The New Bear Garden, octagonal in form, was probably modeled after the playhouses in Shoreditch, and made in all respects superior to the old amphitheatre which it supplanted.[187] We find that it was reckoned among the sights of the city, and was exhibited to distinguished foreign visitors. For example, when Sir Walter Raleigh undertook to entertain the French Ambassador, he carried him to view the monuments in Westminster Abbey and to see the new Bear Garden.
THE BEAR GARDEN
From Visscher's Map of London, published in 1616, but representing the city as it was several years earlier.
A picture of the building is to be seen in the Hondius [View of London], 1610 (see page [149]), and in the small [inset views] from the title-pages of Holland's Herωologia, 1620, and Baker's Chronicle, 1643 (see page [147]), all three of which probably go back to a view of London made between 1587 and 1597, and now lost. Another representation of the structure is to be seen in the [Delaram portrait] of King James, along with the Rose and the Globe (see opposite page [246]). The best representation of the building, however, is in Visscher's [View of London] (see page [127]), printed in 1616, but drawn several years earlier.[188]
Although we are not directly concerned with the history of the Bear Garden,[189] a few descriptions of "the royal game of bears, bulls, and dogs" drawn from contemporary sources will be of interest and of specific value for the discussion of the Hope Playhouse—itself both a bear garden and a theatre.
Robert Laneham, in his Description of the Entertainment at Kenilworth (1575), writes thus of a baiting of bears before the Queen:
Well, syr, the Bearz wear brought foorth intoo the Coourt, the dogs set too them.... It was a Sport very pleazaunt of theez beastz; to see the bear with his pink nyez leering after hiz enemiez approoch, the nimbleness & wayt of ye dog to take his auauntage, and the fors & experiens of the bear agayn to auoyd the assauts: if he war bitten in one place, how he woold pynch in an oother to get free: that if he wear taken onez, then what shyft, with byting, with clawing, with rooring, tossing, & tumbling he woold woork to wynd hym self from them: and when he waz lose, to shake his earz tywse or thryse, wyth the blud and the slauer aboout his fiznomy, waz a matter of a goodly releef.
John Houghton, in his Collection for Improvement of Husbandry and Trade,[190] gives a vivid account of the baiting of the bull. He says: