arrear at the time of the application of 1585 and was still unpaid.[1] Probably these last two were the only allegations to which the court attached importance. Allen claimed that he had no remedy against James Burbadge's estate, for he had made deeds of gift to his sons of his property, and his widow and administratrix was without funds. Burbadge, however, produced evidence of the estimates of 1585 and 1586, and suggested that his father had a counter-claim against the rent in the expense to which he had been put in maintaining his possession at the time of Peckham's claim to the free-*hold. On 18 October 1600 the Court decided in his favour.[2] Allen brought a Queen's Bench action against him in 1601 for breach of agreement, and in 1601 complained to the Star Chamber of perjury on the part of the expert witnesses and other wrongs done him in the course of the earlier proceedings; but, although the conclusions of these suits are not on record, it is not likely that he succeeded in obtaining a favourable decision.[3]
vii. THE CURTAIN
[Bibliographical Note.—Some rather scanty material is brought together
by T. E. Tomlins, Origin of the Curtain Theatre and Mistakes regarding it
in Sh. Soc. Papers, i. 29, and Halliwell-Phillipps, The Theatre and Curtain
(Outlines, i. 345).]
The Curtain is included with the Theatre in Stowe's general
description of Holywell as 'standing on the South-west side
towards the field'. That it was somewhat south of the
Theatre is indicated by a reference to it in 1601 as in Moorfields,
a name given to the open fields lying south of and
adjacent to Finsbury Fields. But, although it stood in the
parish of Shoreditch and the liberty of Holywell, it was not,
like the Theatre, actually within the precinct of the dissolved
priory. Curtina is glossed by Ducange as 'minor curtis, seu rustica area, quae muris cingitur', and the description is
sufficiently met by the piece of land lying outside the southern
gate of the priory, and on the other side of Holywell Lane
into which that gate opened.[4] A priory lease to the Earl
- ↑ Wallace, 186, 215, 220.
- ↑ Ibid. 285.
- ↑ Ibid. 267, 275.
- ↑ Aubrey, ii. 12, on the authority of J. Greenhill, says that Ben Jonson 'acted and wrote, but both ill, at the Green Curtaine, a kind of nursery or obscure playhouse, somewhere in the suburbes (I thinke towards Shoreditch or Clarkenwell)', and on that of Sir Edward Shirburn that Jonson killed Marlowe, 'on Bunhill, comeing from the Green-Curtain play-house'. Hoxton, where Jonson killed Gabriel Spencer, is of course not far from Bunhill, and both are in the Holywell neighbourhood. Probably Aubrey, in giving a name to the theatre, is babbling of green frieze, rather than green fields. Steevens and Malone (Variorum, iii. 54) committed themselves to the view that 'the original sign hung out at this playhouse was the painting of a curtain striped'.
