to Boxley, by explaining that those who visited the shrine did not get off scot-free—
'no more than such as goe to Parisgardein, the Bell Sauage, or Theatre,
to beholde Beare baiting, Enterludes, or Fence play, can account of
any pleasant spectacle, unlesse they first pay one pennie at the gate,
another at the entrie of the Scaffolde, and the thirde for a quiet
standing.'[1]
Paris Garden was the generic name given to the successive
places for bear-baiting which lay on the Surrey side of the
river, not in Southwark proper, which was in the jurisdiction
of the City, but in the Liberty of the Clink, which stretched
in a westerly direction along the Bankside, or still farther
to the west, in the Manor of Paris Garden itself. In Surrey,
no less than in London, plays had established themselves at
an early date. A performance was going on in Southwark,
while the priests of St. Saviour's sang Dirige for Henry VIII's
soul in 1547.[2] The Privy Council ordered the Surrey justices
to suppress plays in the Borough and the adjoining places
during 1578; and it seems probable that a regular play-*house
had been built south of the river at a date not much
later than that of the Theatre itself. It stood far back
behind Southwark, in the village of Newington, divided from
the river by St. George's Fields. The distance and the
bad roads were against it; and it was not until the Rose
was built in the Clink about 1587, that the Bankside became
a serious rival to the 'fields' in the north as the home of
theatres. The Swan, in Paris Garden, was built in 1595.
Newington is too far to the south to appear in the maps, but
Norden's map of 1593 shows two round buildings, standing
between Bankside and an unnamed road, which may safely
be identified with that called Maiden Lane. One is lettered
'The Beare howse', the other, more to the east and the south,
'The play howse'; and this must clearly be the Rose.
In 1596 the City appear to have at last obtained the assent of the Privy Council to the complete exclusion of plays from the area of their jurisdiction. This is probably the proceeding described, with no precise indication of date, in the following passage from Richard Rawlidge's A Monster Lately Found out and Discovered, or the Scourging of Tipplers (1628):[3]
'London hath within the memory of man lost much of hir pristine
