iv. THE BEL SAVAGE INN
The Bel Savage is named as an early London play-house in the 1596 edition of Lambarde’s Perambulation of Kent. This inn, of which the name is still preserved on Ludgate Hill, where it stood until 1873 (Harben, 63), must be distinguished from another in Gracechurch Street once kept by Tarlton, which in his time was known as the Saba.[1088] The origin of the name is obscure; a deed of 1452 refers to an ‘inn ... called Savages Inn, otherwise called the Bell on the Hoop, in the parishe of St. Bride in Fleet Street’ (L. T. R. ii. 71). Probably therefore the notion of the Belle Sauvage is a later perversion. Gascoigne, in the prologue to his Glass of Government (1575), repudiates the ‘worthie jests’ and ‘vain delights’ of ‘Bellsavage fair’.[1089] Gosson, in 1579, excepts from his general condemnation of plays ‘the two prose books, played at the Belsavage, where you shall find never a word without wit, never a line without pith, never a letter placed in vain’.[1090] A play-house ‘on Ludgate Hill’ is included by Rawlidge in his list of those ‘put down’ in Elizabeth’s time. Probably the Queen’s men were acting at the Bel Savage in 1588, for after the death of Tarlton in that year was published ‘a sorowfull newe sonnette, intituled Tarltons Recantacion uppon this theame gyven him by a gentleman at the Belsavage without Ludgate (nowe or els never) beinge the laste theame he songe’.[1091] Prynne’s reference to Dr. Faustus (q.v.) at the Bel Savage suggests that at some time the Admiral’s also played there. It was also occasionally used for the playing of ‘prizes’; the earliest recorded date in the Register of the School of Defence being in 1575–7 and the latest on 31 January 1589.[1092]
v. THE CROSS KEYS INN
This inn may have been the play-house, or one of the play-houses, ‘in Gracious Street’ said by Rawlidge to have been ‘put down’ under Elizabeth. The first notice of it dates from 23 June 1579, on which day James Burbadge was arrested at the suit of John Hynde for £5 1s. 1d., ‘as he came down Gracious Street towards the Cross Keys there to a play’. The house is described as the dwelling-house of Richard Ibotson, citizen and brewer of London.[1093] It was in use as a place of popular amusement during the life of Tarlton, who died in 1588, for one of the Jests relates how he came from the Bell, where he was playing to ‘the Crosse-Keyes in Gracious streete’ to see Banks’s performing horse there.[1094] A company can first be definitely located at it in 1589, on 5 November of which year Lord Strange’s men, as reported by Lord Mayor Hart to Burghley, disobeyed an admonition to forbear playing, and ‘went to the Crosse Keys and played that afternoon’. In 1594 Strange’s men were absorbed in Lord Hunsdon’s, and on 8 October 1594 Hunsdon wrote to the Lord Mayor to obtain toleration for ‘my nowe companie of players’ who had been accustomed ‘to plaie this winter time within the citye at the Crosse Kayes in Gracious street’.[1095] How long Shakespeare’s fellows continued to use the Cross Keys as a winter house is unknown; presumably it ceased to be available in 1596. The adaptation of the inn as a theatre was still visible at the Restoration, and is assigned by Richard Flecknoe to ‘about the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s reign’. The site is shown in Ogilby and Morgan’s map of 1677 and the Ordnance Survey map of 1848–51: it is on the west of Gracechurch Street.
vi. THE THEATRE
[Bibliographical Note.—Material is available in the records of four litigations: (a) Peckham v. Allen (Wards and Liveries, 1589) as to the title to the site; (b) Burbadge v. Ames et al. (Coram Rege, 1596–9) and Earl of Rutland v. Allen and Burbadge (Exchequer, 1599–1602) as to the title to a neighbouring plot; (c) Burbadge v. Brayne (Chancery, 1588–95).
Brayne (afterwards Miles) v. Burbadge (Chancery, 1590–5), and Miles v. Burbadge (Requests, 1597), as to the profits of the house; (d) Allen v. Street (Coram Rege, 1600), Burbadge v. Allen (Requests, 1600), Allen v. Burbadge (Queen’s Bench, 1601–2), and Allen v. Burbadge et al. (Star Chamber, 1601–2), as to the removal of the fabric. A few documents from these, some of which he supposed to relate to the Blackfriars, were printed by Collier in Memoirs of the Actors (1846 and H. E. D. P. iii. 257) and in Original History of the Theatre in Shoreditch (1849, Sh. Soc. Papers, iv. 63). A large number were used by Halliwell-Phillipps for his excursus on The Theatre and Curtain (Outlines, i. 345), and in C. C. Stopes, Burbage and Shakespeare’s Stage (1913), where abstracts of (a) and (b) may be consulted. The full texts of (c) and (d) are printed in C. W. Wallace, The First London Theatre, Materials for a History (1913, Nebraska University Studies, xiii. 1). The exact locality of the site has been carefully investigated by W. W. Braines in Holywell Priory and the Site of the Theatre, Shoreditch (1915, Indication of Houses of Historical Interest in London, xliii), and again in The Site of the Theatre, Shoreditch (1917, L. T. R. xi. 1).]
The following statement as to the beginnings of theatrical enterprise in London is made by Cuthbert Burbadge and his family in the so-called Sharers Papers of 1635:[1096]
‘The father of us, Cutbert and Richard Burbage, was the first builder of playehowses, and was himselfe in his younger yeeres a player. The Theater hee built with many hundred poundes taken up at interest. The players that lived in those first times had onely the profitts arising from the dores, but now the players receave all the commings in at the dores to themselves and halfe the galleries from the houskepers. Hee built this house upon leased ground, by which meanes the landlord and hee had a great suite in law, and, by his death, the like troubles fell on us, his sonnes; wee then bethought us of altering from thence, and at like expence built the Globe.’
The accuracy of this is fully borne out by the records of the various legal proceedings in connexion with the Theatre, which a painful investigation has exhumed, and the topographical indications furnished by the evidence in some of these have made it possible to locate with some precision the site of London’s first regular play-house.