King's Playhouse

“ The chief spirit in the organization of the new playhouse seems to have been the poet Michael Drayton, who had secured a patent from King James to "erect" a company of child actors, to be known as "The Children of His Majesty's Revels." [521] Obviously his hope was to make the Children of His Majesty's Revels at Whitefriars rival the successful Children of Her Majesty's Revels at Blackfriars. In this ambitious enterprise he associated with himself a wealthy London merchant, Thomas Woodford, whom we know as having been interested in various theatrical investments. ”

“ The building is so pictured in the Hondius map of 1610 (see page 149) , and in the inset maps on the title-pages of Holland's Herωologia, 1620, and Baker's Chronicle, 1643 (see page 147) , all three of which apparently go back to an early map of London now lost. The building is again pictured as circular, with the Bear Garden at the left and the Globe at the right, in the Delaram portrait of King James (opposite page 246) . [216]
From Henslowe's Diary we learn that the playhouse was of timber, the exterior of lath and plaster, the roof of thatch ”

“ A warrant granted to Josias D'Aunay, [710] Hurfries de Lau, and others, for to act plays at a new house in Drury Lane, during pleasure, the 5 May, 1635.
The King was pleased to command my Lord Chamberlain to direct his warrant to Monsieur Le Fevure, to give him a power to contract with the Frenchmen for to build a playhouse in the manage-house, which was done accordingly by my advice and allowance. [711]
In Glapthorne's The Ladies' Priviledge is a good-natured allusion to the French Company and their vivacious style of acting: [712]
La. ”

“ Yet for us the playhouse signifies more than a physical structure for the presentation of plays. It has become the symbol of an entire art. Its construction initiated a glorious decade during which the company achieved a level of stability and a quality of productivity rarely matched in the history of the theater. So rich was the achievement that virtually all interest in the Elizabethan drama radiates from the work of these years. ”

“ But all these amusements pale before the growing delight of play-going. To the allegorical morality play—revived to-day by the Elizabethan Stage Society in the representation of "Everyman"—succeeded historical representations, at first crude, but carried to a triumphant height by Shakspere. When Elizabeth ascended the throne there was no theatre: miscellaneous plays were acted in the courtyards of great inns or other open spaces, on temporary stages standing on four legs and protected by an awning in bad weather. But in 1576 a regular playhouse was established and called The Theatre. ”

“ Over some fifteen years a growing number of minds have been more or less actively seeking a way towards a new type of theater. They have been abusing the picture-frame stage, stamping on the footlights, pulling out the front of the apron, pushing the actors into the loges, down the orchestra pit, onto the prompter’s box, out upon runways or up the aisles. They have even gone clear out of the playhouse and into circuses, open air theaters, and public parks. All to set up a new and mutual relationship between the actor and the audience. ”

“ With what unction, from an actor’s lips, falls his manifold and glowing praise of theatres! What a pretty picture, a broad wash of rose-purple and white, he can make of the interior seen from the wings! “There’s such a hurry of pleasure to transport us; the bustle, noise, gallantry, equipage, garters, feathers, wigs, bows, smiles, ogles, love, music, and applause!” And again, in another mood: “The playhouse is the element of poetry, because the region of beauty; the ladies, methinks, have a more inspiring, triumphant air in the boxes than anywhere else. ”

“ Obviously the Queen's Men were seeking permission to play in the city only during the cold winter months; during the balmy spring, summer, and autumn months—for actors the best season of the year—they occupied their commodious playhouse in "the fields." ”

“ Once the principle that the Chapel Royal should supply the Queen with plays was granted, the commission could be used to furnish the necessary actors; and the old fiction, established by Farrant and Hunnis, of using a "private" playhouse as a means of exercising or training the boys for Court service, would enable the promoters to give public204 performances and thus handsomely reimburse themselves for their trouble. ”

“ Other performers, in more or less classic garb, cluster about her with garlands in their hands, ready to bestow them on the bust. In a box, high up on one side of the theatre, sits the demi-god, with two fair friends—one of whom is his niece, Madame Denis, and the other that Marquise de Villette to whom the print that represents the occasion is dedicated. The playhouse is full. The clapping of hands is lusty and enthusiastic. People rise in their boxes. Men stare upwards from the pit. ”

“ The most thrilling moment, I will confess, which theatres can still give me is that—but it is really sui generis and ineffable—when, having got upstairs, you meet in the narrow lobbies of an old-fashioned playhouse the tuning of the fiddles and the smell—of gas, glue, heaven knows what glories of yester-year—which, ever since one's babyhood, has come to mean "the play." People have expended much genius and more money to make theatrical representation transcend imagination ”

“ When we consider the few new theatres that have been built, such as the Scala, the Little Theatre, the Ambassadors, we are sure that the old cannot be brought up to date. Like most old institutions, the English theatre can be reformed only by dynamite.
As in many human things, architecture is at fault. The playhouse is evolved from the Roman circus. But the circus offered a performance without scenery, which could be seen from all sides. When scenery came, it grew impossible to show the play except from one side, so as not to give away the mystery ”

“ By the way, grandmother, I don’t know how it is with the player-folks in New York; but here with us, if a man or woman want a bit of plate they’ve only to take a theatre. A playhouse is a short cut to a silversmith’s. There isn’t a London manager who isn’t plated after this fashion, which shows there is no place for true gratitude like the green-room; but I ask your pardon for talking of such matters, knowing what a low place you think the theatre. Parliament, like a goose that has been set upon too many eggs, has risen with half of ’em come to nothing. But this, grandmother, is the old trick. ”

