These two early theatres set the standard for those more famous playhouses which play so large a part in Elizabethan cultural history. These playhouses were always outside the walls of the city (unlike the “private” theatre of Blackfriars), and the two theatres in the northern fields were constructed upon land once belonging to Holywell Priory; as the name suggests, there was a “holy well” in the immediate vicinity. It may be that they were deliberately sited close to the location where sacred plays had once been staged. This might also account for the presence of a theatre in the old priory of the Blackfriars. Londoners have always been aware of the topography of their city and its environs, so that on many occasions and in many contexts the same activity can be observed taking place in the same location. The situation of the twelfth-century “theatrum” is not known, but it is at least reasonable to suggest that it lay where the Rose, the Swan and the Globe eventually emerged in the 1580s and 1590s.
There has been speculation about the origins of early theatre architecture, and some have supposed that it was established upon the pattern of the yards of galleried inns where itinerant groups of minstrels or actors would perform. They were known as “inn-playhouses”; there were two in Gracechurch Street, the Bell and the Cross Keys, while another stood on Ludgate Hill. The latter was known as the Belle Sauvage or the Bell Savage and, like the others, soon acquired a distinctly unsavoury reputation. In 1580 an edict from the Privy Council commanded the officers of London “to thrust out the Players from the City” and to “pull down the playing and dicing houses within the Liberties” where the presence of actors encouraged “immorality, gambling, intemperance … Apprentices and Factions.” The theatre, then, may provoke that unrest which seems always to have been present beneath the surface of the city’s life. It also provided occasion for the spread of those terrors of London, fire and disease.
Other theatrical historians have concluded that the true model of the Elizabethan theatre was not the inn-yard but the bear-baiting ring or the cockpit. Certainly these activities were not incompatible with serious drama. Some theatres became bear-rings or boxing rings, while some cockpits and bull-rings became theatres. There was no necessary distinction between these activities, and historians have suggested that acrobats, fencers and rope-dancers could also perform at the Globe or the Swan. Edward Alleyn, the great actor-manager of the early seventeenth century, was also Master of the King’s Bears. The public arena was truly heterogeneous.
The popularity of Elizabethan drama characterises Londoners who attended it, both in their affection for colourful ritual and in their admiration of magniloquence. The taste of the crowd for intermittent violence was amply satisfied by the plays themselves, while the Londoners’ natural pride in the history of their city was recognised in those dramatic historical pageants which were part of the diet of the playhouses. When Shakespeare places Falstaff and his company in East Cheap, he is invoking the life of the city which existed two centuries before. Spectacle and violence, civic pride and national honour, all found their natural home in the theatres of London.
There were, of course, familiar complaints. When Burbage attempted to reopen the theatre of Blackfriars in 1596, the “noblemen and gentlemen” who lodged in the old monastery buildings complained about the “vagrant and lewd persons” who would congregate there; they also declared that “the noise of the drums and trumpets” would hinder church services in the vicinity. When the Blackfriars was eventually reopened, visitors attending plays by Shakespeare or by Chapman were obliged to leave their coaches by the west end of St. Paul’s or by the Fleet conduit, and proceed the rest of the way on foot; this was designed to prevent further tumult.
The Fortune Theatre in Golding Lane, now Golden Lane, was famous for its “inflamations” with “squibs … thunder … artificial lightning.” The costs were a penny for standing room only, twopence for a chair and threepence for “the most comfortable seats which are cushioned.” During the performance, according to Thomas Platter’s
