[1164] Wallace, 186, 215, 220.
[1165] Ibid. 285.
[1166] Ibid. 267, 275.
[1167] Aubrey, ii. 12, on the authority of J. Greenhill, says that Ben Jonson ‘acted and wrote, but both ill, at the Green Curtaine, a kind of nursery or obscure play-house, somewhere in the suburbes’ (I thinke towards Shoreditch or Clarkenwell), and on that of Sir Edward Shirburn that Jonson killed Marlowe, ‘on Bunhill, comeing from the Green-Curtain play-house’. Hoxton, where Jonson killed Gabriel Spencer, is of course not far from Bunhill, and both are in the Holywell neighbourhood. Probably Aubrey, in giving a name to the theatre, is babbling of green frieze, rather than green fields. Steevens and Malone (Variorum, iii. 54) committed themselves to the view that ‘the original sign hung out at this play-house was the painting of a curtain striped’.
[1168] Thomas Wilkins was perhaps related to George Wilkins the dramatist, who was buried at Shoreditch 9 Aug. 1613. Sir William Allen is not known to have had anything to do either with Edward Alleyn or with Giles Allen, the ground-landlord of the Theatre. Lanman was 54 on 30 July 1592. We cannot assume that the name is merely an orthographic variant of that of Laneham.
[1169] Reproduced in Ordish, 40.
[1170] Reproduced in Baker, 36, 135, with a photographic enlargement of the building, wrongly identified with the Theatre. It is shown as a round or hexagonal structure, with a large flag, standing in the middle of a square paled plot; but too much stress must not be laid on what is probably only a cartographic symbol. Immediately south of it is Bedlam. Kiechel tells us that the house had three galleries, and de Witt that it was an ‘amphitheatrum’ (cf. pp. 358, 362). In the epilogue to Three English Brothers (1607) it is a ‘round circumference’.
[1171] Cf. p. 393.
[1172] Fleay, 40, 88, 145, 201, 300, assigns it as follows: Sussex’s (1576–83), Arundel’s and Oxford’s (1584), Howard’s and Hunsdon’s (1585), Oxford’s (1586–8), Pembroke’s (1589–97), Chamberlain’s (1597–9), Derby’s (1599–1600), uncertain company (1601), Queen Anne’s (1604–9), Duke of York’s (1610–23). But, of course, this is guessing.
[1173] Tarlton, 16. If Tarlton’s Jig of a Horse Load of Fools, taken from a manuscript of Collier’s (Tarlton, xx), is genuine, that also was given at the Curtain.