Shakespearean Playhouses A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration by Joseph Quincy Adams

Author:Joseph Quincy Adams [Adams, Joseph Quincy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Stage history -- To 1625, Theaters -- England -- London -- History
Published: 2007-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

Baxter turned the letter over to the authorities of Middlesex (hence its preservation), who took steps to guard the playhouse and actors. The only result was that prentices "to the number of one hundred persons on the said day riotously assembled at Clerkenwell, to the terror and disquiet of persons dwelling there."

On July 8, 1622, the Red Bull Company secured a license "to bring up children in the quality and exercise of playing comedies, histories, interludes, morals, pastorals, stage-plays and such like ... to be called by the name of the Children of the Revels."[500] The Children of the Revels occupied the Red Bull until the summer of the following year, 1623, when they were dissolved. The last reference to them is in the Herbert Manuscript under the date of May 10, 1623.[501]

In August, 1623, we find the Red Bull occupied by Prince Charles's Men,[502] who, after the dissolution of the Revels Company, had moved thither from the less desirable Curtain.

Two years later, in 1625, Prince Charles became King, and took under his patronage his father's troupe, the King's Men. Some of the members of the Prince Charles Troupe were transferred to the King's Men, and the rest constituted a nucleus about which a new company was organized, known simply as "The Red Bull Company."

About this time, it seems, the playhouse was rebuilt and enlarged. The Fortune had been destroyed by fire in 1621, and had just been rebuilt in a larger and handsomer form. In 1625 one W.C., in London's Lamentation for her Sins, writes: "Yet even then, Oh Lord, were the theatres magnified and enlarged."[503] This doubtless refers to the rebuilding of the Fortune and the Red Bull. Prynne specifically states in his Histriomastix (1633) that the Fortune and Red Bull had been "lately reedified [and] enlarged." But nothing further is known of the "re-edification and enlargement" of the Red Bull.

After its enlargement the playhouse seems to have acquired a reputation for noise and vulgarity. Carew, in 1630, speaks of it as a place where "noise prevails" and a "drowth of wit," and yet as always crowded with people while the better playhouses stood empty. In The Careless Shepherdess, acted at Salisbury Court, we read:

And I will hasten to the money-box,

And take my shilling out again;

I'll go to the Bull, or Fortune, and there see

A play for two-pence, and a jig to boot.[504]

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