It is rather unfortunate for us that the building was to be in so many respects a copy of the Globe, for that deprives us of further detailed specifications; and it is unfortunate, too, that the plan or drawing showing the arrangement of the stage was not preserved with the rest of the document. Yet we are able to derive much exact information from the contract; and with this information, at least two modern architects have made reconstructions of the building.[445]
No representation of the exterior of the Fortune has come down to us. In the so-called Ryther [Map of London], there is, to be sure, what seems to be a crude representation of the playhouse (see page [278]); but if this is really intended for the Fortune, it does little more than mark the location. Yet one can readily picture in his imagination the playhouse—a plastered structure, eighty feet square and approximately forty feet high,[446] with small windows marking the galleries, a turret and flagpole surmounting the red-tiled roof, and over the main entrance a sign representing Dame Fortune:
I'le rather stand here,
Like a statue in the fore-front of your house,
For ever, like the picture of Dame Fortune
Before the Fortune Playhouse.[447]
THE FORTUNE PLAYHOUSE (?)
The curious structure with the flag may be intended to mark the site of the Fortune. (From the so-called Ryther Map of London, drawn about 1630-40.)
Nor is there any pictorial representation of the interior of the playhouse. In the absence of such, I offer the reader a verbal picture of the interior as seen from the stage during the performance of a play. In Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl, acted at the Fortune, Sir Alexander shows to his friends his magnificent house. Advancing to the middle of the stage, and pointing out over the building, he asks them how they like it:
Goshawk. I like the prospect best.
Laxton.See how 't is furnished!
Sir Davy. A very fair sweet room.
Sir Alex.Sir Davy Dapper,
The furniture that doth adorn this room
Cost many a fair grey groat ere it came here;
But good things are most cheap when they're most dear.
Nay, when you look into my galleries,
How bravely they're trimm'd up, you all shall swear
You're highly pleas'd to see what's set down there:
Stories of men and women, mix'd together,
Fair ones with foul, like sunshine in wet weather;
Within one square a thousand heads are laid,
So close that all of heads the room seems made;
As many faces there, fill'd with blithe looks
Shew like the promising titles of new books
Writ merrily, the readers being their own eyes,
Which seem to move and to give plaudities;
And here and there, whilst with obsequious ears
Throng'd heaps do listen, a cut-purse thrusts and leers
With hawk's eyes for his prey; I need not shew him;
By a hanging, villainous look yourselves may know him,
The face is drawn so rarely: then, sir, below,
The very floor, as 't were, waves to and fro,
And, like a floating island, seems to move
Upon a sea bound in with shores above.
All. These sights are excellent![448]
A closer view of this audience—"men and women, mix'd together, fair ones with foul"—is furnished by one of the letters of Orazio Busino,[449] the chaplain of the Venetian Embassy, who visited the Fortune playhouse shortly after his arrival in London in 1617: