actor and writer; it was there, certainly, that he established his reputation. The Blackfriars (and, it is supposed, others also of those we have mentioned, as the Curtain) were erected immediately after-and in consequence of the entire expulsion of players from the limits of the City by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen in 1575; who, however, gained little more by the movement than the exhibition of a kind of successful contempt of their authority, in the erection of such houses as the Theatre in the Blackfriars, under their very noses, but, owing to the old monastic privileges, beyond their jurisdiction. Two companies, it appears, had the right of playing at this house, the one that Shakspere belonged to (the Lord Chamberlain's) and that of the Children of the Chapel, afterwards (on James's accession) known as the Children of her Majesty's Revels, who played regular pieces the same as their older rivals; as, for instance, Ben Jonson's Case is Altered' in 1599, and his Cynthia's Revels' in 1600. The proprietor of the Blackfriars, in fee, was Richard Burbage; and he probably let the theatre to the Children of the Revels, in the summer season, whilst he and his brother shareholders acted at the Globe. The noticeable passage in Hamlet' refers to them, and to the neglect experienced by the players at some particular period, through the overweening admiration of the public for these tiny representatives of the drama; who, it should seem, also, had been accustomed to injure the regular theatres by more direct modes of attack. "There is, sir,” says Rosencrantz, "an aiery of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question, and are most tyrannically clapped for 't: these are now the fashion; and so berattle the common stages (so they call them), that many, wearing rapiers, are afraid of goose-quills, and dare scarce come thither." And in the kindly and thoughtful spirit of Hamlet's reply there is evidence that the complaint may have been made in no selfish spirit:-" Will they pursue the quality no longer than they can sing?" he asks. "Will they not say afterwards, if they should grow themselves to common players (as it is like most, if their means are no better), their writers do them wrong, to make them exclaim against their own succession?" The Blackfriars was one of those theatres distinguished by the title of private, and which were entirely roofed over, instead of, as in those which were public, merely the stage portion; which had a pit instead of a merc enclosed yard; in which performances took place by candle light; and where the visitors, being altogether of a higher class, enjoyed especial accommodations; among which, the right to sit on the stage during the progress of the play was the feature most peculiar to the time. In the public theatres this last-mentioned custom also prevailed; influential persons no doubt being permitted to do so without comment, and impudent ones taking permission in order to show their impudence, or to display their new dresses to the audience in all their bravery. The stools used by such persons were hired at sixpence each. The Blackfriars was probably pulled down soon after the permanent close of the Theatres, during the Commonwealth, by the Puritans; the locality is still marked by the name Playhouse Yard, near Apothecaries' Hall. The other Theatre which Shakspere has bound so closely up with his own history, and to which, therefore, a similar kind of interest is attached, was the Globe, erected about 1593; and, it is highly probable, in consequence of the growing prosperity of the Lord Chamberlain's servants, who desired a roomier house, a more public field for exertion. This was the largest and best of the theatres yet raised; as is clear from the care of Alleyn and Henslowe, in the erection of the Fortune, soon after, on a still larger scale, to imitate all its arrangements, excepting the shape. Yet what the Globe was, Shakspere himself has told us in the preliminary chorus to Henry the Fifth :' What then? "Pardon, gentles all, The flat unraised spirit, that hath dared That did affright the air at Agincourt?" "Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts," is the bidding of the poet; and he spoke to an audience who could do even better than that, who could forget them altogether, in their apprehension of the spiritual grandeur and magnificence that was then with them in the cockpit. 