Two of these were under De Laune’s late rooms. The
other two were under rooms, to the west of the north end of De Laune’s,
which were occupied by Charles Bradshaw, possibly the Bradshaw whose
room was begged by Farrant in 1576. Bradshaw also occupied a little
buttery, an entry and passage from the seven rooms, and a little room
for wood and coals. This lay over the buttery, on the west side of a
staircase leading to two rooms or lofts, one of which was over the east
and north of Bradshaw’s rooms and the other over the entry between the
seven rooms and the Pipe Office. These were in the occupation of Edward
Merry, who also had a room or garret over them reached by a further
staircase. A staircase also led from Peter Johnson’s yard to Bradshaw’s
rooms. Both Bradshaw’s and Merry’s rooms were included in Burbadge’s
purchase, which was completed by a small yard and privy on the north
side of Pipe Office yard, east of Water Lane, south of Cobham’s house,
and west of a house of More’s also occupied by Cobham. Burbadge was
also to have the right of depositing coal and other goods for a
reasonable time in the old kitchen yard, now called ‘the greate yarde
next the Pipe Office’, provided he did not interfere with access to the
Pipe Office itself, or to More’s garden or other parts of his premises.
The description seems complicated, as one reads the deed, but I think
that the disposition of the rooms is fairly intelligible.[1591] The
seven upper rooms, once a single great room, can only represent the
whole of the old parliament chamber or upper frater, formerly divided
into two distinct holdings. This, as we know, abutted across the
staircase upon the hall in the northern block which had formed part of
Farrant’s holding and which More had converted into the Pipe Office
in 1591.[1592] The middle rooms, together with the two easternmost of
Johnson’s rooms, must together represent the space of the paved hall
and blind parlour. There is no reason to suppose that Burbadge bought
from More, or that More ever possessed, anything beyond this space
on the ground floor of the frater block; and if the hall and parlour
were, as I have suggested, of equal size, the total space passing to
Burbadge on this floor was 74 ft. from north to south and 52 ft. from
east to west. The rest of the floor had been Lady Kingston’s and passed
to Sir George Carey.[1593] Johnson’s other two rooms and Bradshaw’s
rooms above them, lying to the west of the north end of the seven great
rooms, must be the two floors of the Duchy Chamber. The yards behind
them were rendered possible by the clearance of Portinari’s house.
Bradshaw’s two smaller rooms were on the staircase tower, and Merry’s
rooms and garret were partly at the top of this staircase and partly
above the Duchy Chamber.
DIAGRAMS OF BLACKFRIARS
1596
[Illustration: A. LOWER STORY]
[Illustration: B. UPPER STORY]
The property purchased by Burbadge was extended at various dates after
his death in February 1597 by his sons Cuthbert and Richard. On 26 June
1601 they bought for £95 from Sir George More the reversion of the
butler’s lodging, subject to the life-interest of Mrs. Pole and to the
ten years’ lease after her death, which had in the interval since 1585
passed from Rocco Bonetti to Thomas Bruskett.[1594] On 30 May 1610 they
purchased two-thirds of the interests of the heirs of Mrs. Pole and of
a mortgagee in the houses formerly held by Christopher Fenton, and on
7 July 1614 also purchased the remaining interest. These houses cost
them in all £170.[1595] If, as is not unlikely, they also purchased
at some time the house which in 1585 stood on the site of the little
kitchen of 1548, and the bit of land sold to John Tice in 1603, the
whole of the plot between the frater on the east, Water Lane on the
west, the kitchen yard on the north, and the way to Lord Hunsdon’s
house on the south, will have passed into their hands. There is no
indication that they ever acquired any part of Lord Hunsdon’s house.
This was apparently occupied by the French ambassador in 1623, when
one of its upper rooms, used as a chapel, fell, and many persons were
killed. Camden in his notes for Jacobean annals confused this room with
the theatre.[1596] About 1629 the King’s printers, Robert Barker and
John Bill, secured Hunsdon House for their press, and it remained the
King’s printing house until the Great Fire.[1597] On 19 December 1612
the Burbadges obtained from the Cobham estate a piece of land for the
enlargement of the yard near the Pipe Office, which was serving twenty
years later to turn coaches in.[1598]
To make an end for the present of topography, the fortunes of the
property to the north of the Burbadge purchases may be briefly traced.
Sir William More died in 1601 and his son and successor, Sir George,
had no need for a Pipe Office. The rooms were therefore leased, with
others, on 23 April 1601 to Sir Jerome Bowes at a rent of £14 6_s._
8_d._ ‘and certein glasses’.[1599] I think that the other rooms
included the old lavatory of the friars, once a Revels store-house and
thereafter a wash-house for More’s mansion, and that it was in this
room that Bowes established the glass-house which became an important
industry of the Blackfriars.[1600] On 19 June 1609 Sir George More sold
this property, subject to Bowes’s lease, together with the mansion
house, the great garden and all that remained to him within the great
cloister, to a syndicate, whose members in 1611 divided the purchase
amongst themselves.[1601] The former Pipe Office, now called the
gate-house, with its yard, part of the glass-house, and a strip of the
garden 23 ft. 10 in. wide passed to William Banister. Banister’s son
Thomas sold them in 1616 to Gideon De Laune and De Laune in 1617 to
Jacob Hardratt. Then Hardratt rebuilt the property and in 1619 sold
back to De Laune a tenement which extended 43 ft. from north to south,
and 24 ft. westwards from ‘the great gate near the play-house’ to the
tenement occupied by a widow Basil. It had a small garden on the east,
lying south of another garden belonging to De Laune.[1602] The length
of 43 ft. exceeds by 6 ft., the width of an entry, that of the Pipe
Office rooms, the site of which De Laune’s tenement no doubt occupied.
