Lane. There was also a sewer bordering upon the park, and on this Jasper Morris and Thomas Burt had encroached in 1593.[1]
The old maps, as usual, do not give much help when it comes to a pinch, although the balance of their authority, for what it is worth, seems to me to be in favour of a northern site.[2] Mr. Hubbard, calculating from Visscher's map, would put the Globe on the site of the present Central Wharf, 15 feet south of the Bankside houses and 136 feet west of Bank End, and therefore not very near Maiden Lane at all.[3] I do not think that he sufficiently recognizes the imperfections of the maps from a surveyor's point of view. I doubt whether more is to be got out of them than that the Globe stood more to the east and probably more to the south than either the Hope or the Rose.[4]
The foregoing paragraphs show the state of the controversy when the body of this chapter was written. Since then Mr. Braines has taken up the investigation where it was left by Dr. Martin, with the help of the brewery title-deeds and many other documents bearing on the distribution of tenements in Maiden Lane and Globe Alley over more than a century. It now seems clear that, in view of the known history of properties north of Maiden Lane, there is no room for the Globe plot there, that this plot did pass from the Casons to the workhouse and ultimately the brewery, and that it did lie at Dr. Martin's angle site, being indeed precisely located on the map by Concanen and Morgan's description of 1795. We must therefore assume that the points of the compass were, as Dr. Martin conjectured, inverted in the lease of 1599, east with west and north with south, and that the Globe company maintained a bridge over the sewer on the opposite side of Maiden Lane to the theatre, for the convenience of visitors coming down Horseshoe Alley from the river. The venella of 1599 must have been a westward extension of Globe Alley, afterwards disused.
Some notion of the structural character of the Globe may be gleaned from the builder's contract for the Fortune in
- ↑ Dr. Wallace says that all these records were made by the Commissioners 'in dealing with the property of Brend and others on the north side' of Maiden Lane. But there is no reference to 'the north side' in the actual record. Bingham had, and Sellers may have had, more than one plot in the neighbourhood.
- ↑ Cf. p. 379.
- ↑ R. I. B. A. Journal, 3rd series, xvii. 26.
- ↑ Halliwell-Phillipps (Calendar of Shakespeare Rarities, 81) had a document of 1653 concerning a sewer 'in Maide Lane nere the place where the Globe playhouse lately stood', which he considered as establishing the exact locality of the theatre. It is probably now in America.
