sufficient esteem to be called Gabriel by his fellows, according to their familiar and hearty custom. What intercourse he had with Ben Jonson, who was a stout and high-tempered man, or how offence grew up between them, nobody knows. But Ben and Gabriel fell out, and there was nothing left for it but to settle their difference at the point of the sword. Gabriel, probably, was a bad swordsman, and he must have known, for it was quite notorious, that Ben was a man of fierce courage, and a master of fence. Perhaps it was from a consciousness of his own inferiority that, when they went out to fight in Hoxton Fields, Gabriel, who, strange to say, was the challenger, armed himself with a weapon ten inches longer than Ben’s. Now Ben had been a soldier, and had fought an honourable single combat with an enemy in the presence of two armies, and had carried off the spoils; and this base conduct of Gabriel fairly maddened him. But he took a bloody reckoning for it in that sanguinary duel; for, in spite of the undue length of his opponent’s sword, he slew him on the ground. Gabriel was buried in the churchyard of St. Leonard’s, where many notabilities of the early stage sleep, and a curt note in the parish register records simply that he was killed.
Almost simultaneously with the building of “The Curtain,” or immediately after, and all within the circuit of a few months, the enterprising Burbadge, with a clearer and more practical view of what lay before him than he had when he originally ventured upon “The Theatre,” undertook a third play-house on the outskirts of the Lord Mayor’s jurisdiction. This was in the liberties of the Blackfriars, on the verge of the Fleet river, a situation which, although just outside the dominions of the Lord Mayor, was one of the most thronged quarters of the town. Strenuous efforts were made to prevent him from establishing himself in this rich neighbourhood. The rooms he had obtained possession of adjoined the house of the Lord Chamberlain, who, with the Lord Hunsdon, the Lady Elizabeth Russell, and other distinguished inhabitants of the precinct, petitioned the Privy Council to stop him in his proceedings, setting forth the evil consequences that would ensue from the establishment of a play-house, especially as it was so near the church that it would disturb the minister and congregation in time of divine service. The petition failed, as did likewise a subsequent attempt made by the Lord Mayor to put down stage-plays in the Blackfriars, for which his worship was reproved by the Privy Council, and directed not to inter- meddle with the Liberties, except in the case of felons, as he had always done. The Blackfriars, destined to become one of the principal play-houses in the metropolis, was accordingly completed without interruption, and opened in 1576. Several other play-houses soon sprang up: the Bed Ball and the Fortune in the north of London; and on the southern bank of the river, in Southwark, the Globe, the Rose, the Swan, and two or three more in Newington and elsewhere.
The poor players had their revenge, and a signal revenge it was. Driven out of the city, and put to their wits' end for a subsistence, they built play-houses for themselves — a privilege they never enjoyed before — and laid the solid foundations of a profession which had previously neither form nor influence. There was, in reality, no stage till the players were expelled by the Lord Mayor. The player was little higher in the social scale than a street vagrant, who begged, or cheated, or juggled from hand to mouth. There was no association, no combined effort, no drama. But from the moment James Burbadge erected the theatre in Shoreditch, the calling of the player began to assume a definite and independent character. Acting grew up into the dignity of an Art, and out of the old chaos of drolls and interludes, and the rest of the wilderness of strange spectacles that used to be represented on Saints’ days, and marriage festivals, and the feasts of the Church, there rose up a National Drama.
Shakspeare found nearly all these theatres built when he came to London about 1585 or 1586; and some few years elapse after that before we have any trace of him as actor or dramatist. And during all this interval — fifteen years and upwards — James Burbadge has been living in the same house in Holywell Street, burying and marrying his children, and more increasing upon him, and in the midst of his family cares bringing out a succession of new plays, and looking after the companies of the three theatres, rather a more serious matter than the management of Lord Leicester’s troop, which consisted of five persons. The new plays were, for the most part, of a stately and magnificent order, of great breadth and grandeur, presenting humanity chiefly under imperial aspects, or in shapes of epic exaggeration; and the acting, with an ample capacity of pomp for such representations, was becoming insensibly trained for a drama taking in a wider horizon, and a greater variety of life.
Shakspeare found all this machinery ready to his hand when he was admitted into the Blackfriars, where Richard Burbadge, the second son of the founder of the first, and the second, and the third play-house, was already an established actor, taking the parts of all the boy-heroes, and youthful princes, with an earnestness that held out the surest promise of future greatness.
We need not speak of the friendship and intimate relations, lasting all their lives through, that bound the poet and the young actor together. Everybody knows that Richard Burbadge became the Roscius of his age, and that he was the original actor in most of Shakspeare’s principal characters; that the poet and the player, who were nearly of an age, died within two years of each other, Shakspeare dying first; and that, in honour of his memory, Burbadge called his next son William. These matters, tempting as they are, belong not to our story of the First Playhouse.
When the proper time arrived for James Burbadge to seek a renewal of his lease, he put his request in legal form before Goodman Giles Allen, stating that he had complied with all the conditions, and, amongst the rest, that he had expended no less than 700/. upon “The Theatre.” But Allen set up an excuse for declining to fulfil his agreement, and Burbadge had no remedy. By this time he was
so much occupied with his ventures elsewhere,