The big sale of 1609 did not include the kitchen and kitchen stairs
built by Sir Henry Neville about 1560, or the wood yard which enclosed
them. A bit of this yard had been included in Burbadge’s purchase of
1596. The rest of the property, with the water supply, had been bought
on 11 March 1601, by Henry Lord Cobham, whose house it underlay.[1603]
It had in fact been held by his father as far back as 1596.[1604] In
1603 Cobham was attainted. His Blackfriars property was forfeited to
the Crown, but regranted to his widow, Lady Kildare, and for some
years remained in the hands of trustees for her and her daughter Lady
Howard.[1605] In 1612 an additional bit of the wood yard was sold,
as already stated, to the Burbadges. Finally, in 1632 the estate was
conveyed to the Company of Apothecaries, in whose hands it has since
remained.[1606] They must also have acquired the house of Gideon De
Laune, who was one of their founders, and therefore their present
premises, in their extent of 116 ft. from north to south, exactly
replace the ‘northern block’ of buildings which stood to the west of
the main Blackfriars cloister, when Sir Thomas Cawarden took possession
of it in 1550.
James Burbadge was not destined to see the success of his adventure.
After all, he was prevented from establishing his theatre in 1596.
Play-houses had just been suppressed in the City, and a number of the
more important inhabitants of the Blackfriars disliked the idea of one
being opened in their select residential precinct, where no common
play-house had yet been seen. Farrant’s theatre, nominally intended
for the private practice of the Chapel boys, was presumably regarded
as not falling within the category of common play-houses. A petition
was sent to the Privy Council, amongst the signatories to which were
Burbadge’s neighbour, Sir George Carey, now Lord Hunsdon, Elizabeth
Lady Russell, who lived a little farther up Water Lane, and Richard
Field, the printer of Shakespeare’s poems.[1607] The extant copy of
the petition is not dated, but later references assign it to November
1596, and inform us that as a result the Privy Council forbade the use
of the house.[1608] On James Burbadge’s death in February 1597 the
Blackfriars property passed to his son Richard.[1609] It is not known
what use he made of it before 1600, but in that year the resumption
of plays by the Chapel children under Nathaniel Giles gave him an
opportunity of following Farrant’s example, and letting the theatre for
what were practically public performances ‘vnder the name of a private
howse’.[1610] With Giles were associated one James Robinson and Henry
Evans, who had already been concerned in the enterprise of John Lyly
and the Earl of Oxford; and it was to Evans that, on 2 September 1600,
Burbadge leased ‘the great hall or roome, with the roomes over the
same, scituate within the precinct of the black Friours’, for a term
of twenty-one years from Michaelmas 1600, at a rent of £40,[1611] while
Evans and his son-in-law Alexander Hawkins gave a joint bond in £400
as collateral security for due payment. Evans set up a company, which
under various names, and throughout shifting financial managements,
maintained a substantial continuity of existence, and occupied the
Blackfriars for a period of eight years. Its fortunes are dealt with
in detail elsewhere.[1612] Only those points directly bearing upon
the theatre as such need now be noted. In October 1601, when Evans
was negotiating a partnership with Edward Kirkham, William Rastall,
and Thomas Kendall, he apparently undertook to transfer his lease to
Hawkins in trust to reassign a moiety of the interest under it to
these partners.[1613] No reassignment, however, was in fact made.
Evans carried out some repairs in December 1603, and trouble arose
with his partners because he severed the school-house and chamber over
the same from the great hall and used them as private apartments to
dine and sup in.[1614] When the playing companies were hard hit by the
plague of 1603–4, Evans began to treat with Burbadge for a surrender
of the lease.[1615] This came to nothing at the time, but in August
1608, when the Revels company was in disgrace for playing Chapman’s
_Byron_ and Kirkham had declared a desire to make an end of the
speculation, the suggestion was revived, and the surrender, probably
with the assent of Hawkins, actually took place.[1616] As part of his
consideration, Evans, through a nominee, was admitted by Burbadge into
a new syndicate, of which the other members were Burbadge himself and
his brother Cuthbert, and some of the leading players of the King’s
company, by whom it was intended that the Blackfriars should now be
used.[1617] The King’s men probably entered upon their occupation of
the theatre in the autumn of 1609, and thereafter used it alternatively
with the Globe, as their winter house, up to the end of their career
in 1642.[1618] The new syndicate consisted of seven partners, who may
be called ‘housekeepers’, in accordance with the terminology found in
use in 1635, in order to distinguish them from the ‘sharers’ in the
acting profits of the company.[1619] On 9 August 1608 Richard Burbadge
executed six leases, each conveying a seventh part of the play-house
for a term of twenty-one years from the previous midsummer, and
entailing the payment of a seventh part of the rent of £40. The six
lessees were his brother Cuthbert, John Heminges, William Shakespeare,
Henry Condell, William Sly, and Thomas Evans. The remaining interest
he no doubt retained himself. Sly, however, died five days later, and
his share was surrendered by his executrix, and divided amongst the
other partners. On 25 August 1611 it was transferred to William Ostler.
After his death on 16 December 1614 it should have passed to his widow,
Thomasina, but her father John Heminges retained it, and in 1629 she
estimated that he had thus defrauded her of profits at the rate of £20
a year.[1620] At some date later than 1611 John Underwood must have
been admitted to a share, for he owned one at his death in 1624. The
original leases terminated in 1629. Probably new ones were then entered
into, for by 1633 we find that the rent had been increased to £50, and
in 1635 that the interest of the housekeepers had still four years to
run, and that it was divided not into seven, but into eight parts.
