Here, according to Stowe, there were 'certaine faire Innes for receipt of trauellers repayring to the Citie'.[1] At the Aldgate inn had been produced in 1557 a 'lewd' play called The Sackful of Newes, which provoked the interference of Mary's Privy Council.[2] But it seems to me exceedingly improbable that either this or the Eastcheap inn was converted into the play-house, of which we have brief and tantalizing records in the seventeenth century. Both were within the City jurisdiction, where the licensing of play-*houses seems to have definitely terminated in 1596. It is true that a Privy Council letter of 31 March 1602, which directs that the combined company of Oxford's and Worcester's men shall be allowed to play at the Boar's Head, is addressed to the Lord Mayor.[3] But so are other letters of the same type, the object of which is to limit plays to a small number of houses outside the liberties, and to restrain them elsewhere over the whole area of the City and the suburbs.[4] And when, a year or two later, Worcester's men became Queen Anne's, and a draft patent was drawn up to confirm their right to play in the Curtain and the Boar's Head, both houses are described, not as in the City, but as 'within our County of Middlesex'.[5] Presumably Anne's men left the Boar's Head when the Red Bull became available for their use in 1606, and Mr. Adams has explained a mention, which had long puzzled me, of the Duke of York's men as 'the Prince's Players of Whitechapel' in 1608 by the suggestion that they succeeded to the vacant theatre.[6] If this is so, I think it affords further evidence for the theory that the Boar's Head, although it may have taken its name from the Aldgate inn, was not itself that inn, and probably not a converted inn at all, but lay just outside and not just inside the City bars. For, although part of the street between Aldgate and Whitechapel is sometimes called, as in Ogilby's map of 1677 and Rocque's of 1746, 'Whitechapel Street', yet Whitechapel proper lay outside the liberties, farther to the east
- ↑ Stowe, Survey, i. 126; ii. 72. I suppose the inn is identical with the 'Blue Bore Inne' marked by Ogilby (1677). The site is at No. 30 on the north of Aldgate High Street (Harben, 87).
- ↑ Dasent, vi. 168.
- ↑ App. D, No. cxxx. The description of this letter in the Index to Remembrancia, 355, as referring to 'the Boar's Head in Eastcheap' has proved misleading.
- ↑ App. D, Nos. cxxv, cxxix, cxxxv.
- ↑ Cf. ch. xiii (Anne's).
- ↑ Adams, 17; cf. ch. xiii (Duke of York's). The further suggestion of Adams, 8, that Rawlidge in 1628 (cf. p. 360) wrote 'Whitefriars' for 'Whitechapel' is less plausible. Rawlidge is only dealing with playhouses within the City.
