Globe by Catharine Arnold

Author:Catharine Arnold
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781471125713
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

7

THE GREAT GLOBE ITSELF

Can this cockpit hold

The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram

Within this wooden O the very casques

That did affright the air at Agincourt?

Henry V, Prologue

Towards the close of 1598, the Burbage brothers suspected that Giles Alleyn, owner of the land upon which the Theatre stood, intended to tear down their beloved theatre. With the Burbages’ patrons out of favour, it would be a simple matter for Alleyn to destroy the Theatre, allowing him to recoup his losses, cancel the lease and install a new tenant on the land. Cuthbert Burbage even heard rumours that Alleyn had engaged a party of housebreakers to join him in demolishing the Theatre after Christmas, on some day to be decided by him.

But the Burbage brothers were ready for Alleyn. Realising that there was no hope of saving the Theatre, they could at least salvage the materials from which it had been built, and erect a new theatre elsewhere. Cuthbert Burbage looked south, to the liberty of Bankside. It was not an ideal site, since there were already two theatres there, the Rose and the Swan. But Cuthbert Burbage knew they had no choice. He found a suitable site near St Saviour’s Church, west of Dead Man’s Place and south of Maiden Lane, and he arranged with its owner, Nicholas Brend, to take a long lease on it of £14.10s a year, commencing from 25 December 1598.

On 28 December, Cuthbert and Richard Burbage arrived at the Theatre, accompanied by players from the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and an army of volunteers and labourers, one of whom, referred to only as ‘WS’ or ‘William Smith’ in the resulting court records, may have been a pseudonym for Shakespeare himself. Under the direction of master craftsman Peter Street, the men set about tearing down the Burbages’ beloved Theatre. This task was not as easy as they had expected. The original Theatre had been constructed in 1576 by the mortise and tenon method, with each piece of timber fitting into its neighbour with a tapered wooden peg, like an elaborate three-dimensional jigsaw. As each peg locked into place, the construction had become stronger and more secure. Over twenty years since the building of the Theatre, the joints had stiffened and it was difficult to take the timbers apart without splitting the wood.

Word of the Burbages’ audacious scheme soon got about, and Giles Alleyn’s men arrived to stop the destruction, causing uproar. It was probably Alleyn’s own men who did most to destroy the grass, afterwards valued at 40 shillings in Alleyn’s complaint. In his subsequent lawsuit, Alleyn claimed that Cuthbert Burbage and his comrades ‘did riotously take downe and carry away the said Theatre by confederacy with others armed with unlawful and offensive weapons, as namely swords, daggers, bills, axes and such like’.1 Alleyn also alleged that the Burbages and their supporters became aggressive when ‘divers of your said subjects servants and farmers peacefully going about to procure them to desist, they violently resisted, to the great disturbing of the peace, and terrifying of your said subject’s servants’.

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