Cuthbert Burbadge and the widows of Richard Burbadge and Henry Condell
still represented the original holders. Two parts had been bought in
1633 and 1634 from Heminges’s son by John Shank. One part was still
held in the name of Underwood, but a third of it was apparently in
the hands of Eillart Swanston. John Lowin and Joseph Taylor had each
a part. As a result of the dispute the Lord Chamberlain ordered a new
partition under which Shank resigned one share to be divided between
Swanston, Thomas Pollard, and Robert Benfield.[1621]
The occupation of the Blackfriars by the King’s men was not wholly
peaceful. The beginning of their tenure almost exactly coincided with
the grant of the new charter by which the jurisdiction of the City was
extended to the precinct.[1622] It was not, however, until 1619 that
an attempt was made to invoke this jurisdiction against them. In that
year the officials of the precinct and the church of St. Anne’s, backed
up by a few of the inhabitants, sent a petition to the Corporation,
in which they recited the inconveniences due to a play-house in their
midst, recalled the action taken by the Privy Council in 1596, as well
as the Star Chamber order of 1600 limiting the London play-houses to
two, and begged that conformity to the wishes of the Council might be
enforced. The Corporation made an order for the suppression of the
Blackfriars on 21 January 1619.[1623] It clearly remained inoperative,
but explains why the King’s men thought it desirable to obtain a fresh
patent, dated on 27 March 1619, in which their right to play at ‘their
private house scituate in the precinctes of the Blackfriers’, as well
as at the Globe, was explicitly stated.[1624] They had to face another
attack in 1631. Their opponents on this occasion approached Laud, then
Bishop of London.[1625] After some delay Laud seems to have brought the
matter before the Privy Council. The idea was mooted of buying the
players out and on 9 October 1633 a commission of Middlesex justices
was appointed to report as to the value of their interests.[1626] These
were estimated by the players at £21,990, and by the commissioners at
£2,900. The only offer towards a compensation fund was one of £100 from
the parish of St. Anne’s.[1627] Evidently the proposal was allowed to
drop. On 20 November 1633, the Privy Council made an order forbidding
coaches to stand in Ludgate or St. Paul’s Churchyard while the
performances were going on, but even this regulation was practically
cancelled by an amending order made at a meeting presided over by the
King in person on 29 December.[1628]
It is rather disappointing that the numerous documents bearing upon
the occupation of the Blackfriars between 1600 and 1608 should throw
so little light upon the way in which James Burbadge adapted his
purchase ‘with great charge and troble’ to the purposes of a theatre.
The lease of 1600 did not cover the whole of the property, but only a
‘great hall or roome, with the roomes over the same’. Presumably this
was the case also with the leases of 1608, since the rent was the same
as in 1600. The rest of the premises, with those purchased later by
the younger Burbadges, may be represented by the four tenements valued
at £75 a year in 1633, and the ‘piece of void ground to turn coaches’
valued at £6 was doubtless the fragment of the old kitchen yard north
of the approach. The Kirkham lawsuits tell us that one or two rooms
were reserved for the residence of Evans in 1602 and that during the
early part of 1604 ‘a certen rome, called the Scholehouse, and a certen
chamber over the same’ had been ‘seuered from the said great hall, and
made fitt by’ Evans ‘at his owne proper cost and chardges, to dyne and
supp in’.[1629] Professor Wallace has a number of additional lawsuits,
still unpublished.[1630] But the extracts from these given by him in
1908 add only a few details to those formerly known. They seem to
amount to this. The hall was 66 ft. from north to south and 46 ft. from
east to west. It was paved, and had a stage, galleries, and seats of
which a schedule was attached to the lease. The stage was at one end
of the hall. The school-house was at the north end of the hall.[1631]
At this end also must have been the entrance, as one of the petitions
of 1619 locates it near the way used from part of the precinct in
going to church.[1632] It was doubtless by the gate-house entry to
the cloister, just beyond where the coaches turned. Unfortunately one
is left quite in doubt upon the critical question as to which of the
rooms known to us from earlier records were used for the theatre. It
might have been the upper frater with the partitions removed; it might
have been constructed out of the paved hall and blind parlour beneath,
which appear to be represented by the ‘midle romes’ and two of the
rooms in the occupation of Peter Johnson enumerated in the conveyance
to Burbadge. _A priori_ one would have thought the upper frater the
most likely. It may very well have been paved, like the hall beneath
it, and a chamber which had held parliaments and a legatine trial
could amply suffice to hold a theatre. On this supposition the rooms
‘above’ the hall which were conveyed by the lease of 1600, and one of
which Evans converted into a dining-room can only have been the room
over the staircase and the garret over that. These, indeed, may have
extended over the north end of the frater proper, although in the main
that building appears, down to the time when Burbadge bought it, to
have had nothing over it but leads.[1633] There is a serious difficulty
in the way of the alternative theory, which would identify the theatre
with the ‘midle romes’ on the ground floor. This is that these would
most likely only be low rooms, vaulted to carry the heavy floor of the
parliament chamber above. On the whole, the balance of probability
appears to be strongly in favour of the upper frater.
Professor Wallace’s account of the matter is categorical. ‘The south
section’, he says, ‘underwent a thorough transformation. The two
stories were converted into the auditorium called “the great Hall or
Room”.... The roof was changed, and rooms, probably of the usual dormer
sort, were built above the Great Hall.’[1634] I do not know whether
there is any evidence for this theory, which disregards a good many
structural difficulties, in those parts of his recently discovered
documents which Professor Wallace has not published; there is certainly
none in those which he has. If not, I do not think we must assume
that Burbadge undertook expensive building operations, when he had
all the facilities for planning an admirable auditorium without them.
Professor Wallace seems to have been led into his conjecture by an
assumed necessity for providing space for three tiers of galleries.
There is no such necessity, and in fact no evidence for more than one
tier, although I dare say that the upper frater taken by itself was
high enough for two. Professor Wallace cites a reference to ‘porticibus
_anglice_ galleryes’, and points out that ‘galleryes’ is a plural.
This is so, but the ‘galleryes’ were not necessarily superimposed; if
one ran along the east side of the hall and the other along the west,
they would still constitute a plural. Professor Wallace takes the step
from his plural to three with the aid of Cockledemoy’s address to ‘my
very fine Heliconian gallants, and you, my worshipful friends in the
middle region’.[1635] Obviously the ‘middle region’ is not bound to be
the middle one of three galleries; it may just as well be the space
between the stage and the galleries.
It is beyond the scope of this inquiry to trace the detailed fortunes
of the Blackfriars during its later years. By Caroline times it took
place of the Globe as the principal and most profitable house of
the King’s men.[1636] In 1653, when like the rest of the theatres
it was closed, Richard Flecknoe recalled its origin and wrote its
epitaph.[1637] It was pulled down on 6 August 1655.[1638] This site
was used for tenements, which in course of time were replaced by _The
Times_ office which now occupies the site.[1639]
ii. THE WHITEFRIARS
[_Bibliographical Note._--The relevant dissertations are
P. Cunningham, _The Whitefriars, the Salisbury Court, and
the Duke’s Theatres_ (1849, _Sh. Soc. Papers_, iv. 89), J.
