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 20li per ann. beinge the inheritance of Sr Mathew Brand, Knt.’[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 Mr 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: