wooden buildings, open to the weather, perished rapidly. It is not unreasonable to suppose that the relations between the company and their landlords were much what they had been at the Rose; that is to say that the latter took half the gallery receipts and bore repairs, while the former took the rest of the receipts and met all other outgoings. An unexecuted draft lease to Thomas Downton of 1608 indicates that Alleyn and Henslowe then had it in mind to bind the company more closely to the theatre, by dividing a quarter of their interest amongst the eight members of the company.[1] Possibly the plan was carried out. In asking a loan from Alleyn on a date apparently earlier than August 1613, Charles Massye, who was one of the eight, not only offers repayment out of his 'gallery mony' and 'house mony', but also the assignment of 'that lyttell moete I have in the play housses' as a security.[2] Certainly the company took over the house after Henslowe's death on 6 January 1616. His share in the building passed to his widow, who contemplated a sale of it to Gregory Franklyn, Drew Stapley, and John Hamond.[3] But the deed remained unexecuted at her death in 1617, and the whole property was now once more in Alleyn's hands. On 31 October 1618 he leased it to the company for £200 a year, to be reduced to £120 at his death. With it went a taphouse occupied by Mark Brigham, the rent of a two-room tenement held by John Russell, and a strip of impaled ground 123 feet by 17 feet, lying next the passage on the south.[4] This is perhaps the garden in which, according to John Chamberlain, the players, 'not to be overcome with courtesy', banqueted the Spanish ambassador when he visited the theatre on 16 July 1621.[5] John Russell is presumably the same whose appointment by Alleyn as a 'gatherer' lead to a protest from William Bird on behalf of the company.[6] A few months after the ambassador's visit, John Chamberlain records the destruction of the Fortune on 9 December 1621:[7]
'On Sonday night here was a great fire at the Fortune in Golden-Lane,
the fayrest play-house in this towne. It was quite burnt downe
in two howres, & all their apparell & play-bookes lost, wherby those
poore companions are quite undone.'
Alleyn also notes the event in his diary.[8] On 20 May 1622
he formed a syndicate, and leased to it the site at a rent of
