[1655] Before the Swan was built, Nashe wrote in The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), ‘I sawe a banketting house belonging to a merchant that was the meruaile of the world.... It was builte round of green marble like a Theater without’ (Works, ii. 282).
[1656] Cf. chh. iv, xvi (introd.).
[1657] Atlantic Monthly (1906), xcvii. 369.
[1658] Kirkman also says in the preface to The Wits (1672), ‘I have seen the Red Bull Play-house, which was a large one’; but he is referring, more certainly than Wright, to the rebuilt house.
[1659] Cf. Albright, 40; Lawrence, i. 12, and E. S. xxxii. 44.
[1660] There is a dot in Wheatley’s facsimile over the second well-marked ‘r’ of the word ‘orchestra’. Is it possible that Van Buchell misread it ‘orchestia’?
[1661] Cf. Brereton in Homage, 204.
[1662] Cf. ch. xvi.
[1663] The Theatrum of Jonson’s 1616 Folio t.p. is oval, rather than round, but it is safer to take this, in spite of its hut, as representing Jonson’s notion of a classical theatre.
[1664] Cf. ch. xvi. Graves, 32, tries to minimize the structural influence of inn-yards on the theatres, and even doubts whether the actors preferred to act in these ‘rather than in the great halls’. But I do not think that he makes much of a case. Had the inns, indeed, ‘great halls’ at all?