Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 2).pdf/434

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1611, and whose Chaste Maid in Cheapside was published in 1630 as 'often acted at the Swan on the Banke-side'. The Hope itself was modelled structurally upon the Swan. Its measurements were the same, and it had similar partitions between the rooms and external staircases. Its heavens, however, were to be supported without the help of posts from the stage, since this had to be removable on days of bear-baiting. It is obviously illegitimate to infer from this specification that the stage of the Swan, which was not used for bear-baiting, was also removable. The accounts of the overseers show one more payment from the 'players' in 1621, which perhaps supports the statement contained in one of Malone's notes from Sir Henry Herbert's office-book, that after 1620 the Swan was 'used occasionally for the exhibition of prize-fighters'.[1] The theatre is marked 'Old Playhouse' in the manor map of 1627. The last notice of it is in Holland's Leaguer (1632) as a famous amphitheatre, which was 'now fallen to decay, and like a dying swanne hanging downe her head seemed to sing her own dierge'.[2]

Many of the maps of the Bankside do not extend far enough west to take in the Swan. It is named and shown as an octagonal or decagonal building by Visscher (1616) and in maps of the Merian group (1638), but not by Hollar (1647).


xi. THE GLOBE


[Bibliographical Note.—The devolution of the Globe shares can be traced in the documents of three lawsuits: (a) Ostler v. Heminges, in the Court of King's Bench in 1616 (Coram Rege Roll 1454, 13 Jac. I, Hilary Term, m. 692), described by C. W. Wallace in The Times of 2 and 4 Oct. 1909, and in part privately printed by him in Advance Sheets from Shakespeare, the Globe, and Blackfriars (1909), here cited as O. v. H.; (b) Witter v. Heminges and Condell, in the Court of Requests (1619-20), described by C. W. Wallace in The Century of Aug. 1910, and printed by him in Nebraska University Studies, x (1910), 261, here cited as W. v. H.; and (c) the proceedings before the Lord Chamberlain in 1635 known as the Sharers Papers, and printed by Halliwell-Phillipps in Outlines, i. 312. Professor Wallace's descriptive articles require some corrections from the texts of his documents. Much evidence bearing upon the site of the theatre was collected by W. Rendle in The Bankside, Southwark, and the Globe Playhouse (1877), printed by the N. S. S. as an appendix to Harrison, pt. ii (cited as Rendle, Bankside), in Walford's Antiquarian, viii (1885), 209, and in The Anchor Brewery (1888, Inns of Old Southwark, 56), by G. Hubbard in Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 3rd series, xvii. 26, and London and Middlesex Arch. Soc. Trans. n. s. ii (1912), pt. iii,

  1. Herbert, 63; Variorum, iii. 56. Rendle, in Antiquarian Magazine, vii. 211, notes a 'licence for T. B. and three assistants to make shows of Italian motion, at the Prince's Arms, or the Swan' in 1623; cf. Herbert, 47.
  2. Cf. p. 376.