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Some Reasons to Focus on the Globe and the Fortune: Stages and Stage Directions: Controls for the Evidence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2009
Extract
I start with the circumstantial evidence. The first year that the professional companies ever had specific amphitheatre playhouses in London to work in was 1594. Before that, they expected to live an essentially transient life, moving from one playing space to another. The Queen's Men, between 1583 and 1594, are recorded as playing at just about every location there was in London, three inns, and three suburban playhouses. On November 28, 1583, a city permit allowed them to perform, “at the sygnes of the Bull in Bushoppesgate streete, and the sygne of the Bell in Gratioustreete and nowheare els within this Cyttye.” The Bull is confirmed as one of their venues in Tarlton's Jests. They also were playing at the Theatre in about 1584 (Nashe reported them there in Pierce Penilesse, I.197, referring to Gabriel Harvey's Saturn and Jupiter, of 1583: “one in mockage threw him in this theame, he playing then at the Curtaine”). Finally, one of the two divided Queen's Men's groups played at the Rose early in 1594. The Queen's was the most uniquely privileged of companies, over whom the Lord Chamberlain fought with the Lord Mayor in 1584 to secure the right for that one company to use the city's inns. If it moved so thoroughly between playhouses, all the others must have done the same.
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- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1996
References
1. Chambers, E.K., The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923): 2:296Google Scholar.
2. For the question of how quickly the companies can be seen from the outside as becoming London-based, see Ingram, William, The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theatre in Elizabethan London (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 14Google Scholar.
3. REED is a series of volumes that cite the evidence for public entertainments found in civic and other archives of the towns and counties of England up to 1642. This is a continuing series, and the first eleven volumes—now in print—are published by the University of Toronto press under the general editorship of Alexandra F. Johnston.
4. Ibid.
5. ES, 2:437.
6. For this listing, I am particularly indebted to, among other authorities, Knutson, Roslyn Lander, The Repertory of Shakespeare's Company, 1594–1613 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991), Appendix, 179–209Google Scholar.
7. Beckerman, Bernard, Shakespeare at the Globe, 1599–1609 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 69–95Google Scholar.
8. Henslowe's Diary, eds. Foakes, R.A. and Rickert, R.T. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 137Google Scholar.
9. Staging at the Globe, 69.
10. Pre-Restoration Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927), 173Google Scholar.