de Wit twrote his Observations Londinenses. He too mentioned the four theatres, together with the baiting house, and was particularly struck by the newest, and as he avers, the largest and fairest of them, the Swan, of the interior of which he attached a rough sketch to his manuscript. This manuscript is lost, but fortunately an extract survives, copied into a commonplace book by Arend van Buchell of Utrecht. The following is the complete text:[1]
Ex Observationibus Londinensibus Johannis de Witt.
De phano D. Pauli. Huic Paulino phano adheret locus ab asservandis sacratioribus vestimentis Sacristi dictus, omnino observatione dignus,, Antiquities of Westminster (1711), 198. Burgh's death, also given on the monument, was 7 March '1594'. On the whole 1596 is the most probable date for de Witt's visit. Arend van Buchell was himself a traveller, and his Diarium has been edited (1907) by G. Brom and L. A. van Langeraad. But he did not visit England.]
- ↑ Text by H. B. Wheatley, On a Contemporary Drawing of the Interior of the Swan Theatre, 1596 (N. S. S. Trans. 1887-92, 215), from Utrecht Univ. Library MS. Var. 355, ff. 131^v, 132, with facsimile reproduction of drawing. The passage was first made known by K. T. Gaedertz, Zur Kenntniss der altenglischen Bühne (1888). The reproduction of the drawing published by Gaedertz and further reproduced from him in many modern books is not an exact facsimile; the only material difference is that the engraver has made the figure at the door of the loft rather more obviously a man than it is in the original. Letters of the early part of the seventeenth century from de Witt to Buchell, who was his fellow-student at Leyden in 1583, are also in the Utrecht Library (Gaedertz, 57). The last sentence of the passage appears from 'narrabat' to be a report by Buchell either of something not directly copied by him or of de Witt's conversation; but the rest is pretty clearly from 'ea quae alio loco a me notata sunt' a verbatim extract from a manuscript of de Witt's own. If so, 'adpinxi' further shows that the eye-witness of de Witt and not the imagination of Buchell is the source of the drawing. Gaedertz, 63, indeed suggests that the drawing is an original given by de Witt to Buchell, but as Wheatley, 219, points out, this is impossible, as the paper is the same as that used in the rest of the volume. There remains the question of date. De Witt is traceable at Amsterdam in Nov. 1594, at Utrecht in the winters of 1595 and 1596, and in 1599, and at Amsterdam again in March 1604 (Gaedertz, 58). His visit to London obviously falls between Nov. 1594, when the Swan was still only an intention, and Dec. 1598, when the Theatre was pulled down. Gaedertz, 55, puts it in the summer of 1596, largely because Shakespeare, whom he thinks de Witt would certainly have mentioned if he had met him, may have been in Stratford about that time. This is hopeless. Nor does the further suggestion of Gaedertz that a lameness from which de Witt was suffering in Dec. 1596 was due to his travels carry much conviction. But he is not likely, before that year, to have appended the words 'A^o. 1596' to his notice of Sir John Burgh's tomb. If this is intended to be the date, not of his visit, but of the tomb, it is an error. Camden, Reges . . . in Ecclesia . . . West-*monasterii sepulti (1600), gives the final words of the inscription as 'G. B. A. M. P. anno Dom. 1595', and although the tomb itself has disappeared since 1868 and some modern guides date it 1594 or 1598, Camden is confirmed by J. C[rull
