together a privy and a coal-house. Richard Farrant was Master of the Children of Windsor Chapel, and deputy to William Hunnis as Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal, and his object in taking the house was to have a room in which the children could give public representations for profit of the plays which they were afterwards to perform at Court. He carried out his plan, and so the old frater of the friars, once the parliament chamber of the realm, became the first Blackfriars theatre.[1]
More, according to his own account, was not best pleased at the use made of his house. He complained that Farrant, after pretending that he only meant to teach the children in it, had made it a 'continuall howse for plays' to the offence of the precinct, and to fit it for the purpose had pulled down and defaced Neville's partitions, spoiled the windows, and brought the house to great ruin. He had also sub-let certain portions, and, as he was not entitled to do this under his lease without licence, More claimed the forfeiture of the lease. At this moment, on 30 November 1580, Farrant died, leaving the house to his widow Anne. For some months there were no plays in the theatre. Then Hunnis resolved to carry on Farrant's enterprise himself, and on a recommendation from the Earl of Leicester More appears to have given at least a tacit consent to a sub-letting by Anne to Hunnis and one John Newman on 20 December 1581. They were to do repairs and pay her £6 13s. 4d. in rent more than the £14 due to More. An unfortunate slip of the scrivener's pen cut Mrs. Farrant's profit down to £6 6s. 8d. They also gave bonds of £100 each for the due fulfilment of their covenants, and according to Newman's statement to More, paid £30 down. According to Mrs. Farrant they neglected their repairs and were extremely irregular with their rent, so that she was put to great shifts in order to satisfy Sir William
- ↑ On the plays performed there, cf. chh. xii, xiii (Chapel, Paul's, Oxford's). Collier appears to have been aware, probably from the Lyly prologues and the reference in Gosson, P. C. 188, of the existence of the earlier Blackfriars playhouse, and to have dated it, by a singular coincidence, in 1576. He knew nothing of the real facts, but inferred (H. E. D. P. i. 219) that the undated petition of the Blackfriars inhabitants, which is really of 1596, was of 1576, on the strength of a reference in it to a banishment of the players from the City, which an incorrect endorsement on a Lansdowne MS. (cf. App. D, No. lxxv) had led him to place in 1575. This did not prevent him from also assigning the petition, with a forged reply from the players, to 1596 (cf. p. 508). He proceeded to forge (a) an order dated 23 Dec. 1579 for the toleration of Leicester's men at the Blackfriars (New Facts, 9), and (b) a memorial by Shakespeare and others as Queen's men and Blackfriars 'sharers' in 1589 (New Facts, 11; cf. Ingleby, 244, 249).
