Volume 2 / Book 4 — BOOK IV THE PLAY-HOUSES (continued 2)

It was a natural consequence of the success of Burbadge’s new departure that the Theatre and its immediate successor, the Curtain, had to bear the brunt of the Puritan denunciations of the stage. These incidentally bore witness to the costly elaborateness of the new accommodation provided for the players.[1147] Apart from the moral corruption upon which the Puritans laid most stress, there is some evidence that the position of the Theatre, with a great space of open ground before it, made it a natural focus for the disorderly elements of society. As early as 5 October 1577, just after the resumption of plays for the autumn, the Mayor and Recorder Fleetwood were listening to ‘a brabell betwene John Wotton and the Leuetenuntes sonne of the one parte, and certain ffreholders of Shordyche, for a matter at the Theater’. There was serious trouble in the course of 1584. Fleetwood wrote to Burghley how on 8 June, ‘very nere the Theatre or Curten, at the tyme of the playes, there laye a prentice sleping upon the grasse and one Challes alias Grostock dyd turne upon the too upon the belly of the same prentice; whereupon the apprentice start up, and after wordes they fell to playne bloues’; and how on 10 June, ‘one Browne, a serving man in a blew coat, a shifting fellowe, having a perrelous witt of his owne, entending a spoile if he cold have browght it to passe, did at Theatre doore querell with certen poore boyes, handicraft prentises, and strooke some of theym; and lastlie he with his sword wondend and maymed one of the boyes upon the left hand; whereupon there assembled nere a ml. people’.[1148] Unscrupulous characters might find congenial companions in the throng. Somewhere in 1594 a diamond, which had gone astray from the loot of a Spanish vessel, was shown in Finsbury Fields by a mariner to certain goldsmiths, who said that they had met him by chance at a play in the Theatre at Shoreditch.[1149] But James Burbadge had obtained for himself a tactical advantage by building outside the jurisdiction of the City and within that, less organized or more easy-going, of the Middlesex magistrates. The Corporation were powerless, except in so far as, directly by persuasion, or indirectly by invoking the Privy Council, they could stir the county bench to action. They lost no opportunity, which brawls or plague afforded, of attempting this.[1150] An exceptionally troublous year was 1580. It began with an indictment of John Brayne and James Burbadge ‘yeomen’ of Shoreditch, at the Middlesex sessions, for bringing unlawful assemblies together on 21 February and other days ‘ad audienda et spectanda quaedam colloquia sive interluda vocata playes or interludes’ by them and others ‘exercitata et practicata’ at the Theatre in Holywell, with the result of affrays and tumults leading to a breach of the peace.[1151] On 6 April was the great earthquake, which threw down chimneys in Shoreditch, and according to one account ‘shaked not only the scenical Theatre, but the great stage and theatre of the whole land’.[1152] Four days later was the riot between Lord Oxford’s men and the Inns of Court, and the two events gave the Lord Mayor an excellent opportunity of pointing out to the Council that the players of plays which were used at the Theatre were ‘a very superfluous sort of men’ and of securing a suspension of performances until after Michaelmas. The riot of 8 June 1584 similarly led to the inhibition by the Council and Fleetwood already noticed, although it is clear that this was not so permanent as the City probably hoped, when the authority for ‘the suppressing and pulling downe of the Theatre and Curten’ reached them. Matters came to a crisis again in 1597 with the production of The Isle of Dogs on the Bankside, and an appeal of the City on 28 July was answered on the same day by mandates of the Council, of which one was addressed to the Middlesex justices, and directed them to send for the owners of the Theatre and Curtain, and enjoin them to ‘plucke downe quite the stages, gallories and roomes that are made for people to stand in, and so to deface the same as they maie not be ymploied agayne to suche use’.[1153]

