[621] The playhouse discussed in this chapter was officially known as "The Salisbury Court Playhouse," and it should always be referred to by that name. Unfortunately, owing to its situation near the district of Whitefriars, it was sometimes loosely, though incorrectly, called "Whitefriars." Since it had no relation whatever to the theatre formerly in the Manor-House of Whitefriars, a perpetuation of this false nomenclature is highly undesirable.
[622] Malone, Variorum, iii, 66.
[623] Chalmers's Supplemental Apology, pp. 216-17. He may also have been the author of a play called The Masque, which Herbert in 1624 licensed: "For the Palsgrave's Company, a new play called The Masque." In the list of manuscript plays collected by Warburton we find the title A Mask, and the authorship ascribed to R. Govell. Since "R. Govell" is not otherwise heard of, we may reasonably suppose that this was Warburton's reading of "R. Gunell." Gunnell also prefixed a poem to the Works of Captain John Smith, 1626.
[624] Malone, Variorum, iii, 66, 122, 176, 177.
[625] The Blackfriars auditorium was sixty-six feet in length and forty-six feet in breadth.
[626] Cunningham, The Shakespeare Society's Papers, iv, 104. In his Handbook for London Cunningham says that the Salisbury Court Playhouse "was originally the 'barn.'"
[627] Annals (1631), p. 1004. In 1633 Prynne (Histriomastix) refers to it as a "new theatre erected."
[628] Collier, The History of English Dramatic Literature (1879), iii, 106, thought that Salisbury Court was a round playhouse, basing his opinion on a line in Sharpe's Noble Stranger acted at "the private house in Salisbury Court": "Thy Stranger to the Globe-like theatre."
[629] I have not been able to examine this. In the only copy of the second edition accessible to me the Epistle is missing.
[630] Malone, Variorum, iii, 178.