“ It was once felt that a theatre was not a theatre if it was not adorned with a wealth of gilded cupids, masks, tambours, and daggers, surrounded by stucco wreaths and garlands in high relief, and interspaced with pictured panels of the muses, especially those most at home in a playhouse. And, indeed, about those old houses, their garishness now mellowed, there is a glamor peculiarly of the theatre, and a sweet mustiness in the air bespeaking audiences of perfumed ladies, long since dead, the grease-paint and pomade of a long line of players, old scenery, the fine fustian of the old plays. ”

“ An empty house is nevertheless dispiriting—dispiriting to the audience and dispiriting to the performers—so a little paper judiciously used may often bolster up a play in momentary danger of collapse.
“Stalls full.” “Dress Circle full.” “House full.” Such notices are often put outside the playhouse during a performance, and in London they generally mean what they say. In the provinces, however, a gentleman arrived at an hotel, and after dinner went off to the theatre as he had no club. ”

“ The theatre itself was not altered, except by the platform occupied by the king; it is sufficiently splendid as it stands; but the stage, whose area is much larger than that of the pit, was hung in rich drapery as a vast tent, and garnished to profusion with flags and arms. Along the sides, on a level with the lower row of boxes, extended galleries of crimson velvet, festooned with flowers. These were filled with ladies, and completed a circle about the house of beauty and magnificence, of which the king and his dazzling suite formed the corona. ”

“ The playhouse thus erected was, of course, an entirely new structure. Nearly a quarter of a century had elapsed since James Burbage designed the old Theatre, during which time a great development had taken place both in histrionic art and in play writing; and, no doubt, many improvements were possible in the stage and in the auditorium to provide better facilities for the actors and greater comfort for the spectators. In designing such improvements the architect had the advice and help of the actors, including Shakespeare ”

“ We are now beginning to see that, in any effort to recapture the methods of the Elizabethan theater, we must first understand the customs of the medieval stage, and then look forward from that point. Of all places in the world the playhouse is, perhaps, the most conservative, and the most reluctant to relinquish anything which has proved its utility in the past and which is accepted by the public in the present; and many of the peculiarities of the Tudor theater are survivals from the medieval performances. ”

“ In the first place, it is needful to bring together a body of citizens who, under leadership which commands public confidence, will undertake to build and control for a certain term of years a theatre of suitable design in the interests of dramatic art, on conditions similar to those that have worked with success in Berlin, Paris, and notably Vienna. Then the London County Council, after the professions it has made, might be reasonably expected to undertake so much responsibility for the proper conduct of the new playhouse as would be implied by its provision of a site. ”

“ The plot of ground on which the old playhouse stood he leased to the several sharers for a period of fifty-one years at an annual rental of £10 13s. 10d. a share, with the express condition that the building to be erected thereon should never be used for any purpose other than the acting of stage-plays. The sharers then proceeded to the task of constructing their playhouse. It was proposed to make the new building larger [459] and handsomer than the old one, and to build it of brick [460] with a tiled roof—possibly an attempt at fireproof construction. ”

“ These latter were to leave me, however, with a fonder vision still than that of the comparatively jejune "lecture-room" version; for the first exhibition of them to spring to the front was the fine free rendering achieved at a playhouse till then ignored by fashion and culture, the National Theatre, deep down on the East side, whence echoes had come faintest to ears polite, but where a sincerity vivid though rude was now supposed to reward the curious. ”

“ It may as well be confest frankly that, even in the twenty-first century, the playhouse is unlikely to be hospitable to an "extraordinarily complicated texture of subtle thoughts and minute sensations" ”

“ As a result, in the spring of 1600, Henslowe and Alleyn began the erection of a splendid new playhouse, the Fortune, designed to surpass the Globe in magnificence, and to furnish a suitable and permanent home for the Admiral's Men. ”

“ Nor are you disposed, like certain good people, to object to the theatre simply as a name. These sticklers for principle would never enter a playhouse for worlds; and I have heard that in a famous city of Massachusetts, not a hundred miles from here, there are persons to whom the theatre is unknown, but who have no objection to see a play in a building which is called a museum, especially if the vestibule leading to the theatre should be decorated with sound moral principles in the shape of statues, pictures, and stuffed objects in glass cases. ”

“ The so-called picture of the Fortune, printed in Wilkinson's Londina Illustrata, and often reproduced by modern scholars, cannot possibly be that of the playhouse erected by Alleyn. For an interesting surmise as to the history of this later building see W.J. Lawrence, Restoration Stage Nurseries, in Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen (1914) , p. 301.
[484] This playhouse is not to be confused with the famous Bull Tavern in Bishopsgate Street, for many years used as a theatre. ”

“ No representation of the exterior of the Fortune has come down to us. In the so-called Ryther Map of London, there is, to be sure, what seems to be a crude representation of the playhouse (see page 278) ; but if this is really intended for the Fortune, it does little more than mark the location. Yet one can readily picture in his imagination the playhouse—a plastered structure, eighty feet square and approximately forty feet high, [446] with small windows marking the galleries, a turret and flagpole surmounting the red-tiled roof, and over the main entrance a sign representing Dame Fortune ”

“ Thus the history of the first66 London playhouse, which is chiefly the history of quarrels and litigation, came to a close.
It is not possible now to indicate exactly the stay of the different troupes at the Theatre; the evidence is scattered and incomplete, and the inferences to be drawn are often uncertain.
When the building was opened in 1576, it was, no doubt, occupied by the Earl of Leicester's troupe, of which Burbage was the manager, and for which, presumably, the structure had been designed. ”

“ The workmen, under the expert direction of Peter Street, carried the timber and other materials of the old Theatre to the tract of land on the Bankside recently leased by the new syndicate—as Gyles Alleyn puts it, "did then also in most forcible and riotous manner take and carry away from thence all the wood and timber thereof unto the Bankside, in the Parish of St. Mary65 Overies, and there erected a new playhouse with the said timber and wood." ”