Strange's men from playing at the Rose, and enjoining them to play three days a week at Newington Butts, and rescinds it, 'by reason of the tediousness of the way, and that of long time plays have not there been used on working days'.[1] Possibly the theatre had come into Henslowe's hands, for his diary records that it was at Newington that the combined companies of the Admiral's and Chamberlain's men began their first season after the plague of 1592-4, apparently playing there from 5 to 15 June 1594, and then going their separate ways to the Rose and the Theatre respectively. The theatre is mentioned in the list given by Howes in 1631.[2] It is said to have been 'only a memory' by 1599.[3] A bad pun is called a 'Newington conceit' in 1612.[4]
ix. THE ROSE
[Bibliographical Note.—All the more important documents are printed
or calendared from the Dulwich MSS. with a valuable commentary in
Greg, Henslowe's Diary and Henslowe Papers, and in Collier, Memoirs of
Alleyn and Henslowe's Diary.]
The Rose owed its name to the fact that it stood in what
had been, as recently as 1547-8, a rose garden.[5] On 3 December
1552 Thomasyn, widow of Ralph Symonds, fishmonger,
granted to trustees, for her own use during life and thereafter
to the charitable uses of the parish of St. Mildred, Bread
Street, her 'messuage or tennement then called the little
rose with twoe gardens' formerly in St. Margaret's and then
in St. Saviour's, Southwark. St. Mildred's still has a plan
of the estate, which extended to about three roods.[6] A 'tenement
called the Rose' is referred to in a recital of a lease
of Henry VIII's reign as the eastern boundary of other tenements,
by name the Barge, the Bell, and the Cock, which
lay 'vppon the banke called Stewes' in St. Margaret's,
afterwards St. Saviour's, parish, between the highway next
the Thames on the north and Maiden Lane on the south.[7]
It is located by Mr. Rendle just to the east of the still existing
- ↑ App. D, Nos. xlvi, lxxvi, xcii.
- ↑ Cf. p. 373.
- ↑ C. W. Wallace in N. U. S. xiii. 2, 'as shown by a contemporary record to be published later'.
- ↑ A Woman is a Weathercock, III. iii. 25.
- ↑ Rendle, Antiquarian, viii. 60, 'Among the early Surveys, 1 Edward VI, we see that this was not merely a name—the place was a veritable Rose Garden, and paid £1 3s. 4d. by the year, and the messuage called the Rose paid £4'.
- ↑ Close Roll 6 Edw. VI, p. 5, m. 13; cf. Rendle, Bankside, xv; H. P. 1.
- ↑ Egerton MS. 2623, f. 13, quoted in Henslowe, ii. 25. But in ii. 43 Dr. Greg misdescribes the Rose as on the west of the Barge, Bell, and Cock.
