Note 37 — BOOK III THE COMPANIES

Gosson (1582) speaks of the plays as ‘at Paules’; and Rawlidge (1628) mentions a house ‘nigh Pauls’ as one of those pulled down by the City, apparently in 1596 (cf. ch. xvi). The Paul’s boys, however, can hardly have been playing for some years before that date. Howes (1629) definitely specifies the singing school (cf. ch. xvi). On the other hand, Flecknoe, a late authority and in a passage dealing (inaccurately) with Jacobean rather than Elizabethan conditions, assigns the plays to ‘behinde the Convocation-house in Paul’s’ (App. I). This is expanded by Malone (Variorum, iii. 46) into ‘in St. Paul’s school-room, behind the Convocation-house’, and Baker, 45, suggests that they used a small yard or cloister before the doors of the Convocation House and shut off by a high wall from the main churchyard (cf. Hollar’s prints in Baker, 95, 115). But I doubt if Flecknoe had anything in mind except St. Gregory’s, which stood just west of the Convocation House. The hall of the College of Minor Canons is perhaps also a possibility; but neither this nor the church is likely to have afforded a circular auditorium (cf. ch. xviii). Can they have used the Convocation House itself?