About this time, it seems, the playhouse was rebuilt and enlarged. The Fortune had been destroyed by fire in 1621, and had just been rebuilt in a larger and handsomer form. In 1625 one W.C., in London's Lamentation for her Sins, writes: "Yet even then, Oh Lord, were the theatres magnified and enlarged."[503] This doubtless refers to the rebuilding of the Fortune and the Red Bull. Prynne specifically states in his Histriomastix (1633) that the Fortune and Red Bull had been "lately reedified [and] enlarged." But nothing further is known of the "re-edification and enlargement" of the Red Bull.
After its enlargement the playhouse seems to have acquired a reputation for noise and vulgarity. Carew, in 1630, speaks of it as a place where "noise prevails" and a "drowth of wit," and yet as always crowded with people while the better playhouses stood empty. In The Careless Shepherdess, acted at Salisbury Court, we read:
And I will hasten to the money-box,
And take my shilling out again;
I'll go to the Bull, or Fortune, and there see
A play for two-pence, and a jig to boot.[504]
In 1638, a writer of verses prefixed to Randolph's Poems speaks of the "base plots" acted with great applause at the Red Bull.[505] James Wright informs us, in his Historia Histrionica, that the Red Bull and the Fortune were "mostly frequented by citizens and the meaner sort of people."[506] And Edmund Gayton, in his Pleasant Notes, wittily remarks: "I have heard that the poets of the Fortune and Red Bull had always a mouth-measure for their actors (who were terrible tear-throats) and made their lines proportionable to their compass, which were sesquipedales, a foot and a half."[507] Probably the ill repute of the large public playhouses at this time was chiefly due to the rise of private playhouses in the city.
In 1635 the Red Bull Company moved to the Fortune, and Prince Charles's Men occupied the Red Bull.
Five years later, at Easter, 1640, Prince Charles's Men moved back to the Fortune, and the Red Bull Company returned to its old home. In a prologue written to celebrate the event,[508] the members of the company declared:
Here, gentlemen, our anchor's fix't.
This proved true, for the company remained at the Red Bull until Parliament passed the ordinance of 1642 closing the playhouses and forbidding all dramatic performances. The ordinance, which was to hold good during the continuance of the civil war, was renewed in 1647, with January 1, 1648, set as the date of its expiration. Through some oversight a new ordinance was not immediately passed, and the actors were prompt to take advantage of the fact. They threw open the playhouses, and the Londoners flocked in great crowds to hear plays again. At the Red Bull, so we learn from the newspaper called Perfect Occurrences, was given a performance of Beaumont and Fletcher's Wit Without Money.
But on February 9, 1648, Parliament made up for its oversight by passing an exceptionally severe ordinance against dramatic exhibitions, directing that actors be publicly flogged, and that each spectator be fined the sum of five shillings.