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COPYRIGHT 2006 Associated University Presses
FOUR London inns were also playhouses in Shakespearean times, and notable theatrical events occurred in all of them. All four together, however, are less well known than any of the nineteen other Shakespearean playhouses. Unsurprisingly, they are barely mentioned in many studies of the Shakespearean stage. Of, for example, the 139 pages that E. K. Chambers devoted to specific playhouses in the second volume of his Elizabethan Stage, these four playhouses occupy only three and a quarter pages. Yet three were playhouses for nearly twenty years, longer than ten of the others, including some very famous places like the Rose, first Globe, and St. Paul's. The fourth could have been a playhouse for thirty years, longer also than the Theatre, both Fortunes, and the second Globe--and if it was not the first Shakespearean playhouse, it was probably the second. In a sense, another of the four was the last. (1)
Nobody has known anything about, for example, their ownership and management and the places in them where performances took place. (2) Moreover, what has been known defies some conventional ideas about Shakespearean playhouses. They were public playhouses in the City of London, three of them actually within the walls. The other public playhouses were in suburbs to escape the attentions of City authorities who disapproved of such things. Unlike the other public playhouses, too, they belonged to commercial enterprises that otherwise had nothing to do with entertainments. The inns, that is, were regular inns long before, while, and long after the playhouses existed in them. All are supposed to have given up their business as playhouses in about 1596. Two later public playhouses (the Boar's Head and Red Bull) were in inns, too, but those places had ceased permanently to do business as inns before they became playhouses.
Three of the four places that were also active inns were the Bull in Bishops-gate Street, the Cross Keys in Gracechurch Street, and the Bell, which adjoined the Cross Keys in the same street. The fourth was the Bell Savage, the main subject of this essay. It was on the north side of Fleet Street about 100 yards outside the City wall at Ludgate. That end of Fleet Street was then sometimes and is now always called Ludgate Hill. The Bell Savage was in the City ward of Farringdon Without and the parish of St. Bride. Most of the site of the playhouse is now a garden-cum-parking lot behind No. 50 Ludgate Hill.
Even the spelling of the name of the place is a problem. Chambers in his Elizabethan Stage, Bentley in his Jacobean and Caroline Stage (Oxford, 1968), and others (including me) have spelled the name "Bel Savage," having noted, presumably, that an entry about Richard Tarlton in the Stationers' Register spelled it so (2 August 1589) and Stephen Gosson and William Prynne spelled it nearly so, "Belsauage" and "Belsavage" (1579, 1633). In documents mentioned below, the author of Maroccus Extaticus also spelled it "Belsauage" in 1595. Others, however, wrote "le bell Savage alias le bell Savoy" (1555), the other way around (1558), and the Bell Savage alias Bell Savoy again (1559). Its owners for more than 360 years usually preferred "Bell Savage," but also used "Belle Savage," even "La Belle Sauvage," never "Bel Savage." Bryant Lillywhite preferred "Bell Savage" in his massive work on London signs and did not mention "Bel Savage" as an alternative. (3)
Besides, the place was originally, or at least in the fifteenth century, called the Bell, and an owner or manager was or had been one Savage. At Easter 1420 Reginald Broke kept potables there, "atte belle vocata Sauagis Inne in fletestrete." And John French ("ffrenssh") described it as "Savagesynne alias ... le Belle on the Hope" on 5 February 1453 when he conveyed its ownership to his mother, Joan French, widow, for her life. Many things on inn signs could be "on the hoop": various fowls, a George, hart, crown, miter, angel, and bunch of grapes. A messuage in the Strand was also a Bell on the Hoop in 1403. (4)
The surviving maps of London drawn while the Bell Savage was a playhouse do not clearly show an inn or innyard in Ludgate Hill, but a map surveyed, drawn, and published soon after the destruction of the inn does show an innyard that must belong to the Bell Savage. The inn and much else in London (including the Cross Keys and the Bell but not the Bull) perished in the great fire of 1666, which began on the night of 2 September and burned for four days. The City then commissioned surveyors to prepare an accurate plan of the City showing the damage. The surveyors began in December and presented their plan early in 1667 on six sheets. Although these sheets do not survive, one of the surveyors, John Leake, reduced the plan to two sheets, and Wenceslas Hollar engraved them. The engraving was published in 1667 (entered at Stationers' Hall on 10 May) as An Exact Surveigh. It shows the yard as a rectangle about 40' wide (east to west), 80' feet long (north to south), and at the end of an alley about 130' long leading north from Ludgate Hill through, presumably, the ruins of the inn.