66 There is something, it must be owned, occasionally amusing as well as delightful in the simplicity of the old stage: in Greene's Pinner of Wakefield' two parties are quarrelling, and one of them says, "Come, sir, will you come to the town's end, now?" in order to fight. Aye, sir, come," answers the other; and both then, we presume, move a few feet across the stage to another part, but evidently that is all, for in the next line the same speaker continues, "Now we are at the town's end-what shall we say now?" But if the audiences of the sixteenth cen tury were by no means critical about the appliances of the drama, the case was very different as to the drama itself. Jonson gives us a pleasant peep into the interior of a theatre of the time on the first night of a new piece: "But the sport is at a new play to observe the sway and variety of opinion that passeth it. A man shall have such a confused mixture of judgment poured out in the throng there, as ridiculous as laughter itself. One says he likes not the writing, another likes not the plot, another not the playing; and sometimes a fellow that comes not there past once in five years, at a Parliament time or so, will be as deep mixed in censuring as the best, and swear by God's foot he would never stir his foot to see a hundred such as that is.” * Then, as now, it seems, managers, in bringing out new pieces, were not insensible to the advantages of accompanying them with novel or greatly improved theatrical effects. It was possibly one of these that led to the catastrophe at the Globe Theatre in 1613, on an important occasion of this kind, when there was no doubt an unusually brilliant audience assembled. Jonson was among them, as we learn from his Execration of Vulcan' for his doings in the affair; which are thus described by Sir Henry Wotton, in a letter to his nephew, dated the 29th of June: "Now, to let matters of state sleep, I will entertain you at present with what hath happened this week at the Bankside. The King's players had a new play, called 'All is True,' representing some principal pieces of the reign of Henry VIII., which was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty, even to the matting of the stage; the knights of the order with their Georges and garters, the guards with their embroidered coats, and the like; sufficient, in truth, within a while, to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous. Now King Henry, making a mask at the Cardinal Wolsey's house, and certain cannons being shot off at his entry, some of the paper or other stuff wherewith one of them was stopped did light on the thatch, where, being thought at first but an idle smoke, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming, within less than an hour, the whole house to the very grounds. This was the fatal period of that virtuous fabric, wherein yet nothing did perish but wood and straw and a few forsaken cloaks; only one man had his breeches set on fire, that perhaps had broiled him, if he had not, by the benefit of a provident wit, put it out with bottle ale." This play, there is little doubt, was Shakspere's Henry VIII.,' having perhaps All is True' for a first title; for not only does the prologue contain various passages illustrative of the idea the author desired to impress of the truth of the story, but another recorder of the event, Thomas Lorkin, in a letter to Sir Thomas Puckering, expressly calls it 'Henry VIII.'; and, lastly, we read in the original stage directions of Shakspere's play, Act I., Scene 4, " drums and trumpets, chambers discharged," under the precise circumstances described by Sir Henry Wotton. The Globe was rebuilt next year, when Taylor, the water-poet, noticing it, says― . 6 "-where before it had a thatched hide Now to a stately theatre is turn'd." Like the Blackfriars, it was most probably pulled down during the Commonwealth. The Fortune Theatre, built about 1599, proved truly a fortune to its chief owner, Alleyn, the actor and founder of Dulwich College. Here the Lord Admiral's servants performed. From the indenture between Alleyn and Henslowe, his co-partner, on the one side, and the builder, Street, on the other, we learn that the house had three tiers, consisting of boxes, rooms, and galleries; that there were "two-penny rooms," and "gentlemen's;" that the width of the stage was forty-three feet, and the depth thirty-nine and a half, including, however, we should presume, the 'tiring house at the back. In connexion with these particulars, the view of the old stage we have given, with that important and most useful portion of it, the balcony, copied from an engraving in the title-page of ‘Roxana,' a *Case is Altered,' Act ii. Sc. 4. Latin play, by William Alabaster, 1632, may not be unacceptable. The balcony appears to have been so managed, that when not in use by the players, it might be occupied by some of the audience. We see at a glance in this design, the means by which many of the old stage directions were fulfilled, as "Enter Romeo and Juliet at the window." In the balcony, too, would sit the Court in 'Hamlet' during the performance of the play, and in similar cases of a play within a play. It has been supposed that the names of the theatres were borrowed from their respective signs, or, at