The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 2

by E. K. Chambers

B. UPPER STORY

The property purchased by Burbadge was extended at various dates after his death in February 1597 by his sons Cuthbert and Richard. On 26 June 1601 they bought for £95 from Sir George More the reversion of the butler’s lodging, subject to the life-interest of Mrs. Pole and to the ten years’ lease after her death, which had in the interval since 1585 passed from Rocco Bonetti to Thomas Bruskett.[1594] On 30 May 1610 they purchased two-thirds of the interests of the heirs of Mrs. Pole and of a mortgagee in the houses formerly held by Christopher Fenton, and on 7 July 1614 also purchased the remaining interest. These houses cost them in all £170.[1595] If, as is not unlikely, they also purchased at some time the house which in 1585 stood on the site of the little kitchen of 1548, and the bit of land sold to John Tice in 1603, the whole of the plot between the frater on the east, Water Lane on the west, the kitchen yard on the north, and the way to Lord Hunsdon’s house on the south, will have passed into their hands. There is no indication that they ever acquired any part of Lord Hunsdon’s house. This was apparently occupied by the French ambassador in 1623, when one of its upper rooms, used as a chapel, fell, and many persons were killed. Camden in his notes for Jacobean annals confused this room with the theatre.[1596] About 1629 the King’s printers, Robert Barker and John Bill, secured Hunsdon House for their press, and it remained the King’s printing house until the Great Fire.[1597] On 19 December 1612 the Burbadges obtained from the Cobham estate a piece of land for the enlargement of the yard near the Pipe Office, which was serving twenty years later to turn coaches in.[1598]

To make an end for the present of topography, the fortunes of the property to the north of the Burbadge purchases may be briefly traced. Sir William More died in 1601 and his son and successor, Sir George, had no need for a Pipe Office. The rooms were therefore leased, with others, on 23 April 1601 to Sir Jerome Bowes at a rent of £14 6s. 8d. ‘and certein glasses’.[1599] I think that the other rooms included the old lavatory of the friars, once a Revels store-house and thereafter a wash-house for More’s mansion, and that it was in this room that Bowes established the glass-house which became an important industry of the Blackfriars.[1600] On 19 June 1609 Sir George More sold this property, subject to Bowes’s lease, together with the mansion house, the great garden and all that remained to him within the great cloister, to a syndicate, whose members in 1611 divided the purchase amongst themselves.[1601] The former Pipe Office, now called the gate-house, with its yard, part of the glass-house, and a strip of the garden 23 ft. 10 in. wide passed to William Banister. Banister’s son Thomas sold them in 1616 to Gideon De Laune and De Laune in 1617 to Jacob Hardratt. Then Hardratt rebuilt the property and in 1619 sold back to De Laune a tenement which extended 43 ft. from north to south, and 24 ft. westwards from ‘the great gate near the play-house’ to the tenement occupied by a widow Basil. It had a small garden on the east, lying south of another garden belonging to De Laune.[1602] The length of 43 ft. exceeds by 6 ft., the width of an entry, that of the Pipe Office rooms, the site of which De Laune’s tenement no doubt occupied.

The big sale of 1609 did not include the kitchen and kitchen stairs built by Sir Henry Neville about 1560, or the wood yard which enclosed them. A bit of this yard had been included in Burbadge’s purchase of 1596. The rest of the property, with the water supply, had been bought on 11 March 1601, by Henry Lord Cobham, whose house it underlay.[1603] It had in fact been held by his father as far back as 1596.[1604] In 1603 Cobham was attainted. His Blackfriars property was forfeited to the Crown, but regranted to his widow, Lady Kildare, and for some years remained in the hands of trustees for her and her daughter Lady Howard.[1605] In 1612 an additional bit of the wood yard was sold, as already stated, to the Burbadges. Finally, in 1632 the estate was conveyed to the Company of Apothecaries, in whose hands it has since remained.[1606] They must also have acquired the house of Gideon De Laune, who was one of their founders, and therefore their present premises, in their extent of 116 ft. from north to south, exactly replace the ‘northern block’ of buildings which stood to the west of the main Blackfriars cloister, when Sir Thomas Cawarden took possession of it in 1550.

