A more serious blow to the company, however, fell in April, 1616, when Shakespeare himself died. To the world he had been "the applause, delight, the wonder" of the stage; but to the members of the Globe Company he had been for many years a "friend and fellow." Only Burbage and Heminges (described in 1614 as "old Heminges"), now remained of the original venturers. And Burbage passed away on March 13, 1619:
He's gone! and with him what a world are dead
Which he reviv'd—to be revived so
No more. Young Hamlet, old Hieronimo,
Kind Lear, the grieved Moor, and more beside
That lived in him have now for ever died![422]
Many elegies in a similar vein were written celebrating his wonderful powers as an actor; yet the tribute that perhaps affects us most deals with him merely as a man. The Earl of Pembroke, writing to the Ambassador to Germany, gives the court news about the mighty ones of the kingdom: "My Lord of Lenox made a great supper to the French Ambassador this night here, and even now all the company are at a play; which I, being tender-hearted, could not endure to see so soon after the loss of my old acquaintance Burbage."[423]
THE TRADITIONAL SITE OF THE GLOBE
From Wilkinson's Theatrum Illustrata (1825). This site is still advocated by some scholars. Compare page [245].
In 1623 Heminges and Condell, with great "care and paine," collected and published the plays of Shakespeare, "onely to keep the memory of so worthy a Friend and Fellow alive"; and shortly after, they too died, Condell in 1627 and Heminges in 1630.
After the passing of this group of men, whose names are so familiar to us, the history of the playhouse seems less important, and may be chronicled briefly.
When young Matthew Brend came of age he recovered possession of the Globe property by a decree of the Court of Wards. Apparently he accepted the lease executed by his uncle and guardian, Bodley, by which the actors were to remain in possession of the Globe until December 25, 1635; but in 1633 he sought to cancel the lease he himself had executed as a minor, by which the actors were to remain in possession until 1644. His purpose in thus seeking to gain possession of the Globe was to lease it to other actors at a material increase in his profits.[424] Naturally the owners of the Globe were alarmed, and they brought suit in the Court of Requests. In 1635, one of the sharers, John Shanks, declares that he "is without any hope to renew" the lease; and he refers thus to the suit against Brend: "When your suppliant purchased his parts [in 1634] he had no certainty thereof more than for one year in the Globe, and there was a chargeable suit then pending in the Court of Requests between Sir Mathew Brend, Knight, and the lessees of the Globe and their assigns, for the adding of nine years to their lease in consideration that their predecessors had formerly been at the charge of £1400 in building of the said house."[425] The lessees ultimately won their contention, and thus secured the right to occupy the Globe until December 25, 1644—a term which, as it happened, was quite long enough, for the Puritans closed all playhouses in 1642.
What disposition, if any, the sharers made of the Globe between 1642 and 1644 we do not know. But before the lease expired, it seems, Brend demolished the playhouse and erected tenements on its site. In the manuscript notes to the Phillipps copy of Stow's Annals, we find the statement that the Globe was "pulled down to the ground by Sir Mathew Brend, on Monday the 15 of April, 1644, to make tenements in the room of it";[426] and the statement is verified by a mortgage, executed in 1706, between Elizabeth, the surviving daughter and heir of Thomas Brend, and one William James, citizen of London. The mortgage concerns "all those messuages or tenements ... most of which ... were erected and built where the late playhouse called the Globe stood, and upon the ground thereunto belonging."[427]