Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 07.djvu/291

 operations, or at any rate to make provisions against the termination of his twenty-one years' lease in Shoreditch. On 5 Feb. 1595-6 Sir William More of Loseley, Surrey, conveyed to him by a deed of fee ment part of a large house in Blackfriars, which Burbage resolved to convert into a playhouse to be called the Blackfriars Theatre. In November 1596 the neighhouring tenants appealed to the privy council to prohibit this conversion, but the appeal seems to have been unsuccessful, and the new Playhouse was soon afterwards opened. Meanwhile Burbage had been endeavouring to obtain a renewal of his Shoreditch lease for ten years, in accordance (as he stated) with the original agreement. He was willing, ‘in respect of the great proffitt and commoditie which he had made and in time then to come was further likelye to make of the Theatre and the other buildinges and growndes to him demised,’ to pay 24l. a year, i.e. 10l. more than he had previously paid. But Giles Allen, the lessor, stipulated that the playhouse should only be applied to theatrical purposes for another five years. This stipulation was contested by urbage, and he and his sons began a harassing lawsuit with Allen. But before the dispute had gone very far Burbage died (in the spring of 1597), and the suit was continued by his sons Richard [q. v.] and Cuthbert, to whom it seems certain that Burbage had made over the property by a deed of gift shortly before his death. Ultimately the fabric of The Theatre was removed from Shoreditch to the Bankside, either in December 1598 or in the following month, and reerected as the Globe Theatre. Thus the erection of the three chief Elizabethan playhouses was due to Burbage's enterprise.

Gusson in his ‘School of Abuse,' 1579, and his ‘Playes confuted’ (n. d.), mentions several plays, few of them now extant, that were performed at The Theatre under Burbage’s management. Other authorities prove that the old play of ‘Hamlet’, Wits Miserie, 1596), and Marlowe's ‘Faustus’ (Blacke Booke, 1604) were part of his repertory. Tarleton, the comedian, seems to have made his reputation at The Theatre. The dramatic entertainments were occasionally exchanged for fencing matches.

Burbage married, before 1575, Ellen or Helen Braine, or Brayne, of London. His wife’s father appears to have advanced money for the erection of The Theatre, on condition that a moiety of the property and of the profits were assigned him. After Brayne’s death, Margaret, his widow and executrix, brought an action against Burbage in 1590 to compel him to carry out this contract. The suit lingered on or six years, and its result is not known. Burbage had a house in Holywell Street, Shoreditch. The registers of St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, prove that he had three daughters: Alice (baptised 11 March 1575-6), Joan (buried 18 Aug. 1582), and Helen (buried 13 Dec. 1595). He had two sons, Richard [q. v.], the famous actor, and Cuthbert, who been persistently identified by Mr. Collier with Cuthbert Burby, a well-known printer and publisher of the time. The Stationers' Registers show, however, that this Cuthbert was the ‘son of Edmund Burbie, late of Erlsey, in the county of Bedford, husbandman’ (, Transcript, ii. 127).  BURBAGE, RICHARD (1567?–1619), actor, was the son of James Burbage [q. v.], actor and theatrical manager, by his wife Ellen or Helen, daughter of John Braine or Brayne of London. Cuthbert was another son. The date of Richard's birth is unknown. The registers of St. Leonard's, Shoreditch, the parish in which stood his father's home in Holywell Street, record the birth of his sisters Alice (11 March 1575-6) and Joan (18 Aug. 1582), but are silent respecting himself or his brother. He was, with his father and brother, defendant in a lawsuit brought against the elder Burbage by his wife’s relations in 1590, and both sons must have then been of age. If Richard were the elder, he must have been a year or two more than twenty-one, and 1507 will perhaps prove to be about the correct date.

Burbage was doubtless associated with his father's profession from childhood, and made his début at James Burbage‘s Theatre in Shoreditch as a boy. Before 1588 he had secured some reputation on the stage. The well-known comedian, Richard Tarleton, a neighbour of his father in Holywell Street, was the author of a rude dramatic piece entitled ‘The Seven Deadlie Sinns,’ in which virtues and vices were represented in confusing alliance with historical and mythological personages. In a manuscript (No. xix.) at Dulwich College (‘The Platt of the secound parte of the Seven Deadlie Sinns’) the names of the actors and their parts are given, and two of the chief characters (King Gorboduc and Tereus) are assigned to ‘R. Burbadge.’