It is unlikely that the Theatre was ever opened again. It is certain that the Chamberlain’s men had moved to the Curtain before the end of 1597, and the abandonment of the old house is referred to unmistakably enough in a satire published in 1598.[1154] The explanation is to be found in the relations of the Burbadges to their ground landlord, Giles Allen. The following account is taken in the main from Cuthbert Burbadge’s allegations in litigation of 1600. On 1 November 1585, shortly before the termination of the first ten years of the lease, James Burbadge, as he was entitled to do, presented Allen with a draft of a new twenty-one years’ lease. This Allen evaded signing, apparently alleging that it was not in verbatim agreement with the old lease, and probably also that some of Burbadge’s covenants under the old lease had remained unfulfilled.[1155] By way of precaution, Burbadge thought it desirable to put on record in his account-book some evidence that he had spent the £200 in improving the tenements, upon which his right to remove the structure of the Theatre depended. He called in expert craftsmen, and took two ‘views’, one on 20 November 1585, another, after some further work had been done, on 18 July 1586. The first estimate was £220, the second £240. This last was later confirmed by a third view taken in connexion with the Brayne litigation in July 1591.[1156] The money had been spent, partly on ordinary repairs, partly on converting the old barn into tenements, partly on putting up two new houses, one of which was for Burbadge’s own occupation.[1157] The matter of the new lease now slumbered until the expiration of the old one on 13 April 1597 drew near. In 1596 negotiations took place between landlord and tenant, and a compromise was mooted, by which the new lease was to be granted, but for an increased rent of £24 instead of £14. Allen afterwards asserted and Cuthbert Burbadge denied that there was a proviso that after five years the building should be converted to some other use than that of a play-house.[1158] Cuthbert continued the negotiations after James Burbadge’s death in February 1597, but they finally broke down, and for a year or so the tenancy was only on sufferance.[1159] Finally, in the autumn of 1598, when Cuthbert had agreed to demands which he thought extortionate, Allen refused to accept his brother Richard as security, and all hope of a settlement disappeared.[1160] Cuthbert now resolved to avail himself of the covenant of the expired lease, under which the tenant was entitled to pull down and remove the Theatre. This he began to do, in spite of a protest from Allen’s representative, on 28 December 1598, with the concurrence of his mother and brother, and the financial aid of one William Smith of Waltham Cross.[1161] The work was still in progress on 20 January 1599, when Burbadge’s agent, Peter Street, carpenter, entered the close with ten or twelve men, and carried the timber to the other side of the river for use in the erection of the Globe. For this act Allen brought an action of trespass against Street in the Queen’s Bench, alleging that he had trampled down grass in the close to the value of 40s., and claiming damages for £800 in all, of which £700 represented his estimate of the value of the Theatre.[1162] Burbadge applied to the Court of Requests to stop the common law suit, alleging in effect that he was equitably entitled to act upon the covenant, even though the lease had expired, on account of the unreasonable refusal of Allen to grant the new lease when applied for, under the terms of the old one, in 1585.[1163] The issue really turned upon whether this refusal was reasonable. Allen said that James Burbadge had been a troublesome tenant, that he had converted the barn into eleven tenements, whose inhabitants became a nuisance to the parish by begging for their 20s. rents, that he had not repaired the building but only shored it up, that he had not spent the stipulated £200, and that £30 rent was in arrear at the time of the application of 1585 and was still unpaid.[1164] Probably these last two were the only allegations to which the court attached importance. Allen claimed that he had no remedy against James Burbadge’s estate, for he had made deeds of gift to his sons of his property, and his widow and administratrix was without funds. Burbadge, however, produced evidence of the estimates of 1585 and 1586, and suggested that his father had a counter-claim against the rent in the expense to which he had been put in maintaining his possession at the time of Peckham’s claim to the freehold. On 18 October 1600 the Court decided in his favour.[1165] Allen brought a Queen’s Bench action against him in 1601 for breach of agreement, and in 1601 complained to the Star Chamber of perjury on the part of the expert witnesses and other wrongs done him in the course of the earlier proceedings; but, although the conclusions of these suits are not on record, it is not likely that he succeeded in obtaining a favourable decision.[1166]

vii. THE CURTAIN

[Bibliographical Note.—Some rather scanty material is brought together by T. E. Tomlins, Origin of the Curtain Theatre and Mistakes regarding it in Sh. Soc. Papers, i. 29, and Halliwell-Phillipps, The Theatre and Curtain (Outlines, i. 345).]