James Burbadge was not destined to see the success of his adventure. After all, he was prevented from establishing his theatre in 1596. Play-houses had just been suppressed in the City, and a number of the more important inhabitants of the Blackfriars disliked the idea of one being opened in their select residential precinct, where no common play-house had yet been seen. Farrant’s theatre, nominally intended for the private practice of the Chapel boys, was presumably regarded as not falling within the category of common play-houses. A petition was sent to the Privy Council, amongst the signatories to which were Burbadge’s neighbour, Sir George Carey, now Lord Hunsdon, Elizabeth Lady Russell, who lived a little farther up Water Lane, and Richard Field, the printer of Shakespeare’s poems.[1607] The extant copy of the petition is not dated, but later references assign it to November 1596, and inform us that as a result the Privy Council forbade the use of the house.[1608] On James Burbadge’s death in February 1597 the Blackfriars property passed to his son Richard.[1609] It is not known what use he made of it before 1600, but in that year the resumption of plays by the Chapel children under Nathaniel Giles gave him an opportunity of following Farrant’s example, and letting the theatre for what were practically public performances ‘vnder the name of a private howse’.[1610] With Giles were associated one James Robinson and Henry Evans, who had already been concerned in the enterprise of John Lyly and the Earl of Oxford; and it was to Evans that, on 2 September 1600, Burbadge leased ‘the great hall or roome, with the roomes over the same, scituate within the precinct of the black Friours’, for a term of twenty-one years from Michaelmas 1600, at a rent of £40,[1611] while Evans and his son-in-law Alexander Hawkins gave a joint bond in £400 as collateral security for due payment. Evans set up a company, which under various names, and throughout shifting financial managements, maintained a substantial continuity of existence, and occupied the Blackfriars for a period of eight years. Its fortunes are dealt with in detail elsewhere.[1612] Only those points directly bearing upon the theatre as such need now be noted. In October 1601, when Evans was negotiating a partnership with Edward Kirkham, William Rastall, and Thomas Kendall, he apparently undertook to transfer his lease to Hawkins in trust to reassign a moiety of the interest under it to these partners.[1613] No reassignment, however, was in fact made. Evans carried out some repairs in December 1603, and trouble arose with his partners because he severed the school-house and chamber over the same from the great hall and used them as private apartments to dine and sup in.[1614] When the playing companies were hard hit by the plague of 1603–4, Evans began to treat with Burbadge for a surrender of the lease.[1615] This came to nothing at the time, but in August 1608, when the Revels company was in disgrace for playing Chapman’s Byron and Kirkham had declared a desire to make an end of the speculation, the suggestion was revived, and the surrender, probably with the assent of Hawkins, actually took place.[1616] As part of his consideration, Evans, through a nominee, was admitted by Burbadge into a new syndicate, of which the other members were Burbadge himself and his brother Cuthbert, and some of the leading players of the King’s company, by whom it was intended that the Blackfriars should now be used.[1617] The King’s men probably entered upon their occupation of the theatre in the autumn of 1609, and thereafter used it alternatively with the Globe, as their winter house, up to the end of their career in 1642.[1618] The new syndicate consisted of seven partners, who may be called ‘housekeepers’, in accordance with the terminology found in use in 1635, in order to distinguish them from the ‘sharers’ in the acting profits of the company.[1619] On 9 August 1608 Richard Burbadge executed six leases, each conveying a seventh part of the play-house for a term of twenty-one years from the previous midsummer, and entailing the payment of a seventh part of the rent of £40. The six lessees were his brother Cuthbert, John Heminges, William Shakespeare, Henry Condell, William Sly, and Thomas Evans. The remaining interest he no doubt retained himself. Sly, however, died five days later, and his share was surrendered by his executrix, and divided amongst the other partners. On 25 August 1611 it was transferred to William Ostler. After his death on 16 December 1614 it should have passed to his widow, Thomasina, but her father John Heminges retained it, and in 1629 she estimated that he had thus defrauded her of profits at the rate of £20 a year.[1620] At some date later than 1611 John Underwood must have been admitted to a share, for he owned one at his death in 1624. The original leases terminated in 1629. Probably new ones were then entered into, for by 1633 we find that the rent had been increased to £50, and in 1635 that the interest of the housekeepers had still four years to run, and that it was divided not into seven, but into eight parts. Cuthbert Burbadge and the widows of Richard Burbadge and Henry Condell still represented the original holders. Two parts had been bought in 1633 and 1634 from Heminges’s son by John Shank. One part was still held in the name of Underwood, but a third of it was apparently in the hands of Eillart Swanston. John Lowin and Joseph Taylor had each a part. As a result of the dispute the Lord Chamberlain ordered a new partition under which Shank resigned one share to be divided between Swanston, Thomas Pollard, and Robert Benfield.[1621]

The occupation of the Blackfriars by the King’s men was not wholly peaceful. The beginning of their tenure almost exactly coincided with the grant of the new charter by which the jurisdiction of the City was extended to the precinct.[1622] It was not, however, until 1619 that an attempt was made to invoke this jurisdiction against them. In that year the officials of the precinct and the church of St. Anne’s, backed up by a few of the inhabitants, sent a petition to the Corporation, in which they recited the inconveniences due to a play-house in their midst, recalled the action taken by the Privy Council in 1596, as well as the Star Chamber order of 1600 limiting the London play-houses to two, and begged that conformity to the wishes of the Council might be enforced. The Corporation made an order for the suppression of the Blackfriars on 21 January 1619.[1623] It clearly remained inoperative, but explains why the King’s men thought it desirable to obtain a fresh patent, dated on 27 March 1619, in which their right to play at ‘their private house scituate in the precinctes of the Blackfriers’, as well as at the Globe, was explicitly stated.[1624] They had to face another attack in 1631. Their opponents on this occasion approached Laud, then Bishop of London.[1625] After some delay Laud seems to have brought the matter before the Privy Council. The idea was mooted of buying the players out and on 9 October 1633 a commission of Middlesex justices was appointed to report as to the value of their interests.[1626] These were estimated by the players at £21,990, and by the commissioners at £2,900. The only offer towards a compensation fund was one of £100 from the parish of St. Anne’s.[1627] Evidently the proposal was allowed to drop. On 20 November 1633, the Privy Council made an order forbidding coaches to stand in Ludgate or St. Paul’s Churchyard while the performances were going on, but even this regulation was practically cancelled by an amending order made at a meeting presided over by the King in person on 29 December.[1628]

