Sealed and deliuered by the saide Peter Streete in the presence of me William Harris Pub[lic] Scr[ivener] And me Frauncis Smyth appr[entice] to the said Scr[ivener]
[Endorsed:] Peater Streat ffor The Building of the Fortune.
The constant references in the terms of the contract to the model of the Globe, while bearing testimony to the stimulus which the building of the Globe had given to theatrical competition, leaves some uncertainty as to many details of planning, and it is matter for regret that the ‘plot’ of the stage and staircases furnished to the builder has not itself been preserved. We learn, however, that the house was a square one, 80 feet each way by outside and 55 feet by inside measurement; that the stage was 43 feet wide and projected into the middle of the yard; that the framework was of wood, on a foundation of brick and piles, and with an outer coating of plaster; that the framework and stage were boarded within and strengthened with iron pikes; that there were three galleries rising to a total height of 32 feet, and that sections of these were partitioned off and ceiled as ‘gentlemens rooms’, of which there were four, and ‘two-penny rooms’; that the tiring-house had glazed windows; that there was a ‘shadowe or cover’ over the stage, and that this, with the galleries and staircases, were tiled and supplied with lead gutters to carry off the rain-water. Two divergences from the Globe model are specified: the timber work is to be stouter, and the principal posts of the frame work and stage are to be square and carved with satyrs. An ingenious attempt has been made by Mr. William Archer and Mr. W. H. Godfrey to reconstruct the plan of the theatre from these and other indications, with a liberal allowance of conjecture.[1299] It will be observed that Henslowe, as well as Alleyn, was a party to the contract; but it is pretty clear from Alleyn’s note already referred to that he found the money, and although Henslowe did in fact become his partner in the enterprise, this was under a lease of 4 April 1601, whereby he took over a moiety of the play-house and its profits for a term of twenty-four years from the previous 25 March at an annual rent of £8.[1300] This lease did not include Alleyn’s private tenements, but it did include some enclosed ‘growndes’ on the north and west of the house, and a passage 30 feet long by 14 feet wide running east from the south-west angle of the building ‘from one doore of the said house to an other’. It is, I think, to be inferred from this that the main approach to the earlier Fortune theatre was from the Golden Lane side. The contract with Street is dated on 8 January 1600 and provides for the completion of the work by the following 25 July, and for the payment of the price in two instalments, one when the framework was up and the other upon completion. In fact, however, the acquittances by Street and others, endorsed upon the Dulwich indenture, show that Henslowe acted as a kind of banker for the transaction, and made advances from time to time to Street, or to pay workmen or purchase materials, all of which were debited against the amounts payable under the contract. Work seems to have begun before 17 January. By 20 March Henslowe had paid £180 and by 4 May £240. It is therefore a little puzzling to find a payment ‘at the eand of the fowndations’ on 8 May. About £53 more was paid before 10 June, making nearly £300 in all by that date. The last entry is one of 4s. to Street ‘to pasify him’, which suggests that some dispute had taken place. Here the acquittances stop, but Henslowe’s Diary indicates that he was frequently dining in company with Street from 13 June to August 8, and probably the work was completed about the latter date.[1301] Alleyn had had to face some opposition in carrying out his project. He began by arming himself with the authority of his ‘lord’, the Earl of Nottingham, who wrote in his favour to the Middlesex justices on 12 January 1600, explaining the reasons for leaving the Bankside and the general convenience of the new locality, and citing the Queen’s ‘special regarde of fauor’ towards the company as a reason why the justices should allow his servant to build ‘wthout anie yor lett or molestation’. This action did not prove sufficient to avert a local protest. Lord Willoughby and others complained to the Council, who on 9 March wrote to the Middlesex justices informing them that the erection of a new play-house, ‘wherof ther are to manie allreadie not farr from that place’, would greatly displease the Queen, and commanding the project to be ‘staied’. Alleyn, however, was secure in the royal favour. He also, by offering a weekly contribution to the relief of the poor, succeeded in obtaining a certificate from the petty officials and other inhabitants of Finsbury of their consent to the toleration of the house; and on 8 April the Council wrote again to the justices, withdrawing their previous inhibition and laying special stress on Elizabeth’s desire that Alleyn personally should revive his services as a player, ‘wheareof, of late he hath made discontynuance’. The letter also referred to the fact that another house was pulled down instead of the Fortune, and a formal Privy Council order of 22 June, laying down that there shall in future be one house in Middlesex for the Admiral’s men, and one on the Bankside for the Chamberlain’s, makes it clear that the condemned theatre was the Curtain.[1302] Nevertheless, it is certain that neither the Curtain nor the Rose was in fact plucked down at this date.