Greenstreet, _The Whitefriars Theatre in the Time of Shakspere_
(1888, _N. S. S. Trans._ 269), with text of the Bill and Answer
in the Chancery suit of _Androwes v. Slater_ (1609), and A. W.
Clapham, _The Topography of the Carmelite Priory of London_
(1910, _Brit. Arch. Assoc. Journal_, n. s. xvi. 15), with
seventeenth-century plan of the precinct, reproduced by Adams,
312.]
The only suggestion of a sixteenth-century play-house in the
Whitefriars is to be found in the statement of Richard Rawlidge in 1628
that one was suppressed there at a date under Elizabeth which he does
not specify, but which may most plausibly be put at 1596 (cf. p. 359).
It is not improbable that Rawlidge wrote ‘Whitefriars’ when he should
have written ‘Blackfriars’, but Malone (_Var._ iii. 46, 52) accepted
the statement and assigned the suppression to 1580. I do not suppose
that Collier had any other basis than this for the ‘more then 30
yeares’ of the following description which he alleged to be an extract
from ‘an original survey of some part of the precinct, made in March
1616’ in his possession, and printed in his _New Facts_ (1835), 44:
‘The Theater is situate near vnto the Bishopps House, and was
in former times a hall or refectorie belonging to the dissolved
Monastery. It hath beene vsed as a place for the presentation
of playes and enterludes for more then 30 yeares, last by the
Children of her Majestie. It hath little or no furniture for a
play-house, saving an old tottered curten, some decayed benches,
and a few worne out properties and peeces of Arras for hangings
to the stage and tire house. The raine hath made its way in and
if it bee not repaired, it must soone be plucked downe or it
will fall.’
The earliest record, therefore, on which reliance can be placed is
the lawsuit of _Androwes v. Slater_ in 1609,[1640] which recites
the lease by Robert Lord Buckhurst to Michael Drayton and Thomas
Woodford for six years eight months and twenty days from March 1608 of
‘a messuage or mansion howse parcell of the late dissolved monastery
called the Whitefriars, in Fleete streete, in the subvrbs of London’,
while the articles of agreement between the sharers of the King’s
Revels syndicate (cf. ch. xii), of the same date, assign lodgings in
the house to Martin Slater, and add
‘The roomes of which howse are thirteene in number, three belowe
and tenne above, that is to saie, the greate hall, the kitchin
by the yard, and a cellar, with all the roomes from the east
ende of the howse to the Master of the revells’ office, as the
same are now severed and devided.’[1641]
The precinct of the former priory of the Carmelites or White Friars lay
between Fleet Street and the river, to the east of Serjeants’ Inn and
to the west of Water Lane, which divided it from Salisbury Court, the
old inn of the bishops of Salisbury, which had passed to the Sackvilles
in the sixteenth century, and ultimately became known as Dorset House
(Stowe, _Survey_, ii. 45). The precinct was a liberty, and its history,
from the point of view of local government, had been closely analogous
to that of the Blackfriars. Like the Blackfriars, it came under
complete civic control in this very year of 1608 (cf. p. 480). The
Whitefriars mansion itself the Sackvilles probably acquired from the
family of Thomas Lord De La Warr, to whom a grant of priory property
was made in 1544 (Dugdale, vi. 1572).
From the King’s Revels the Whitefriars passed to the occupation of
the Queen’s Revels (cf. ch. xii) in 1609, and continued in their use
both before and after their amalgamation with the Lady Elizabeth’s in
March 1613. It is named on the title-pages of _Woman a Weathercock_
(1612) and _The Insatiate Countess_ (1613), and a reference in the
prologue to ‘daughters of Whitefriars’ shows that it was also the
locality of _Epicoene_ (1609). In February 1613 it was ‘taken up’
by some London apprentices for an invitation performance of Robert
Tailor’s _The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl_ (q.v.). From March 1613 the
amalgamated companies had Bankside theatres available, first the Swan
and afterwards the Hope, but it is clear from the Watermen’s petition
(cf. p. 370) that, at any rate before the Hope was built, they mainly
used the Whitefriars. Daborne in a letter to Henslowe of 5 June 1613
speaks of the company ‘comming over’, presumably from the Whitefriars
to Bankside, and on 9 Dec. 1613 suggests that a play of his would be
suitable for Henslowe’s ‘publique howse’, from which it may perhaps be
inferred that Henslowe had also an interest in a ‘private’ house at the
time (_Henslowe Papers_, 72, 79). Apparently conversion into a public
theatre was then contemplated, for on 13 July 1613 the Master of the
Revels received a fee of £20 ‘for a license to erect a new play-house
in the White-friers, &c.’ (_Var._ iii. 52). But this scheme was stopped
by the Privy Council.[1642] On 3 June 1615 Rosseter and others obtained
their patent for the Porter’s Hall theatre in Blackfriars (cf. p.
472), which contemplated its use by the Revels, the Prince’s, and the
Lady Elizabeth’s, and incidentally recited that the Revels Children
had been trained and exercised in the Whitefriars ‘ever since’ 1610.
The amalgamation was dissolved in the spring of 1616, and the Lady
Elizabeth’s and the Revels probably disappeared from London. If,
therefore, the Whitefriars continued in use, it was probably by Prince
Charles’s men, who would have been left homeless by the demolition
of Porter’s Hall early in 1617. That it did continue in use and that
a renewed lease was still held by some of the parties interested in
the house in 1608 is indicated by the suit of _Trevell v. Woodford_
before the Court of Requests in 1642, from which it appears, according
to Peter Cunningham, that Sir Anthony Ashley, the then landlord of
the house, entered the theatre in 1621, and turned out the players,
on the pretence that half a year’s rent was due to him. In 1629 the
Whitefriars was replaced by the Salisbury Court theatre, built on the
site of an old barn just on the other side of Water Lane.
