Alleyn had of course resumed his part proprietorship of the house as executor and ultimate heir to Henslowe. Meade probably took actual charge of the theatre, and there is an undated letter from Prince Charles's men to Alleyn, written possibly in 1617, in which they explain their removal from the Bankside as due to the intemperate action of his partner in taking from them the day which by course was theirs. I suppose that this dispute also was due to the competition of baiting with the plays. In 1619 some disputes between Alleyn and Meade had to be settled by arbitration, and from Alleyn's memoranda in connexion with these it appears that Meade was his deputy under his patent as Master of the Game, and had also a lease from him of the house at £100 a year.[1] The Hope is mentioned from time to time, chiefly as a place of baiting, up to the civil wars.[2] It is one of the three Bankside theatres alluded to in Holland's Leaguer (1632), where it is described as 'a building of excellent hope' for players, wild beasts, and gladiators. Bear-baiting was suppressed by the House of Commons in 1642,[3] and the house was dismantled in 1656. The manuscript continuation of Stowe's Annales describes its end and the slaughter of the bears, but gives the date of its erection erroneously as 1610 instead of 1613.[4]
After the Restoration the Bear Garden was restored, and a lane called Bear Gardens, running from Bankside to New Park Street, and a sign therein of The White Bear still mark its name.[5] Its site is pretty well defined in the seventeenth-century maps as to the west of the Globe and, where that is shown, the Rose, and generally as a little nearer Maid Lane than the latter. This is consistent with a notice in the Sewers records for 5 December 1595 of a sewer which ran to the Bear Garden from a garden known to have lain a little farther east along Maid Lane than the Globe.[6], I was in a rage,
I rayl'd on him that kept the Beares,
Instead of a Stake was suffered a Stage,
And in Hunkes his house a crue of Players.
</poem> ]*
- ↑ Alleyn Memoirs, 159.
- ↑ Ordish, 235. No date can be assigned to A North Countrey Song in Wit and Drollery (1656): <poem> When I'se come there [to Paris Garden
- ↑ Collier, iii. 102.
- ↑ Cf. p. 375.
- ↑ Ordish, 244. A Bearsfoot Alley shown farther to the east by Rocque (1746) may derive from one of the earlier baiting-places.
- ↑ C. W. Wallace in The Times (30 April 1914), 'We present John Wardner William Sellors and all the land holders or their tenantes that holde anie landes gardeines ground or tenementes abbutting vpon the common sewer leadinge from Sellors gardin to the beare garden to cast clense and scoure their and euerie one of their seuerall partes of the