The Fortune was opened in the autumn of 1600 by the Admiral’s men, probably with Dekker’s 1 Fortune’s Tennis, and its theatrical history is closely bound up with that of the same company, who occupied it continuously, as the Admiral’s to 1603, then as Prince Henry’s men to his death in 1612, and finally as the Palsgrave’s men. It is only necessary to deal here with matters that directly concern the building. That it became something of a centre of disturbance in the peaceful suburbs of the north-west is shown by various entries in the records of the Middlesex Bench. On 26 February 1611, two butchers, Ralph Brewyn and John Lynsey, were charged with abusing gentlemen there. On 1 October 1612, the justices regarded it as the resort of cutpurses, and were thereby led to suppress the jigs at the end of plays, which especially attracted such persons. In 1613 a true bill was found against Richard Bradley for stabbing Nicholas Bedney there on 5 June.[1303] The upkeep of the structure was expensive. A note in Alleyn’s hand of sums laid out upon the play-house during the seven years 1602–8 shows an average amount of about £120. Only £4 2s. was spent during 1603, for the greater part of which year the theatres were closed, but £232 1s. 8d. in 1604.[1304] No doubt wooden buildings, open to the weather, perished rapidly. It is not unreasonable to suppose that the relations between the company and their landlords were much what they had been at the Rose; that is to say that the latter took half the gallery receipts and bore repairs, while the former took the rest of the receipts and met all other outgoings. An unexecuted draft lease to Thomas Downton of 1608 indicates that Alleyn and Henslowe then had it in mind to bind the company more closely to the theatre, by dividing a quarter of their interest amongst the eight members of the company.[1305] Possibly the plan was carried out. In asking a loan from Alleyn on a date apparently earlier than August 1613, Charles Massye, who was one of the eight, not only offers repayment out of his ‘gallery mony’ and ‘house mony’, but also the assignment of ‘that lyttell moete I have in the play housses’ as a security.[1306] Certainly the company took over the house after Henslowe’s death on 6 January 1616. His share in the building passed to his widow, who contemplated a sale of it to Gregory Franklyn, Drew Stapley, and John Hamond.[1307] But the deed remained unexecuted at her death in 1617, and the whole property was now once more in Alleyn’s hands. On 31 October 1618 he leased it to the company for £200 a year, to be reduced to £120 at his death. With it went a taphouse occupied by Mark Brigham, the rent of a two-room tenement held by John Russell, and a strip of impaled ground 123 feet by 17 feet, lying next the passage on the south.[1308] This is perhaps the garden in which, according to John Chamberlain, the players, ‘not to be overcome with courtesy’, banqueted the Spanish ambassador when he visited the theatre on 16 July 1621.[1309] John Russell is presumably the same whose appointment by Alleyn as a ‘gatherer’ lead to a protest from William Bird on behalf of the company.[1310] A few months after the ambassador’s visit, John Chamberlain records the destruction of the Fortune on 9 December 1621:[1311]
‘On Sonday night here was a great fire at the Fortune in Golden-Lane, the fayrest play-house in this towne. It was quite burnt downe in two howres, & all their apparell & play-bookes lost, wherby those poore companions are quite undone.’
