settled,[1] but Dr. Chambers altered his opinion in the course of investigation, and his conversion to the Anchor Brewery view is appended as an afterthought. The whole controversy is of great interest as showing the tricks that the most authentic direct evidence may play, for the site south of Maiden Lane involves the assumption that when the lease of the property was drawn up it was described from a plan which was accidentally turned the wrong way round, so that north and south were reversed! No wonder that Dr. Chambers, with his caution, was rather contemptuous of the suggestion when first advanced. “I daresay that such things do sometimes happen in conveyancer’s [sic] offices, but it is hardly legitimate to call them in aid as a canon of interpretation.” I suppose he has come to recognise that the legitimacy must depend on the temptation, since he now surrenders the point rather than make nonsense of the other evidence. It speaks well for his openmindedness that he bowed to conviction, and for his frankness—perhaps a trifle sardonic—that he left his original argument as it stood.
Maybe the Swan comes next in interest, on account of the drawing and description of it by a Dutch visitor about 1596. There are more variants among the published reproductions of this sketch than Dr. Chambers seems aware, and I should have been glad of an explicit statement that his own block was made direct from the original. By the way, his note as to the position of the drawing in the text is misleading, and I do not feel as certain as he is that it depicts women in the audience. There remain the almost unknown theatre at Newington Butts, the reconstructed baiting-ring known as the Hope, fittingly opened in 1614 with Jonson’s malodorous Bartholomew Fair, the Boar’s Head, which Dr. Chambers thinks may have been between Aldgate and Whitechapel, and the Red Bull in Clerkenwell. Of these I have only to note that one “Browne of the Boares head,” mentioned by Mrs. Alleyn, though apparently an actor, was very likely a tenant in Henslowe’s property of that name rather than connected with the theatre; and that when Dekker writes: “The pide Bul heere keeps a tossing and a roaring, when the Red Bull dares not stir,” he is alluding not only to Paris Garden, but to the book-trade, the Pied Bull being the sign of the publisher for whom he was writing his tract. The theatres technically known as “Private Houses,” are two only, the important
- ↑ In spite of the recent arguments in Mr. George Hubbard’s monograph On the Site of the Globe Playhouse, Cambridge, 1923.