XVIII
THE STRUCTURE AND CONDUCT OF THEATRES
[_Bibliographical Note._--The only Restoration treatises which
throw any light on the pre-Restoration theatre are R. Flecknoe,
_A Short Discourse of the English Stage_ (1664), and J. Wright,
_Historia Histrionica_ (1699), extracts from which are in
Appendix I.
Archaeological material was brought together by E. Malone in
_Variorum_ iii. 51, and J. P. Collier in _H. E. D. P._
iii. 140.
Modern investigation may be said to begin with the discovery of
the Swan drawing in 1888. The principal dissertations up to 1916
are:
K. T. Gaedertz, _Zur Kenntnis der altenglischen Bühne_ (1888);
H. B. Wheatley, _On a contemporary Drawing of the interior of
the Swan Theatre_, 1596 (1888, _N. S. S. Trans. 1887–92_, 215);
W. Archer, _A Sixteenth-Century Play-house_ (1888, _Universal
Review_), _The Stage of Shakespeare_ (10 Aug. 1907, _Tribune_),
_The Fortune Theatre_, 1600 (12 Oct. 1907, _Tribune_, repr.
_Jahrbuch_, xliv. 159), _The Swan Drawing_ (11 Jan. 1908,
_Tribune_), _The Elizabethan Stage_ (1908, _Quarterly Review_,
ccviii. 442), _The Play-house_ (1916, _Shakespeare’s England_,
ii. 283); R. Genée, _Ueber die scenischen Formen Shakespeare’s
in ihrem Verhältnisse zur Bühne seiner Zeit_ (1891, _Jahrbuch_,
xxvi. 131); E. Kilian, _Die scenischen Formen Shakespeares
in ihrer Beziehung zu der Aufführung seiner Dramen auf der
modernen Bühne_ (1893, _Jahrbuch_, xxviii. 90), _Shakespeare
auf der modernen Bühne_ (1900, _Jahrbuch_, xxxvi. 228); H.
Logeman, _Johannes de Witt’s Visit to the Swan Theatre_ (1897,
_Anglia_, xix. 117); C. Grabau, _Zur englischen Bühne um
1600_ (1902, _Jahrbuch_, xxxviii. 232); W. J. Lawrence, _Some
Characteristics of the Elizabethan-Stuart Stage_ (1902, _E.
S._ xxxii. 36), _The Elizabethan Play-house_ (1912, 1913),
_Night Performances in the Elizabethan Theatres_ (1915, _E.
S._ xlviii. 213), _New Light on the Elizabethan Theatre_ (May
1916, _Fortnightly Review_), _A Forgotten Play-house Custom of
Shakespeare’s Day_ (1916, _Book of Homage_, 207), _Horses on
the Elizabethan Stage_ (_T. L. S._ 5 June 1919), _He’s for a
Jig or ---- _ (_T. L. S._ 3 July 1919); K. Mantzius, _History
of Theatrical Art_ (1903–9); E. E. Hale, _The Influence of
Theatrical Conditions on Shakespeare_ (1904, _M. P._ i. 171);
E. Koeppel, _Die unkritische Behandlung dramaturgischer Angaben
in den Shakespeare-Ausgaben_ (1904, _E. S._ xxxiv. 1); W. Bang,
_Zur Bühne Shakespeares_ (1904, _Jahrbuch_, xl. 223); W. Keller,
_Nochmals zur Bühne Shakespeares_ (1904, _Jahrbuch_, xl. 225);
A. H. Tolman, _Shakespeare’s Stage and Modern Adaptations_
(1904, _Views about Hamlet_, 115), _Alternation in the Staging
of Shakespeare’s Plays_ (1909, _M. P._ vi. 517); C. Brodmeier,
_Die Shakespeare-Bühne nach den alten Bühnenanweisungen_ (1904);
R. Prölss, _Von den ältesten Drucken der Dramen Shakespeares_
(1905); P. Monkemeyer, _Prolegomena zu einer Darstellung der
englischen Volksbühne_ (1905); G. P. Baker, _Hamlet on an
Elizabethan Stage_ (1905, _Jahrbuch_, xli. 296), _Elizabethan
Stage Theories_ (3 Nov. 1905, _The Times Literary Supplement_);
C. H. Kaulfuss-Diesch, _Die Inszenierung des deutschen Dramas an
der Wende des 16 und 17 Jahrhunderts_ (1905); G. F. Reynolds,
_Some Principles of Elizabethan Staging_ (1905, _M. P._ i. 581,
ii. 69), _Trees on the Stage of Shakespeare_ (1907, _M. P._ v.
153), _What we know of the Elizabethan Stage_ (1911, _M. P._ ix.
47), _William Percy and his Plays_ (1914, _M. P._ xii. 109);
J. Corbin, _Shakespeare and the Plastic Stage_ (1906, _Atlantic
Monthly_, xcvii. 369), _Shakespeare his Own Stage Manager_
(1911, _Century_, lxxxiii. 260); R. Bridges, _On the Influence
of the Audience_ (1907, _Stratford Town Shakespeare_, x. 321);
E. K. Chambers, _On the Stage of the Globe_ (1907, _Stratford
Town Shakespeare_, x. 351); C. C. Stopes, _Elizabethan Stage
Scenery_ (June 1907, _Fortnightly Review_); R. Wegener, _Die
Bühneneinrichtung des Shakespeareschen Theaters_ (1907); W.
H. Godfrey, _An Elizabethan Play-house_ (1908, _Architectural
Review_, xxiii. 239; cf. xxxi. 53); C. W. Wallace, _The
Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars_ (1908); F. Schelling,
_The Elizabethan Play-house_ (1908, _Proc. of Philadelphia
Num. and Antiq. Soc._); A. A. Helmholtz-Phelan, _The Staging
of Court Dramas before 1595_ (1909, _M. L. A._ xxiv. 185); V.
E. Albright, _The Shaksperian Stage_ (1909), _Percy’s Plays as
Proof of the Elizabethan Stage_ (1913, _M. P._ xi. 237); A.