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

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

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

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

viii. NEWINGTON BUTTS

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

ix. THE ROSE

[Bibliographical Note.—All the more important documents are printed or calendared from the Dulwich MSS. with a valuable commentary in Greg, Henslowe’s Diary and Henslowe Papers, and in Collier, Memoirs of Alleyn and Henslowe’s Diary.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

x. THE SWAN

[Bibliographical Note.—John de Witt’s description and plan are published in K. T. Gaedertz, Zur Kenntnis der altenglischen Bühne (1888), and more exactly by H. B. Wheatley in On a Contemporary Drawing of the Swan Theatre, 1596 (N. S. S. Trans. 1887–92, 215). They are discussed by H. Logemann in Anglia, xix. 117, by W. Archer in The Universal Review for June 1888, by W. Rendle in 7 N. Q. vi. 221, by J. Le G. Brereton, De Witt at the Swan (1916, Sh.-Homage, 204), by myself in a paper on The Stage of the Globe in The Stratford Town Shakespeare, x. 351, and in most recent treatises on Elizabethan staging; cf. chh. xviii, xx. Earlier material is collected by W. Rendle in The Play-houses at Bankside in the Time of Shakespeare (Antiquarian Magazine and Bibliographer, 1885, vii. 207). The facts as to Langley’s purchase and the pleadings and order in the suit of Shawe et al. v. Langley before the Court of Requests in 1597–8 (cited as S. v. L.) are given by C. W. Wallace, The Swan Theatre and the Earl of Pembroke’s Servants (1911, E. S. xliii. 340). T. S. Graves, A Note on the Swan Theatre (M. P. ix. 431), discusses the light thrown on the internal arrangements of the Swan by the accounts of England’s Joy in 1602.]

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

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

xi. THE GLOBE

[Bibliographical Note.—The devolution of the Globe shares can be traced in the documents of three lawsuits: (a) Ostler v. Heminges, in the Court of King’s Bench in 1616 (Coram Rege Roll 1454, 13 Jac. I, Hilary Term, m. 692), described by C. W. Wallace in The Times of 2 and 4 Oct. 1909, and in part privately printed by him in Advance Sheets from Shakespeare, the Globe, and Blackfriars (1909), here cited as O. v. H.; (b) Witter v. Heminges and Condell, in the Court of Requests (1619–20), described by C. W. Wallace in The Century of Aug. 1910, and printed by him in Nebraska University Studies, x (1910), 261, here cited as W. v. H.; and (c) the proceedings before the Lord Chamberlain in 1635 known as the Sharers Papers, and printed by Halliwell-Phillipps in Outlines, i. 312. Professor Wallace’s descriptive articles require some corrections from the texts of his documents. Much evidence bearing upon the site of the theatre was collected by W. Rendle in The Bankside, Southwark, and the Globe Play-house (1877), printed by the N. S. S. as an appendix to Harrison, pt. ii (cited as Rendle, Bankside), in Walford’s Antiquarian, viii (1885), 209, and in The Anchor Brewery (1888, Inns of Old Southwark, 56), by G. Hubbard in Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 3rd series, xvii. 26, and London and Middlesex Arch. Soc. Trans. n. s. ii (1912), pt. iii, and most fully by W. Martin in Surrey Archaeological Collections, xxiii (1910), 149. Some additional facts, from records of the Sewers Commission for Kent and Surrey in the possession of the London County Council, and from deeds concerning the Brend estate, were published by Dr. Wallace in The Times of 30 April and 1 May 1914, and led to discussion by Dr. Martin, Mr. Hubbard, and others in 11 N. Q. x. 209, 290, 335; xi. 447; xii. 10, 50, 70, 121, 143, 161, 201, 224, 264, 289, 347, and by W. W. Braines in The Site of the Globe Play-house (1921). A paper by the present writer on The Stage of the Globe is in the Stratford Town Shakespeare, x. 351.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No longer since than yesterday, while Burbage’s company were acting at the Globe the play of Henry VIII, and there shooting off certain chambers in way of triumph, the fire catched and fastened upon the thatch of the house, and there burned so furiously, as it consumed the whole house, all in less than two hours, the people having enough to do to save themselves.’

