Scaped not his justice any jot the more:
He burnt that idol of the Revels too.
Nay, let Whitehall with revels have to do,
Though but in dances, it shall know his power;
There was a judgement shewn too in an hour.’
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 ‘50li or 60li’ 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 cxxli’.[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 14li to 20li per ann., and one house there adjoyning built about the same tyme with timber, in the possession of Wm Millet, gent., worth per ann. 4li [In margin, Play-house & house, Sr Mathew Brend’s inheritance].’