R. Skemp, _Some Characteristics of the English Stage before
the Restoration_ (1909, _Jahrbuch_, xlv. 101); W. Creizenach,
_Bühnenwasen und Schauspielkunst_ (1909, _Gesch. des neueren
Dramas_, iv. 401); B. Neuendorff, _Die englische Volksbühne im
Zeitalter Shakespeares nach den Bühnenanweisungen_ (1910); H.
H. Child, _The Elizabethan Theatre_ (1910, _C. H._ vi. 241); H.
Conrad, _Bemerkungen zu Lawrence’ Title and Locality Boards_
(1910, _Jahrbuch_, xlvi. 106); C. R. Baskervill, _The Custom
of Sitting on the Elizabethan Stage_ (1911, _M. P._ viii.
581); J. Q. Adams, _The Four Pictorial Representations of the
Elizabethan Stage_ (April 1911, _J. G. P._); F. A. Foster,
_Dumb Show in Elizabethan Drama before 1620_ (1911, _E. S._
xliv. 8); A. Forestier, _The Fortune Theatre Reconstructed_ (12
Aug. 1911, _Illustrated London News_); M. B. Evans, _An Early
Type of Stage_ (1912, _M. P._ ix. 421); T. S. Graves, _A Note
on the Swan Theatre_ (1912, _M. P._ ix. 431), _Night Scenes in
the Elizabethan Theatres_ (1913, _E. S._ xlvii. 63), _The Court
and the London Theaters during the Reign of Elizabeth_ (1913),
_The Origin of the Custom of Sitting upon the Stage_ (1914, _J.
E. G. P._ xiii. 104), _The Act Time in Elizabethan Theatres_
(1915, _Univ. of Carolina, Studies in Philology_, xii. 3), _The
Ass as Actor_ (1916, _S. Atlantic Quarterly_, xv. 175); G. H.
Cowling, _Music on the Shakespearian Stage_ (1913); H. Bell,
_Contributions to the History of the English Play-house_ (1913,
_Architectural Record_, 262, 359); W. G. Keith, _The Designs
for the first Movable Scenery on the English Stage_ (1914,
_Burlington Magazine_, xxv. 29, 85); W. Poel, _Shakespeare in
the Theatre_ (1915), _Some Notes on Shakespeare’s Stage and
Plays_ (1916); J. Le G. Brereton, _De Witt at the Swan_ (1916,
_Book of Homage_, 204); A. H. Thorndike, _Shakespeare’s Theater_
(1916); T. H. Dickinson, _Some Principles of Shakespeare
Staging_ (1916, _Wisconsin Shakespeare Studies_, 125). More
recent papers are noted in the _Bulletin_ of the English
Association. R. C. Rhodes’ _The Stagery of Shakespeare_ (1922)
deserves consideration.
It remains to give some account of the iconographical material
available. Of four representations of the interiors of
play-houses, the only one of early date (_c._ 1596) is (_a_)
Arend van Buchell’s copy of a drawing by Johannes de Witt of
the Swan, published in 1888 by Gaedertz and in more accurate
facsimile by Wheatley (_vide supra_). The other three are
Caroline. (_b_) A small engraving in a compartment of the
title-page of W. Alabaster, _Roxana_ (1632), may be taken as
representing a type of academic stage, as the play was at
Trinity, Cambridge, _c._ 1592. (_c_) A very similar engraving
in the title-page of N. Richards, _Messallina_ (1640), if it
represents a specific stage at all, is less likely to represent
the second Fortune, as suggested by Skemp in his edition of
the play, or the Red Bull, as suggested by Albright, 45,
than Salisbury Court, where it is clear from Murray, i. 279,
that most of the career of the Revels company, by whom it
was produced, was spent. (_d_) An engraved frontispiece to
Francis Kirkman’s editions (1672, 1673) of _The Wits, or Sport
upon Sport_ (originally published by Marsh, 1662) has been
shown by Albright, 40, to have been erroneously regarded as a
representation of the Red Bull, to which there is an incidental
reference in the preface to Part II, and must be taken to show
the type of stage on which the ‘drolls’ contained in the book
were given ‘when the publique Theatres were shut up’.
A Court interlude, with performers and spectators, might be
supposed to be represented in (_e_) a woodcut prefixed to
Wilson’s _Three Lords and Three Ladies of London_ (1590), but
the subject is not that of the play, and the cut is shown by A.
W. Pollard (_English Miracle Plays_, ed. 6, 1914) to be taken
from S. Batman, _The Travayled Pylgrime_ (1569), and ultimately
from a fifteenth-century illustration to O. de la Marche’s
_Chevalier Délibéré_.
Of the exteriors of theatres there are (_f_) a small engraving
of _Theatrum_ in a compartment of the title-page of Jonson’s
_Works_ (1616), which may be merely a bit of classical
archaeology, but appears to have the characteristic Elizabethan
hut, and (_g_) a series of representations, or perhaps only
cartographical symbols, in the various maps detailed in the
bibliographical note to ch. xvi. Doubtfully authentic is (_h_) a
façade of the Blackfriars, reproduced by Baker, 78, from a print
in the collection of Mr. Henry Gardiner, with a note (44) that
the owner and various antiquarians ‘believe it genuine’; and
almost certainly misnamed (_i_) a façade engraved as a relic of
the second Fortune in R. Wilkinson, _Londina Illustrata_ (1819),
ii. 141, and elsewhere, which is plausibly assigned by W. J.
Lawrence, _Restoration Stage Nurseries_, in _Archiv_ (1914),
301, to a post-Restoration training-school for young actors.
A small ground-plan (_k_) of the Swan appears upon a manor map
of Paris Garden in 1627, reproduced by W. Rendle in Harrison,
ii, App. I.
A rough engraving (_l_) on the title-page of _Cornucopia,
Pasquils Nightcap_ (1612) shows a section of the orchestra of a
classical play-house as seen from the stage, and throws no light
on contemporary conditions; and (_m_) the design by Inigo Jones
described in ch. vii is of uncertain date, and intended for the
private Cockpit theatre at Whitehall.