least, that they had signs exhibited without of the nature indicated by their titles. This was certainly the case as regards Alleyn's theatre, as Heywood speaks of There was, however, a much more useful and characteristic sign of the theatres. As the time of performance approaches, about three in the afternoon, "each playhouse advanceth his flags in the air, whither quickly, at the waving thereof, are summoned whole troops of men, women, and children." To the particulars already incidentally given, we may now add a few others. And first as to actors, many of whom, we need hardly remind our readers, were poets also, like their great exemplar, Shakspere; and were generally, there is every reason to believe, worthy of the dramas they represented. The chief men of note, besides Shakspere himself, whose names have been preserved in connexion with his plays, were Burbage, the original Richard the Third; Heminge and Condell, Shakspere's friends and literary executors, who," without ambition either of self-profit or fame-only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakspere," published the first edition of his collected works; Taylor, the original Hamlet; Kemp; Sly; Lowin; Field, &c. Actors *William Parkes' Curtain Drawn of the World, 1612. of this rank generally participated in the profits of the company to which they belonged, as whole sharers, three-quarter sharers, or half-sharers; whilst the remaining performers were either hired at regular weekly salaries (six shillings seems to have been an ordinary rate of payment), or were apprenticed to particular members of the company. The emoluments of the sharers were, no doubt, considerable, as, in addition to their ordinary public business, they were frequently called upon to play before the Court, for which the usual payment, at one time, was ten pounds; and at the mansions of the nobility on extraordinary cases of state, at christenings, and at marriages. The price of admission seems to have varied not only at the different theatres, but at different times in the same theatre. Ben Jonson has told us in an amusing passage what they were in 1614, when his Bartholomew Fair' was acted at the Hope. In the Induction he says, "It shall be lawful for any man to judge his six-pennyworth, his twelve-pennyworth, so to his eighteenpence, two shillings, half-a-crown, to the value of his place, provided always his place get not above his wit." But Dekker speaks of your groundling and gallery commoner buying his sport for a penny; and other writers also of the "penny bench theatres," referring most likely to theatres of a lower grade than any we have enumerated. Of moveable painted scenes, the theatres of the Shaksperian era were not entirely deficient; but in the earliest period we had" Thebes written in great letters on an old door," when the audience were desired to understand the scene lay in that place, and which Sir Philip Sidney ridicules. Hence the briefest, but most significant of stage directions in Selimus, Emperor of the Turks,' published in 1594, where, when the hero is conveying his father's dead body in solemn state to the Temple of Mahomet, all parties are quietly told to suppose the Temple of Mahomet." A great many difficulties might be got rid of by this principle, which, however, was not stretched too far. Our forefathers were not required to suppose the descent of the cauldron in 'Macbeth,' as there were trap-doors; nay, upon occasion, still more difficult feats of ingenuity were accomplished. In the directions to Greene's Alphonsus' we read," after you have sounded thrice, let Venus be let down from the top of the stage, and when she is down, say;" again, in another part, "Exit Venus. Or, if you can conveniently, let a chair come down from the top of the stage, and draw her up." 66 " But in dresses and properties the stage of the Shaksperian era seems to have been rich enough to compare with the stage of the present day; nay, it is probable, that in comparison with the size of its theatres, and the number of its actors, it surpassed ours in the splendour and value of the wardrobe. In Henslowe's 'Inventory,' we find, among other and still more expensive items of dress, one of a Robe for to go invisible," which, with a gown, cost 31. 10s. of the money of the sixteenth century. The daylight performances, it is to be observed, would make it indispensable to have articles of a better quality than now. As to properties, though they had not attained the completeness of Covent Garden in these matters, where the property-man tells us he has almost everything in creation— from the fly to the whale-under his charge; yet it will be seen in the following mock heroic account of an adventure in the theatre, by R. Brome, in The Antipodes,' 1640, that their possessions were far from contemptible. Bye-play is speaking of Peregrine :— |