xxv. 1580. Anon.
[From Stationers’ Register, 8 April 1580 (Arber, ii. 368). This is one of a number of ballads and pamphlets entered in April-June 1580 as a result of the earthquake on 6 April; Abraham Fleming, in his A Bright Burning Beacon, names eight writers on the subject besides himself, including Thomas Churchyard and Richard Tarlton. It may be that several of these improved the occasion by reproving bear-baitings and plays, as did Arthur Golding in his A Discourse Upon the Earthquake, but it does not appear from Golding’s ‘reporte’ that any playhouses suffered serious damage, although Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 369, quotes Munday, View of Sundry Examples (1580), ‘At the playhouses the people came running foorth, supprised with great astonishment’, and S. Gardiner, Doomes-day Booke (1606), ‘The earthquake ... shaked not only the scenicall Theatre, but the great stage and theatre of the whole land’. On the contrary, the only deaths were those of two children killed ‘while they were hearing a sermon’ at Christ Church, Newgate, a detail which is omitted in the reprint of the ‘reporte’ and of some of Golding’s moralizing, with an official Order of Prayer issued for use in parish churches (Liturgical Services, Parker Soc., 573).]
H. Carr, ‘a ballat intituled comme from the plaie, comme from the playe: the house will fall, so people saye: the earth quakes, lett us hast awaye’.