I know of no representation of an English provincial stage,
and unfortunately E. Mentzel, who describes (_Gesch. der
Schauspielkunst in Frankfurt am Main_, 38) a woodcut of a
play, with signboards, by English actors, probably at Frankfort,
Nuremberg, or Cassel, in 1597, does not reproduce it. Some
notion of the improvised stages used by travelling companies for
out-of-door performances may be obtained from the continental
engravings reproduced by Bapst, 153, by Rigal in _Petit de
Julleville_, iii. 264, 296, and by M. B. Evans, _An Early
Type of Stage_ (_M. P._ ix. 421).
An engraving of the Restoration stage of the Theatre Royal,
Drury Lane (built 1663), from _Ariane, ou Le Mariage de
Bacchus_ (1674), and another of the same house as altered in
1696, from _Unhappy Kindness_ (1697), are reproduced by
Lawrence, i. 169; ii. 140. Of the five engravings of the Duke’s
Theatre, Dorset Garden (built 1671), in E. Settle, _Empress
of Morocco_ (1673), one is reproduced by Albright, 47, and
another by Lawrence, ii. 160, and Thorndike, 110.
Graphic attempts to reconstruct the plan and elevation of a
typical Elizabethan stage will be found in the dissertations
cited above of Brodmeier, Wegener, Archer, Godfrey, Albright,
Corbin (1911, by G. Varian and J. Hambridge), and Forestier, and
in the picture reproduced in W. N. Hills, _The Shakespearian
Stage_ (1919).
Various revivals have also been carried out on Elizabethan
stages, with more or less of archaeological purism, notably
in London (W. Poel, _Shakespeare in the Theatre_), Paris
(_Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xxxv. 383), Harvard (G. P. Baker in
_Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xli. 296), and Munich (_Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xlii.
327).]
A history of the theatres would not be complete without some account of
their general structure and economy in the disposition of auditorium
and stage. I propose to begin with the more assured or less important
points, as a clearing of the way for the difficult and controverted
problems of scenic setting, on some of which I am afraid that no very
secure conclusion can be reached.
[Illustration]
It is necessary, in the forefront, to appreciate the distinction
between the ‘common’ or ‘public’ play-houses and the ‘private’ houses,
which, so far as our period is concerned, were Paul’s, the Blackfriars,
and the Whitefriars. This distinction is in its origin somewhat a
technical one, for there is no reason to suppose that in the private
houses the performances were private, in the sense that access to them
could not be obtained, on payment, by members of the general public.
Probably it is to be explained in relation to the Elizabethan system
of State control of theatres, and represents an attempt to evade the
limitations on the location and the number of play-houses which had
been established through the action, first of the civic authorities
and later of the Privy Council itself. This view receives support from
the allegations made during the campaign for the suppression of the
Blackfriars in 1619 that the owner ‘doth vnder the name of a private
howse (respectinge indeed private comoditie only) convert the said
howse to a publique play-house’.[1643]
It can hardly be supposed, however, that Burbadge could have hoodwinked
the Privy Council merely by calling the Blackfriars a ‘private’
house, without finding any other means of differentiating it from
the ‘public’ houses, and it is quite possible that the technical
distinction, for which modern analogies could be found, consisted in
the fact that admission was paid for in advance and no money taken
at the doors.[1644] Mr. Lawrence has very appropriately quoted in
this connexion the Common Council regulations of 1574, in which
an exception is made for performances ‘withowte publique or comen
collection of money of the auditorie, or behoulders theareof’; and
though I do not suggest that the extension of this principle to
Paul’s or the Blackfriars fell within the intention of the order,
the evasion may have been allowed, within the gates of Paul’s or in
a liberty, and for a well-conducted house attended by a well-to-do
audience, to hold.[1645] If so, it is probable that Paul’s from the
beginning and the earlier Blackfriars were in effect private houses.
But the actual terminology does not emerge before the revival of the
boy companies in 1599 and 1600. For some years past the title-pages
of plays had vaunted them as ‘publikely acted’.[1646] A corresponding
‘priuately acted’ appears for Blackfriars in Jonson’s _Cynthia’s
Revels_ (1601) and _Poetaster_ (1602), and for Paul’s in Middleton’s
_Blurt Master Constable_ (1602), while the antithesis is complete in
Dekker’s _Satiromastix_ (1602), which was presented ‘publikely’ by
the Chamberlain’s and ‘priuately’ by Paul’s. Somewhat later we find
Field’s _Woman a Weathercock_ (1612) acted ‘priuately’, and Chapman’s
_Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois_ (1613) ‘at the priuate Play-house’ in the
Whitefriars.[1647] But by this time the distinction may be taken for
granted as well established in general use.[1648]
From the point of view, however, of stage arrangements, the technical
_differentia_ of a private house is less important than certain
subsidiary characteristics.[1649] The private houses were all in
closed buildings, were occupied by boys, and charged higher prices
than the ordinary theatres. These facts entailed variations of
structure and method, which will require attention at more than one
point. They naturally became less fundamental, but did not entirely
disappear, after the transfer of the Blackfriars to the King’s men
in 1609, and probably passed still further into the background after
the introduction of roofed public houses in the Caroline age.[1650]
The title-pages generally describe the Blackfriars, the Cockpit, and
Salisbury Court as ‘private’ houses right up to the closing of the
theatres, but the term, in so far as it connotes anything different
from ‘public’, seems to have lost what little meaning it ever had.[1651]
De Witt, about 1596, describes the Theatre, Curtain, Rose, and Swan
as ‘amphiteatra’, and Hentzner in 1598 adds that they were all
‘lignea’.[1652] The Globe and the Hope were built later on the same
structural model. The Fortune was also of wood, but square. Of the
shape and material of the Red Bull we know nothing. Prologues and
epilogues often refer to the internal appearance of the auditorium as
presenting a ‘round’, ‘ring’, ‘circuit’, ‘circumference’, or ‘O’.[1653]
If we can rely upon the draughtsmanship of the London maps, the
external outline was rather that of a polygon. This evidence must not
be pressed too far, for there is probably an element of cartographic
symbolism to be reckoned with. The same house may appear in one map as
a hexagon, in another as an octagon or decagon, and the late Hollar
group differs from its predecessors in using a completely circular