It is rather disappointing that the numerous documents bearing upon the occupation of the Blackfriars between 1600 and 1608 should throw so little light upon the way in which James Burbadge adapted his purchase ‘with great charge and troble’ to the purposes of a theatre. The lease of 1600 did not cover the whole of the property, but only a ‘great hall or roome, with the roomes over the same’. Presumably this was the case also with the leases of 1608, since the rent was the same as in 1600. The rest of the premises, with those purchased later by the younger Burbadges, may be represented by the four tenements valued at £75 a year in 1633, and the ‘piece of void ground to turn coaches’ valued at £6 was doubtless the fragment of the old kitchen yard north of the approach. The Kirkham lawsuits tell us that one or two rooms were reserved for the residence of Evans in 1602 and that during the early part of 1604 ‘a certen rome, called the Scholehouse, and a certen chamber over the same’ had been ‘seuered from the said great hall, and made fitt by’ Evans ‘at his owne proper cost and chardges, to dyne and supp in’.[1629] Professor Wallace has a number of additional lawsuits, still unpublished.[1630] But the extracts from these given by him in 1908 add only a few details to those formerly known. They seem to amount to this. The hall was 66 ft. from north to south and 46 ft. from east to west. It was paved, and had a stage, galleries, and seats of which a schedule was attached to the lease. The stage was at one end of the hall. The school-house was at the north end of the hall.[1631] At this end also must have been the entrance, as one of the petitions of 1619 locates it near the way used from part of the precinct in going to church.[1632] It was doubtless by the gate-house entry to the cloister, just beyond where the coaches turned. Unfortunately one is left quite in doubt upon the critical question as to which of the rooms known to us from earlier records were used for the theatre. It might have been the upper frater with the partitions removed; it might have been constructed out of the paved hall and blind parlour beneath, which appear to be represented by the ‘midle romes’ and two of the rooms in the occupation of Peter Johnson enumerated in the conveyance to Burbadge. A priori one would have thought the upper frater the most likely. It may very well have been paved, like the hall beneath it, and a chamber which had held parliaments and a legatine trial could amply suffice to hold a theatre. On this supposition the rooms ‘above’ the hall which were conveyed by the lease of 1600, and one of which Evans converted into a dining-room can only have been the room over the staircase and the garret over that. These, indeed, may have extended over the north end of the frater proper, although in the main that building appears, down to the time when Burbadge bought it, to have had nothing over it but leads.[1633] There is a serious difficulty in the way of the alternative theory, which would identify the theatre with the ‘midle romes’ on the ground floor. This is that these would most likely only be low rooms, vaulted to carry the heavy floor of the parliament chamber above. On the whole, the balance of probability appears to be strongly in favour of the upper frater.

Professor Wallace’s account of the matter is categorical. ‘The south section’, he says, ‘underwent a thorough transformation. The two stories were converted into the auditorium called “the great Hall or Room”.... The roof was changed, and rooms, probably of the usual dormer sort, were built above the Great Hall.’[1634] I do not know whether there is any evidence for this theory, which disregards a good many structural difficulties, in those parts of his recently discovered documents which Professor Wallace has not published; there is certainly none in those which he has. If not, I do not think we must assume that Burbadge undertook expensive building operations, when he had all the facilities for planning an admirable auditorium without them. Professor Wallace seems to have been led into his conjecture by an assumed necessity for providing space for three tiers of galleries. There is no such necessity, and in fact no evidence for more than one tier, although I dare say that the upper frater taken by itself was high enough for two. Professor Wallace cites a reference to ‘porticibus anglice galleryes’, and points out that ‘galleryes’ is a plural. This is so, but the ‘galleryes’ were not necessarily superimposed; if one ran along the east side of the hall and the other along the west, they would still constitute a plural. Professor Wallace takes the step from his plural to three with the aid of Cockledemoy’s address to ‘my very fine Heliconian gallants, and you, my worshipful friends in the middle region’.[1635] Obviously the ‘middle region’ is not bound to be the middle one of three galleries; it may just as well be the space between the stage and the galleries.

It is beyond the scope of this inquiry to trace the detailed fortunes of the Blackfriars during its later years. By Caroline times it took place of the Globe as the principal and most profitable house of the King’s men.[1636] In 1653, when like the rest of the theatres it was closed, Richard Flecknoe recalled its origin and wrote its epitaph.[1637] It was pulled down on 6 August 1655.[1638] This site was used for tenements, which in course of time were replaced by The Times office which now occupies the site.[1639]