Rents.[1] Land south of Maiden Lane certainly formed part of the Brend estate, and a plot of it conveyed by Sir Matthew Brend to one Hilary Memprise in 1626 was bounded on the south by a sewer dividing it from the Bishop of Winchester's park, and on the north by 'the alley or way leading to the Gloabe Playhouse commonly called Gloabe Alley'.[2] A century later, property acquired for the brewery in 1732 is similarly described as 'fronting a certain alley or passage called Globe Alley, in antient times leading from Deadman's Place to the Globe Playhouse'.[3]
It was certainly a belief in the Thrale family that the site of the theatre itself had passed into their hands. Mrs. Piozzi, Johnson's friend, who married Henry Thrale in 1763, left the following autobiographical note of her residence in Southwark between that date and her husband's death in 1781:
'For a long time, then—or I thought it such—my fate was bound
up with the old Globe Theatre, upon the Bankside, Southwark; the
alley it had occupied having been purchased and thrown down by
M^r Thrale to make an opening before the windows of our dwelling-*house.
When it lay desolate in a black heap of rubbish, my Mother,
one day, in a joke, called it the Ruins of Palmyra; and after that they
laid it down in a grass-plot. Palmyra was the name it went by, I
suppose, among the clerks and servants of the brewhouse. . . . But
there were really curious remains of the old Globe Playhouse, which
though hexagonal in form without, was round within.'[4]
Dr. Martin seems to think that the lady's recollection was
confused and that the garden called Palmyra stood on the
east of Deadman's Place opposite to Globe Alley. But,
according to Concanen and Morgan it was 'on the opposite
side of the street' to the brewery.[5] However this may be,
there are other notices which show that, however complete
the demolition of 1644, the theatre or part of it was still
regarded by tradition as standing a hundred years later
amongst the tenements by which it was replaced.[6] In 1787
the brewery was purchased by Barclay and Perkins, and the
- ↑ Martin, 158.
- ↑ Stopes, Burbage, 196; Martin, 169; from Close Roll, 3 Car. I, pt. 23, m. 22.
- ↑ Martin, 174.
- ↑ A. Hayward, Autobiography of Mrs. Piozzi, ii. 33.
- ↑ History of St. Saviour's (1795), 231.
- ↑ T. Pennant, London (1791), 60, 'A little west of S. Mary Overies (in a place still called Globe Alley) stood the Globe. . . . I have been told that the door was very lately standing'; Concanen and Morgan, 224, 'Several of the neighbouring inhabitants remember these premises being wholly taken down about fifty years ago, having remained for many years in a very ruinous state: avoided by the young and superstitious as a place haunted by those imaginary beings called evil spirits'.