form. But there is confirmation in the Paris Garden manor map of
1627, which shows the ground-plan of the Swan decagonal, and in the
statement of Mrs. Thrale that the ruins of the Globe still visible in
the eighteenth century were hexagonal without and round within. This
was of course the later Globe built in 1613, and there is some reason
for thinking that the earlier Globe may have been of rather different
design. The verses on the fire by which it was destroyed speak of the
stage-house ‘as round as taylers clewe’, and the early Hondius map,
while it shows the Rose as polygonal, shows the Globe as circular,
with the upper half of less diameter than the lower. This construction
reappears in the Delaram drawings, and is so peculiar that the
representation may well be realistic. There was an obvious precedent
for the amphitheatrical form in the bear and bull rings which preceded
the public theatres, and I do not know that we need go back with Ordish
to a tradition of round mediaeval play-places, Cornish or English,
or to the remains of Roman occupation. A ring is the natural form in
which the maximum number of spectators can press about an object of
interest.[1654]
There is nothing to show that, for the main fabric, any material but
timber was used, until the Fortune was rebuilt of brick in 1623. Timber
is provided for in the contracts for the earlier Fortune and the Hope,
and these were modelled on the Globe and Swan. Oak was to be mainly
used for the Hope; no fir in the lower or middle stories. Burbadge’s
lawsuits show that timber was the chief object of his expenditure on
the Theatre, although some ironwork was also employed, presumably to
tie the woodwork together. The dismantled fabric of the Theatre was
used for the Globe. Henslowe used a good deal of timber for the repairs
of the Rose in 1592–3, and did the house ‘about with ealme bordes’ in
1595. There was also some brickwork, and the Fortune and Hope were
to have brick foundations, a foot above the ground. The Fortune was
to be covered with lath, lime, and hair without. Henslowe also used
plaster, and I do not see anything inconsistent with a substantially
wooden structure in De Witt’s statement that the Swan was ‘constructum
ex coaceruato lapide pyrritide ... ligneis suffultum columnis’. This
has been regarded as an error which prejudices the reliability of De
Witt’s observations, but the description is too precise to be disproved
by Hentzner’s generalized ‘lignea’, and after all the strength of the
building was naturally in the columns, and the flints and mortar--a
common form of walling in the chalk districts of England--may well have
filled up the interstices between these. De Witt adds that the columns
might deceive the shrewdest ‘ob illitum marmoreum colorem’.[1655]
De Witt has also been criticized for giving the seating capacity of
the Swan as 3,000. I dare say this is merely the exaggerated round
estimate of a casual visitor, but Wheatley calculates from the drawing
that the galleries might hold 2,000, and it would not be surprising
if our rude forefathers sat a bit closer than we care to do. Moryson
speaks even more largely of theatres ‘more remarkable for the number,
and the capacity, than for the building’, and ‘capable of many
thousands’, while no less than 2,000 got into Trinity College hall for
the academic plays of 1615.[1656] The frame of the Fortune was 80 ft.
square without and 55 ft. square within. This allows a depth of 12½ ft.
for the galleries, and Corbin calculates a seating capacity, allowing
18 in. for a seat and 18 in. square for a standing man, of 2,138 or
2,558 at a pinch.[1657] We do not know that the Swan was not larger
than the Fortune, and have therefore no right to assume that De Witt
was seriously out. Wright tells us that the Globe, Fortune, and Red
Bull were ‘large’ houses; he is comparing them with the private houses
of Caroline days.[1658] The allusion in _Old Fortunatus_ to the ‘small
circumference’ of the Rose perhaps hardly indicates that it was below
the average size.
The Swan drawing is our one contemporary picture of the interior of
a public play-house, and it is a dangerous business to explain away
its evidence by an assumption of inaccurate observation on the part
of De Witt, merely because that evidence conflicts with subjective
interpretations of stage-directions, arrived at in the course of
the pursuit of a ‘typical’ stage. Still less can it be discredited
on the ground that it was merely made by Van Buchell on ‘hearsay
evidence’ from the instructions of De Witt.[1659] It is a copy, like
the accompanying description on the same piece of paper, of De Witt’s
original, which De Witt says he drew (‘adpinxi’) in order to bring
out an analogy which had struck him between the English and the Roman
theatres. It was for this reason also, no doubt, that he marked certain
features of the structure on the drawing with the names of what he
thought to be their classical prototypes. I do not, of course, suggest
that the drawing has the authority of a photographic record. De Witt is
more likely to have made it as an afterthought in his inn than during
the actual performance, and he may well have omitted or misrepresented
features. Certainly he can hardly have seen the trumpeter sounding
when the action had already begun. And the draughtsmanship is bad, and
may have been made worse by the copyist.[1660] The upper part is done,
with an attempt at perspective, as he may have seen it from a point
in the middle, or perhaps the upper, gallery somewhat to the right
of the centre; the lower part as from full face, so that the pillars
stand equidistant from the edges of the stage, as they would not have
appeared to him in perspective. His doors and the compartments of his
stage gallery are of uneven sizes.[1661] But, with all its faults,
the drawing is the inevitable basis of any comprehensive account of
the main structural features of a play-house, and I propose, leaving
aside for the present the question of the possible hangings which it
does not show, to take its parts one by one and illustrate them from
other sources, and in particular from Henslowe’s contracts for the
construction of the Fortune in 1600 and the Hope in 1614.[1662]
The outline of the building is round, or slightly ovoid.[1663] The
floor, which shows no traces of seating, is marked ‘planities siue
arena’. This is the space ordinarily known as the ‘yard’, a name which
it may fairly be taken to have inherited from the inn-yards, surrounded
by galleries and open overhead, in which, in the days before the
building of the Theatre in 1576, more or less permanent play-houses
had grown up.[1664] Spectators in the yard always stood, and the more
unstable psychology of a standing, as compared with a seated, crowd
must always be taken into account in estimating the temperament of an
Elizabethan audience. These are the ‘groundlings’, and the poets take
their revenge for occasional scenes of turbulence in open or covert
sneers at their ‘understanding’.[1665]