Building playhouses, the accession of James I, and the Red Bull.

Publication: Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England

Publication Date: 01-JAN-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 Associated University Presses

FOUR hundred years after the event seems a convenient time to ask whether the accession of James I on March 24, 1603, affected the schemes of people who built (or, more accurately, caused to be built) the professional London playhouses that comprised the Shakespearean stage. This essay begins with a general review of the building of all twenty-three of them, from 1567 to 1629, and concludes with comments on the first scheme in hand after the accession.

Curiously diverse people built these places. Many were or became financiers but had begun as something closer to the ground: a grocer, a joiner, a dyer, a draper, a haberdasher, a yeoman, a waterman, and apparently four innkeepers. The others were professional musicians and actors, a senior civil servant, perhaps a yeoman of the Queen's guard, a gentleman or two, a knight, and, it seems, two earls. At least one builder was evidently illiterate, and many were chancers who had no obvious interest in drama as art.

Whoever the builder was, however, he proceeded much as others had done or were to do. The constraints and opportunites that faced the builder of the first playhouse in 1567, that is, faced the builders of the last in 1629. The builder had mainly to find four things: 1) players, 2) a piece of suitable real estate, 3) artisans (to erect the place), and above all 4) money. These things, especially the second and fourth, required very nice calculation, and even when well calculated could lead to serious losses and to the lawsuits the documents of which survive to instruct the theater historian about the building of playhouses. They could also lead to thunderbolts from the Privy Council that delayed the builders of at least the second Blackfriars, first Fortune, and Red Bull playhouses and destroyed the schemes of people who would have built (or had already built) others: in, for example, Nightingale Lane in Whitechapel, a garden in Whitefriars, and Porter's Hall in Blackfriars.

Builders seem to have assured themselves that professional players would use their playhouses when they were built. At least seventeen playhouses were built for specific players, from those who would open John Brayne's playhouse in the yard of a farmhouse called the Red Lion in 1567 with the anonymous (and lost) Story of Samson to the King's Revels who would open William Blagrave's and Richard Gunnell's Salisbury Court with Thomas Randolph's The Muses' Looking Glass in 1629. (1) However reckless theatrical entrepreneurs may have been in some of their dealings (like Brayne), they did not, it seems, build playhouses on spec. But although all adult players received the same financial arrangement, except those in the two last private playhouses, adult players were not equally enthusiastic about playing in all playhouses. Francis Langley, for example, had trouble finding players for the Swan, as his fraught contract with Pembroke's Men in 1597 suggests, as did Philip Henslowe and Jacob Meade for the Hope.

The piece of ground where a builder could build a playhouse, or an existing building that he could make into one, had to be accessible to people who would pay to see the kind of plays that the players meant to mount. It had to be priced within the financial scheme the builder had in mind. Even more important, it had to be where the local authorities and inhabitants would not object too strongly or could be persuaded to acquiesce, and where for local or other reasons national authorities would not interfere. This complex equation took the builders of playhouses all over London, into the City proper, both within the walls (six playhouses) and outside (three), and into the suburbs on the east (two), south (six), north (five), and west (one). (2) The London of, say, 1603 was riddled with places where Shakespearean playhouses were, had been, or would be. Contrary to the usual offhand opinion, more of these places were within the city (39 percent) than in any of the suburbs; a quarter of them (26 percent) were actually within the City walls. These numbers count the five playhouses in Southwark as in a suburb, though one could argue that they were in the City as much as the playhouses in Blackfriars were. (3) The western suburb was the city of Westminster, where in 1617 the Phoenix inaugurated the present theatrical district, the West End.

Among the places where the builder of a playhouse could look for a site were the many lands and buildings belonging to monastic institutions that had been dissolved less than thirty years before the building of playhouses began. These places were often in the hands of speculators and ripe for redevelopment. Six of the twenty-three playhouses appeared in such places, where, in a sense, drama supplanted religion. (4) Moreover, another playhouse was said to have been built on the site of a chapel and three more were built in places belonging to undissolved religious institutions--so that 44 percent of Shakespearean playhouses had a curious, if remote, connection with religion. (5)

The builder of a playhouse had to choose a site where he thought he could persuade the neighbors not to protest too cogently to the Privy Council. One of the two partners at the first Fortune saw to the erection of the playhouse, the other to the placating of neighbors, which after much ado and some delays he managed to achieve. One of the neighbors who objected to the second Blackfriars in 1596 was the patron of the company that proposed to play there, and for well over a decade these neighbors had their way. Builders of playhouses tried to win over neighbors by promising to make regular payments to the expenses of the parish and to maintain the highway outside the playhouse. The more needy the parish was, therefore, the less trouble the builder might have. Besides, the parishioners of poor parishes were less likely to be articulate and well connected in Whitehall.

The artisans who erected playhouses included carpenters, bricklayers, plasterers, thatchers, tilers, blacksmiths, nailers, and painters. The builder could put these people to work in one of three ways. He could draw up a contract with a man, nearly always a carpenter, who would lead a team of them in erecting the building according to stated specifications. The famous contracts for the Fortune and Hope and Henslowe's relationship with John Griggs at the Rose are examples of this process. Or the builder could contract with one man to see to the erecting of one part of the playhouse and with one or more other men to see to the erecting of...

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