The first accurate map of London by something approaching modern standards was published a decade after the fire: Ogilby and Morgan's Large and Accurate Map of the City of London (1676). (5) It shows a yard in much the same place and identifies it as Bell Savage yard. It also identifies the inn, which apparently has been rebuilt. The yard is about 32 feet wide and 81 feet long (counting only the main rectangle), and the alley is about 69 feet long. In the days of the playhouse, apparently, the spectator went up an alley off the north side of Ludgate Hill and watched plays being performed in a rectangular yard about twice as long as it was wide.
For centuries, historians of the stage were content to accept Cuthbert Burbage's famous remark in 1635 that, in effect, his father's playhouse in Shoreditch called the Theatre, built in 1576, was the first public playhouse. Eventually they realized that the ground under the remark was shaky because they saw that George Gascoigne had mentioned the Bell Savage as a playhouse in his Glasse of Governement published in 1575, (6) but, apparently, places like the Bell Savage did not count. In 1915, in his edition of the papers of the Carpenters' Company of London (3:95-96), Bower Marsh published a document showing that Cuthbert Burbage's uncle, John Brayne, had built a public playhouse in a "house" called the Red Lion in 1567. Interesting, we thought, and perhaps another playhouse in an inn, but Burbage could not be wrong about such things, and the Theatre must really have been the first public playhouse. Then in 1983 Janet Loengard announced another, more substantial document about the Red Lion that more than confirmed Marsh's, and this document did count. (7) For more than twenty years writers have agreed that the public playhouse, indeed the Shakespearean playhouse in general, began in 1567 with Brayne's Red Lion, which, as we now learned, was not in an inn but in a court or yard belonging to a farmhouse of the name.
Even this document, however, may not be the last word about which playhouse inaugurated the Shakespearean stage. The London Company of the Masters of Defence was using the Bell Savage for its prizes even before the building of the playhouse in the Red Lion. The company's business was the teaching of fencing, and prizes were public displays of fencing in which students qualified first to be free scholars, then provosts, and finally masters. If used for prizes, the Bell Savage may also have been used for plays, because, as the brothers George and Toby Silver implied in about 1590, martial games there took place on a stage.
The company had used open public places surrounded by buildings, like Leadenhall, but when playhouses became available it increasingly preferred to use them. Playhouses provided better control of admission and stages on which performances could be seen by more people. The company used the Bell Savage at least twelve times for prizes from the mid-1560s to 1589. It used the Bull from c. 1573 to 1590, the Theatre from 1578 to 1585, and the Curtain from 1579 to 1583. Of the thirty-nine prizes recorded from 1575 to 1590, only two occurred in a place that was not (or did not become) a playhouse. The first prizes recorded at the Bell Savage concerned William Mucklowe. He played his provost prize there on 13 June 1568 having already played his free scholar prize there. If he proceeded from free scholar to provost as others did, he played his free scholar prize at the Bell Savage in 1565 or 1566. (8)
At least when the Silvers tried to use it, the stage at the Bell Savage was higher than stages elsewhere and thus risky for the people on it. The Silvers challenged the two principal Italian teachers of fencing in London, Vincentio Saviolo and one Ieronimo, to a series of martial games at the Bell Savage, which they had chosen because there "he that went in his fight faster backe then he ought ... shold be in danger to breake his necke off the Scaffold." (9) The Silvers had "fiue or sixe score bils of challenge ... printed and set up from Southwarke to the Tower, and from thence through London vnto Westminster." On the day, they and "a multitude of people" then appeared at the Bell Savage, but the Italians did not.
In 1576 and 1596, spectators at the Bell Savage paid "one penny at the gate, another at the entrie of...
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