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

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

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

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

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

A Sonnett upon the pittiful burneing of the Globe playhowse in London.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A corrected return of 1637 runs:

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the assumption that the theatre stood in Globe Alley, there has been divergence of opinion as to the precise part of the Alley in which it stood. Mr. Rendle fixed on a spot on the north side, about 80 or 100 feet from the Deadman’s Place end.[1278] To this he was guided, partly by a further local tradition, according to which the site was occupied successively by a meeting-house and a windmill, and partly by an argument derived from the entries in the St. Saviour’s token-book for 1621.[1279] Here, under the heading ‘Sir John Bodley’s Rentes’ are recorded in succession about ten names. Then comes a new heading, differently written, ‘Gloab Alley’, then two more names, then in the margin of the page the word ‘Gloabe’. This Mr. Rendle took to mean that the Globe was about twelve houses from the east end of the alley. If this is an indication of the site of the Globe at all, which is a mere conjecture, I should myself draw the inference that it stood, not twelve, but two houses from the end of the alley, and that a part, if not the whole, of Bodley’s Rents was outside the alley. And why should the enumerator be supposed to have worked from the east, rather than from the north end of the alley? Dr. Martin, in fact, turns Mr. Rendle’s argument round in this way, and uses the token-book to support a theory which places the theatre south of Globe Alley, just at the angle where it turns to the north, and 360 feet, instead of Mr. Rendle’s 80 or 100 feet, west of Deadman’s Place.[1280] Here it appears to be located in a borough history of 1795;[1281] and is certainly located in more than one early nineteenth-century plan.[1282] Dr. Martin has attempted to obtain confirmation of this siting from an investigation of the brewery title-deeds. From 1727 onwards the history of the angle site is clear. In that year it was transferred, subject to a mortgage, by Timothy Cason and his wife Elizabeth, heiress of the Brend estate, to certain parishioners of St. Saviour’s. Upon it was built the parish workhouse referred to by Concanen and Morgan. This stood just at the outer south-west angle of Globe Alley, which Dr. Martin conceives to have been occupied by the theatre. In 1774 a new workhouse was built, and the site of the old one bought by the Thrales. It was conveyed with the rest of the brewery to Barclay and Perkins in 1787, and was then described as the ground ‘on which lately stood all that great shop or workhouse formerly used for a meeting-house’. Dr. Martin thinks that this forgotten meeting-house may have been confused in local tradition with that further to the east along Globe Alley.[1283] Dr. Martin suggests that the property transferred by the Casons in 1727 is to be identified with that described in a deed executed by the same persons in 1706, of which a copy is also to be found amongst the brewery title-deeds, as consisting of tenements built ‘where the late play-house called the Globe stood and upon the ground thereunto belonging’. If this were so, he would of course have proved his point. The deed of 1706 seems to have been a family settlement covering various fragments of Brend property in Southwark, which had only just been brought together in the hands of Elizabeth Cason. The Globe site had been settled by Sir Matthew Brend in 1624 upon his wife Frances as a jointure. She died in 1673, and it then passed as a jointure to Judith, wife of Sir Matthew’s son Thomas and mother of Elizabeth, under a deed of 1655 in which the reference to ‘the late play-house called the Globe’, repeated in that of 1706, first occurs. Judith Brend had died in 1706.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

xii. THE FORTUNE

[Bibliographical Note.—Most of the documents are at Dulwich, and are printed in full or in abstract by W. W. Greg in Henslowe Papers, and by J. P. Collier in Alleyn Memoirs and Alleyn Papers. The Register of the Privy Council adds a few of importance. Valuable summaries of the history of the theatre are given by W. W. Greg, Henslowe’s Diary, ii. 56, and W. Young, History of Dulwich College (1889), ii. 257. The Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Muniments at Dulwich (1881–1903) by G. F. Warner and F. B. Bickley is also useful.]

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

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