Brayne (afterwards Miles) v. Burbadge (Chancery, 1590-5), and Miles v. Burbadge (Requests, 1597), as to the profits of the house; (d) Allen v. Street (Coram Rege, 1600), Burbadge v. Allen (Requests, 1600), Allen v. Burbadge (Queen's Bench, 1601-2), and Allen v. Burbadge et al. (Star Chamber, 1601-2), as to the removal of the fabric. A few documents from these, some of which he supposed to relate to the Blackfriars, were printed by Collier in Memoirs of the Actors (1846 and H. E. D. P. iii. 257) and in Original History of the Theatre in Shoreditch (1849, Sh. Soc. Papers, iv. 63). A large number were used by Halliwell-Phillipps for his excursus on The Theatre and Curtain (Outlines, i. 345), and in C. C. Stopes, Burbage and Shakespeare's Stage (1913), where abstracts of (a) and (b) may be consulted. The full texts of (c) and (d) are printed in C. W. Wallace, The First London Theatre, Materials for a History (1913, Nebraska University Studies, xiii. 1). The exact locality of the site has been carefully investigated by W. W. Braines in Holywell Priory and the Site of the Theatre, Shoreditch (1915, Indication of Houses of Historical Interest in London, xliii), and again in The Site of the Theatre, Shoreditch (1917, L. T. R. xi. 1).]
The following statement as to the beginnings of theatrical
enterprise in London is made by Cuthbert Burbadge and his
family in the so-called Sharers Papers of 1635:[1]
'The father of us, Cutbert and Richard Burbage, was the first
builder of playehowses, and was himselfe in his younger yeeres a
player. The Theater hee built with many hundred poundes taken up
at interest. The players that lived in those first times had onely the
profitts arising from the dores, but now the players receave all the
commings in at the dores to themselves and halfe the galleries from
the houskepers. Hee built this house upon leased ground, by which
meanes the landlord and hee had a great suite in law, and, by his death,
the like troubles fell on us, his sonnes; wee then bethought us of
altering from thence, and at like expence built the Globe.'
The accuracy of this is fully borne out by the records of the
various legal proceedings in connexion with the Theatre,
which a painful investigation has exhumed, and the topographical
indications furnished by the evidence in some of
these have made it possible to locate with some precision the
site of London's first regular play-house.
The Theatre stood in the Liberty of Halliwell or Holywell, part of the Middlesex parish of St. Leonard's, Shoreditch, immediately outside the Bishopsgate entrance to the City.[2]*
- ↑ Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 317; cf. p. 425.
- ↑ Stowe, Survey (ed. Kingsford, ii. 262, 369), ends his account of Holywell in the 1598 edition, 'And neare therevnto are builded two publique houses for the acting and shewe of Comedies, Tragedies, and Histories, for recreation. Whereof the one is called the Courtein, the other the Theatre: both standing on the Southwest side towards the field'. This is omitted from the 1603 edition, probably not so much, as has been suggested, because Stowe shared the Puritan dislike of the stage, as because in 1603 the Theatre was gone and the Curtain little used. Stowe's draft (c. 1598) in
