Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 2).pdf/394

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and treating Salisbury Court as a continuation of the earlier Whitefriars. The Hope and Newington Butts are afterthoughts, and make his seventeen into nineteen. We can identify his five inns as the Bull, the Bell, the Cross Keys, the Bel Savage, and probably the Red Lion, although this just antedates his period of sixty years; while his balance of eight unnamed common play-houses must be the Theatre, the Curtain, the Rose, the Swan, the Globe, the Fortune, the Boar's Head, and the Red Bull.

Prynne, in his Histriomastix (1633), records six 'divels chappels' as then in use, and these are doubtless the six houses, the Blackfriars, Globe, Cockpit, Salisbury Court, Fortune, and Red Bull, which are also noted by the Restoration writers on the stage, John Downes and James Wright, as surviving up to the cataclysm of the civil wars.[1]

Somewhat more confused and vague in their datings are the reminiscences about 1660 of the Marquis of Newcastle in his letter of advice to Prince Charles, under the head of 'Devertismentes for your Ma^{tie} People':[2]


'Firste for London Paris Garden will holde good for the meaner People.

'Then for severall Playe Houses as ther weare five att leaste In my Time,—

'Black-Friers, the Cock-Pitt, Salsburye Courte, the Fortune, & the Redd Bull,—Ther weare the Boyes thatt played at Black-Friers, & Paules, & then the Kinges Players played att the Globe—which is nowe calde the Phenixe [!]—Some Played, att the Bores heade, & att the Curtin In the feildes & some att the Hope whiche Is the Beare Garden, and some at White Friers,—Butt five or Sixe Playe Houses Is enough for all sortes off Peoples divertion & pleasure In thatt kinde.'


The marquis is the only one of the chroniclers who definitely records the Boar's Head.

A manuscript continuation of Stowe's Annales, found in a copy of the 1631 edition, narrates the havoc wrought by Puritans and ground-landlords:[3]


'Play Houses. The Globe play house on the Banks side in Southwarke, was burnt downe to the ground, in the yeare 1612. And now built vp againe in the yeare 1613, at the great charge of King Iames, and many Noble men and others. And now pulled downe to the ground, by Sir Matthew Brand, On Munday the 15 of April 1644, to make tenements in the room of it.

'The Blacke Friers players playhouse in Blacke Friers, London, which

  1. Cf. App. I.
  2. S. A. Strong, Catalogue of Letters at Welbeck, 226.
  3. Harrison, iv. 212, from Phillipps MS. 11613, f. 16, penes J. F. P. Fenwick, of Thirlestane House, Cheltenham, written about 1656-8. The writer is not quite accurate in some of his earlier dates.