Alleyn also notes the event in his diary.[1312] On 20 May 1622 he formed a syndicate, and leased to it the site at a rent of £128 6s., under an obligation to build a new theatre at a cost of £1,000.[1313] This, ‘a large round brick building’, was erected in the following year.[1314] The site conveyed covered a space of almost exactly 130 feet square, and on it had stood, besides the buildings named in the lease of 1618, other tenements, in one of which William Bird himself lived. Mr. Lawrence has suggested that the new Fortune may have been a roofed-in house, but his evidence is hardly sufficient to outweigh the explicit statement of Wright that it ‘lay partly open to the weather, and there they always acted by daylight’.[1315] This can hardly refer only to the earlier building. The Fortune was dismantled in 1649 and ‘totally demolished’ by 1662, and the façade still extant in 1819 cannot therefore have belonged to it, although it may have belonged to a Restoration ‘nursery’ for young actors, possibly upon the same site.[1316] No acting seems to have taken place at the Fortune after 1649.[1317]
xiii. THE BOAR’S HEAD
There appear to have been at least six city inns under this sign.[1318] The most famous was that on the south side of Great Eastcheap, in St. Michael’s, which seems to have been regarded in the middle of the sixteenth century as the traditional locality of the tavern scenes in Henry IV.[1319] This inn was in the occupation of Joan Broke, widow, in 1537, and in that of Thomas Wright, vintner, about 1588.[1320] Another Boar’s Head stood ‘without’ Aldgate, in the extra-mural Portsoken ward, which lay between that gate and the bars with which the liberties of the City terminated at Hog Lane. Here, according to Stowe, there were ‘certaine faire Innes for receipt of trauellers repayring to the Citie’.[1321] At the Aldgate inn had been produced in 1557 a ‘lewd’ play called The Sackful of Newes, which provoked the interference of Mary’s Privy Council.[1322] But it seems to me exceedingly improbable that either this or the Eastcheap inn was converted into the play-house, of which we have brief and tantalizing records in the seventeenth century. Both were within the City jurisdiction, where the licensing of play-houses seems to have definitely terminated in 1596. It is true that a Privy Council letter of 31 March 1602, which directs that the combined company of Oxford’s and Worcester’s men shall be allowed to play at the Boar’s Head, is addressed to the Lord Mayor.[1323] But so are other letters of the same type, the object of which is to limit plays to a small number of houses outside the liberties, and to restrain them elsewhere over the whole area of the City and the suburbs.[1324] And when, a year or two later, Worcester’s men became Queen Anne’s, and a draft patent was drawn up to confirm their right to play in the Curtain and the Boar’s Head, both houses are described, not as in the City, but as ‘within our County of Middlesex’.[1325] Presumably Anne’s men left the Boar’s Head when the Red Bull became available for their use in 1606, and Mr. Adams has explained a mention, which had long puzzled me, of the Duke of York’s men as ‘the Prince’s Players of Whitechapel’ in 1608 by the suggestion that they succeeded to the vacant theatre.[1326] If this is so, I think it affords further evidence for the theory that the Boar’s Head, although it may have taken its name from the Aldgate inn, was not itself that inn, and probably not a converted inn at all, but lay just outside and not just inside the City bars. For, although part of the street between Aldgate and Whitechapel is sometimes called, as in Ogilby’s map of 1677 and Rocque’s of 1746, ‘Whitechapel Street’, yet Whitechapel proper lay outside the liberties, farther to the east along the Mile End Road.[1327] The only other contemporary record of the Boar’s Head is a letter to Edward Alleyn from his wife Joan on 21 October 1603, in which she says, ‘All the companyes be come hoame & well for ought we knowe, but that Browne of the Boares head is dead & dyed very pore, he went not into the countrye at all’.[1328] This Browne cannot be identified, and it is perhaps idle to conjecture that he may have been related to Robert Browne, and that it may have been at the Boar’s Head that the latter played with Derby’s men in 1599–1601. The Boar’s Head seems to have been generally forgotten by the Restoration, but is recalled by the Marquis of Newcastle c. 1660.[1329]
xiv. THE RED BULL
[Bibliographical Note.—The records of the suit of Woodford v. Holland (1613) were printed by J. Greenstreet in the Athenaeum for 28 Nov. 1885 from Court of Requests Books, xxvi, ff. 780, 890, and cxxviii, and therefrom by Fleay, 194; and more fully with those of the later suit of 1619 (misdated 1620) by C. W. Wallace in Nebraska University Studies, ix. 291 (cited as W. v. H.). Collier, i. 374, mentions evidence on the same transactions as ‘in the Audit Office’, and misnames the complainant John Woodward.]