Why did London inns function as theaters?

Huntington Library Quarterly

Volumn 71, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 181-197

  Manley, Lawrence ^a  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Playing companies in seventeenth century London; Theater and city inns in seventeenth century London; Theater and the victualing trades in early modern London; Theatre, Curtain, and Newington Butts (theaters)

Indexed keywords

EID: 57749133005     PISSN: 00187895     EISSN: 1544399X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/hlq.2008.71.1.181     Document Type: Review

References (48)

1. Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (1612), sig. F3.
2. Annales, or A General Chronicle of England. Begun by Iohn Stow: continued and Augmented... By Edmund Howes (1631), fol. 1004.
3. Lansdowne MS. 60, fol. 47, printed in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1923), 4:305.
4. Henslowe's Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes (Cambridge, 2002), 16-18.
5. Corporation of London Record Office, Remembrancia, ii.33, printed in Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4:316.
6. "Henry Carey's Peculiar Letter, " Shakespeare Quarterly 56 (2005): 54-55.
7. The Description of England, ed. G. Edelin (Ithaca, N.Y., 1968), 399.
8. Siobhan Keenan, Traveling Players in Shakespeare's England (Basingstoke, U.K., 2002), 87-106.
9. For a strong dissent from the idea that touring plays were performed at inns with any regularity, see Barbara Palmer, "Early Modern Mobility: Players, Payments, and Patrons, " Shakespeare Quarterly 56.3 (2005): 259-305, esp. 272, 282-84.
10. "The Playhouses, " in The Revels History of Drama in English, Volume III, 1576-1613 (London, 1975), 124-30.
11. William Ingram, "The Costs of Touring, " Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 6 (1993): 57-62; Ingram speculates that "companies might well have had arrangements with their host to share the takings (as they did with London playhouse owners), or pro-rate the charges, or even, in dire enough straits, to perform in exchange for room and board, with the innkeeper taking all the profits" (p. 58).
12. William Lambarde, Perambulation of Kent (1576), 187; (1596), 233.
13. Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200-1830 (London, 1983), 6-10, 40.
14. H. A. Monckton, A History of the English Public House (London, 1969), 44-45.
15. O. L. Brownstein, "The Saracen's Head, Islington: A Pre-Elizabethan Inn Playhouse, " Theatre Notebook 25 (1970-71): 68-72.
16. Acts of the Privy Council in England, 1556-8, ed. J. R. Dasent (London, 1893), 168-69.
17. "The Bell and Bel Savage Inns (1576-1577), " Notes and Queries 51:3 (2004): 242-43.
18. Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry, and William Ingram, eds., English Professional Theatre, 1530-1660 (Cambridge, 2000), 297-99.
19. Histrio-Mastix (1633), sig. Ggg4r.
20. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 2:383.
21. Robert Greene, The Thirde and last Part of Conny-catching (1592), in The Life and Complete Works, ed. A. B. Grosart, 12 vols. (London, 1881-83), 10:172-73;
22. Wickham, et al., English Professional Theatre, 301-2.
23. The Bull and the Bel Savage were also in regular use, from the 1560s, for fencing matches of the London Masters of the Noble Science of Defense; see O. L. Brownstein, "A Record of London Inn-Playhouses from ca. 1565-1590, " Shakespeare Quarterly 22:1 (1971): 17-24.
24. Gurr, "Henry Carey's Peculiar Letter, " 71.
25. "Dramatic Records of the City of London, " in Malone Society Collections, vol. 2, pt. 3 (Oxford, 1931), 301.
26. William Ingram, The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan London (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992), 119-49.
27. Malone Society Collections, vol. 2, pt. 3, p. 194.
28. Paul Menzer cites Q1 Hamlet as an example of a play with possible associations to performance at London inns in "The Tragedians of the City? Q1 Hamlet and the Settlements of the 1590s, " Shakespeare Quarterly 57 (2006): 162-82. I am greatly indebted to Menzer's article, and to the earlier Shakespeare Association seminar on which it is based, for his suggestion that "London's early winter dusk made the suburban theaters inconvenient for patrons who had not only to traverse frozen lanes but also to do so through the gloaming. The City's inns, closer to the population centers, made it easier for patrons to return home before dark and provided players a suitable answer to suburban inconvenience" (p. 174).
29. See R. B. Graves, "Shakespeare's Outdoor Stage Lighting, " Shakespeare Studies 13 (1980): 235-50.
30. Malone Society Collections, vol. 1, pt. 3, p. 310.
31. Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages 1300 to 1660, Volume Two: 1576 to 1660, Part I (London, 1963), 186-97;
32. Gurr, "Henry Carey's Peculiar Letter, " 65.
33. Herbert Berry, The Boar's Head Playhouse (Washington, D.C., 1986), 51.
34. On the Red Bull inn-yard and lawsuit, see Eva Griffiths, "New Material for a Jacobean Playhouse: The Red Bull Theatre on the Seckford Estate, " Theatre Notebook 55:1 (2001): 5-23.
35. Berry, Boar's Head Playhouse, 116-18.
36. W. A. Pantin, "Medieval Inns, " in E. M. Jope, ed., Studies in Building History (London, 1961), 186.
37. The order is cited in Charles Haskins, The Ancient Trade Guilds and Companies of Salisbury (Salisbury, 1912), 295.
38. My estimates are drawn from the scaled plans of the George in Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, An Inventory of Historical Monuments in the City of Salisbury (London, 1980), 1:96.
39. D. F. Rowan, "Inns, Inn-Yards, and Other Playing Places, " The Elizabethan Theatre 9 (1981): 1-20. The Ogilby and Morgan map was made after the great London fire of 1666, but property boundaries and foundation lines tended to remain the same after the fire, and the map proves accurate within feet of what has been found from early-seventeenth-century documents pertaining to the Red Bull and the Boar's Head, neither of which were damaged by the fire.
40. Christine Eccles, The Rose Theatre (New York, 1990), 133-36.
41. Estimates of gallery capacity at the Rose are in the range of 1400-1800; see Eccles, ibid., 133, and Diana Price, "Henslowe's 'ne' and 'the tyeringe-howsse doore, '" Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 42 (2003): 62-78.
42. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4:267, 273.
43. Ingram, The Business of Playing, 153-55, 170, 92-113, 182-218.
44. Henslowe's Diary, ed. Foakes, 305-6.
45. Gabriel Egan, "John Heminges's Tap-House at the Globe, " Theatre Notebook 55 (2001): 72-77;
46. David Kathman, "Grocers, Goldsmiths, and Drapers: Freemen and Apprentices in the Elizabethan Theater, " Shakespeare Quarterly 55:1 (2004): 1-49.
47. The New Inn (1629), ed. Michael Hattaway (Manchester, 1984), 1.3.126-37.
48. A Monster Late Found Out and Discouered (1628), sig. A3.