After this the history of the property becomes obscure. Mrs. Thrale (later Mrs. Piozzi), the friend of Samuel Johnson, whose residence was near by in Deadman's Place, thought that she saw certain "remains of the Globe" discovered by workmen in the employ of her husband:[428] "For a long time, then,—or I thought it such,—my fate was bound up with the old Globe Theatre, upon the Bankside, Southwark; the alley it had occupied having been purchased and [the tenements] thrown down by Mr. Thrale to make an opening before the windows of our dwelling-house. When it lay desolate in a black heap of rubbish, my mother one day in a joke called it the Ruins of Palmyra; and after that they had laid it down in a grass-plot Palmyra was the name it went by.... But there were really curious remains of the old Globe Playhouse, which though hexagonal in form without, was round within." In spite of serious difficulties in this narrative it is possible that the workmen, in digging the ground preparatory to laying out the garden, uncovered the foundation of the Globe, which, it will be recalled, was formed of piles driven deep into the soil, and so well made that it resisted the fire of 1613.[429]
At the present time the site of the Globe is covered by the extensive brewery of Messrs. Barclay, Perkins, and Company. Upon one of the walls of the brewery, on the south side of Park Street, which was formerly Maiden Lane, has been placed a bronze memorial tablet[430] showing in relief the Bankside, with what is intended to be the Globe Playhouse conspicuously displayed in the foreground. This is a circular building designed after the circular playhouse in the Speed-Hondius View of London, and represents, as I have tried to show, not the Globe, but the Rose. At the left side of the tablet is a bust of the poet modeled after the Droeshout portrait. At the right is the simple inscription:
HERE STOOD THE GLOBE PLAYHOUSE OF
SHAKESPEARE
Yet it is very doubtful whether the Globe really stood there. Mr. Wallace has produced good evidence to show that the building was on the north side of Park Street near the river; and in the course of the present study I have found that site generally confirmed.
CHAPTER XIII
THE FORTUNE
THE erection of the Globe on the Bankside within a few hundred yards of the Rose was hardly gratifying to the Admiral's Men. Not only did it put them in close competition with the excellent Burbage-Shakespeare organization, but it caused their playhouse (now nearly a quarter of a century old, and said to be in a state of "dangerous decay") to suffer in comparison with the new and far handsomer Globe, "the glory of the Bank." Accordingly, before the Globe had been in operation much more than half a year, Henslowe and Alleyn decided to move to another section of London, and to erect there a playhouse that should surpass the Globe both in size and in magnificence. To the authorities, however, they gave as reasons for abandoning the Rose, first, "the dangerous decay" of the building, and secondly, "for that the same standeth very noisome for resort of people in the winter time."
The new playhouse was undertaken by Henslowe and Alleyn jointly, although the exact arrangement between them is not now clear. Alleyn seems to have advanced the money and to have held the titles of ownership; but on April 4, 1601, he leased to Henslowe a moiety (or one-half interest) in the playhouse and other properties connected with it for a period of twenty-four years at an annual rental of £8—a sum far below the real value of the moiety.[431]