Foreign employment had now come to an end:
‘And the players have all (except the King’s men) left their usuall residency on the Bankside, and do play in Middlesex far remote from the Thames, so that every day in the week they do draw unto them three or four thousand people, that were used to spend their monies by water.’
Such, Taylor assures us, was the effect of the petition. It was referred by James to ‘his commissioners for suits’, that is to say, the Court of Requests, composed of Sir Julius Caesar, Sir Thomas Parry, Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Henry Montagu, Sir Walter Cope, George Calvert, and Baron Sotherton. The King’s men exhibited a counter-petition, and the case came on for hearing.
‘Sir Francis Bacon very worthily said that so far as the public weal was to be regarded before pastimes, or a serviceable decaying multitude before a handful of particular men, or profit before pleasure, so far was our suit to be preferred before theirs.’
The players appealed to the Earl of Somerset, who became Lord Chamberlain and in that capacity their official protector on 10 July 1614, but he proved well affected towards the watermen. The hearing was adjourned and never resumed, owing to the death of Cope on 31 July, the promotion of Caesar to the Mastership of the Rolls on 1 October, and the consequent dissolution of the commission. Ill feeling broke out between Taylor and his fellows the watermen, who declared that he met the players at supper at the Cardinal’s Hat on Bankside, and took bribes of them to let the suit fall. Taylor, therefore, wrote his pamphlet to vindicate his position.[1057] The completion of the new Globe and the Hope during the progress of the dispute had probably eased matters temporarily for the watermen, but the growing tendency of things theatrical towards Middlesex was not permanently checked. Some of the minor companies used the Hope until 1617, and then left it to the bears again. The Globe survived, but will be found to have occupied during the Caroline period a distinctly secondary position to the Blackfriars in the economy of the King’s men. For this there was another reason besides the geographical superiority of Middlesex over Surrey. The acquisition of the Blackfriars, even though only for winter purposes, in 1608 was an acknowledgement of the advantages for adult companies of the ‘private’ or roofed type of theatre, hitherto used only by boys. Once these advantages were realized, the doom of the old ‘ring’ type, with its central opening, was written. Probably the Hope was the only new house constructed on these lines after 1608, and obviously the Hope required free ventilation to get rid of the stink of bears and dogs. In 1615 Philip Rosseter and others obtained sanction for the conversion of Porter’s Hall in the Blackfriars into a theatre. This was to be used by children as well as adults, and was probably roofed. It was pulled down again by what seems a somewhat arbitrary decision in 1617. About the same time, the roofed Cockpit in Drury Lane was converted into a theatre, under the name of the Phoenix, for the occupation of the Queen’s men, who migrated to it from the Red Bull. Whether or not the Fortune was given a roof at the rebuilding of 1623, or the Red Bull at somewhat the same time, is uncertain; but at any rate the Salisbury Court theatre, built near the Whitefriars in 1629, perhaps to replace the old Whitefriars theatre, was a roofed house.[1058] This was the last new theatre built before the civil wars. The Blackfriars, the Cockpit, and Salisbury Court were the most important of the Caroline stages, and in the post-Restoration houses, although these were on a larger scale than the ‘private’ houses of the past, the roofed model was invariably adopted.
Soon after the completion of Salisbury Court, Edmund Howes, who had already edited the fourth edition of John Stowe’s Annales in 1615, was again revising the text for the fifth edition of 1631, and took occasion to append to his account of the burnings of the Globe and the Fortune the following summary of theatrical enterprise since 1569:[1059]
‘In the yeere one thousand sixe hundred twenty nine, there was builded a new faire Play-house, neere the white Fryers. And this is the seauenteenth Stage, or common Play-house, which hath beene new made within the space of threescore yeeres within London and the Suburbs, viz.
‘Fiue Innes, or common Osteryes turned to Play-houses, one Cockpit, S. Paules singing Schoole, one in the Black-fryers, and one in the White-fryers, which was built last of all, in the yeare one thousand sixe hundred twenty nine, all the rest not named, were erected only for common Play-houses, besides the new built Beare garden, which was built as well for playes, and Fencers prizes, as Bull bayting; besides, one in former time at Newington Buts; Before the space of threescore yeares aboue-sayd, I neither knew, heard, nor read, of any such Theaters, set Stages, or Play-houses, as haue beene purposely built within mans memory.’
This passage serves as a fair summary of the detailed investigations set out in this chapter. Howes only allows one house to the Blackfriars and one to the Whitefriars, and must therefore be leaving out of account the abortive Porter’s Hall house, and treating Salisbury Court as a continuation of the earlier Whitefriars. The Hope and Newington Butts are afterthoughts, and make his seventeen into nineteen. We can identify his five inns as the Bull, the Bell, the Cross Keys, the Bel Savage, and probably the Red Lion, although this just antedates his period of sixty years; while his balance of eight unnamed common play-houses must be the Theatre, the Curtain, the Rose, the Swan, the Globe, the Fortune, the Boar’s Head, and the Red Bull.
Prynne, in his Histriomastix (1633), records six ‘divels chappels’ as then in use, and these are doubtless the six houses, the Blackfriars, Globe, Cockpit, Salisbury Court, Fortune, and Red Bull, which are also noted by the Restoration writers on the stage, John Downes and James Wright, as surviving up to the cataclysm of the civil wars.[1060]