£128 6s., under an obligation to build a new theatre at a cost of £1,000.[1] This, 'a large round brick building', was erected in the following year.[2] The site conveyed covered a space of almost exactly 130 feet square, and on it had stood, besides the buildings named in the lease of 1618, other tenements, in one of which William Bird himself lived. Mr. Lawrence has suggested that the new Fortune may have been a roofed-in house, but his evidence is hardly sufficient to outweigh the explicit statement of Wright that it 'lay partly open to the weather, and there they always acted by daylight'.[3] This can hardly refer only to the earlier building. The Fortune was dismantled in 1649 and 'totally demolished' by 1662, and the façade still extant in 1819 cannot therefore have belonged to it, although it may have belonged to a Restoration 'nursery' for young actors, possibly upon the same site.[4] No acting seems to have taken place at the Fortune after 1649.[5]
xiii. THE BOAR'S HEAD
There appear to have been at least six city inns under this sign.[6] The most famous was that on the south side of Great Eastcheap, in St. Michael's, which seems to have been regarded in the middle of the sixteenth century as the traditional locality of the tavern scenes in Henry IV.[7] This inn was in the occupation of Joan Broke, widow, in 1537, and in that of Thomas Wright, vintner, about 1588.[8] Another Boar's Head stood 'without' Aldgate, in the extra-mural Portsoken ward, which lay between that gate and the bars with which the liberties of the City terminated at Hog Lane.
- ↑ Henslowe Papers, 28.
- ↑ Cf. App. I. It is this second house that is represented as a small angular flagged building in the 'Ryther' maps.
- ↑ Fortnightly Review (May 1916).
- ↑ W. J. Lawrence in Archiv (1914), 301; cf. p. 520.
- ↑ Adams, 284, gives the history of the Fortune during 1621-49.
- ↑ A Boar's Head on the Bankside, which belonged to Henslowe in 1604 and previously to Alleyn (Henslowe, ii. 30), was apparently not an inn.
- ↑ E. Gayton, Pleasant Notes upon Don Quixot (1654), 277, 'Sir John of famous memory; not he of the Boares-Head in Eastcheap'. Neither the text nor the stage-directions of Henry IV name the Boar's Head; but the references to Eastcheap (1 Hen. IV, I. ii. 145, 176; II. iv. 16, 485; 2 Hen. IV, II. i. 76; II. ii. 161) are sufficient, and when Prince Hal asks (2 Hen. IV, II. ii. 159) 'Doth the old boar feed in the old frank?', Bardolph answers, 'At the old place, my lord, in Eastcheap'. Doll Tearsheet (II. iv. 250) calls Falstaff a 'whoreson little tidy Bartholomew boar-pig'.
- ↑ Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 258. Harben, 88, however, suggests that the name was transferred to this house from another on the north side of Great Eastcheap in St. Clement's.
