Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 2).pdf/390

 In addition to the Globe and the Whitefriars, the tale of seven theatres is probably made up by the Blackfriars, the Fortune, the Red Bull, the Curtain, and the Swan.

Henslowe's correspondence with Daborne shows that he still had a 'publique howse', probably the Swan, in December 1613, and also that in June of that year his company was only just thinking of 'comming over' for a summer season, presumably from the Whitefriars, as he had recently carried out an amalgamation between the Lady Elizabeth's men and the Queen's Revels. In the following year occurred an episode which curiously emphasizes the constant shifting of the focus of theatrical interest during the whole of the period with which we are concerned. Originally stageland was in the heart of the City itself. With the building of the first theatres, it was transferred to the Fields of the northern suburbs. During the last decade of the sixteenth century the Fields in their turn gave way to the Bankside. The Rose, the Swan, and the Globe successively made their appearance, and the vestry of Southwark began to echo the earlier outcry of the City against the iniquities of players, until their mouths were stopped with tithes. But the transpontine period proved a brief one. Hardly was the Globe up, before Alleyn's choice of a site for the Fortune set the fashion veering again, and opened up a new theatrical region in the western suburbs. This was convenient for the Court and the great houses along the Strand and for the lawyers in the Temple and at Westminster, as well as for the City proper, and its tradition has endured until quite recent years. The Red Bull and the Whitefriars followed in the same area. On the other hand, the Rose had vanished, and the King's men, although they did not desert the Globe, acknowledged the change of venue by taking up their winter quarters in the Blackfriars hard by. One result was that men who had ridden to the Fields and been ferried to the Bankside, now walked or drove in their coaches to the theatre door. During the spring of 1614 things were probably at their worst. Both the Globe, after its fire, and the Hope were still in the builder's hands, and if the Lady Elizabeth's lingered again at the Whitefriars, there can have been no plays across the water at all. The watermen, who twenty years before had exercised the influence of their patron, the Lord Admiral, to induce the Privy Council to revoke an inhibition on the Bankside houses, sent up a bitter cry of protest. John Taylor, the 'water-poet', whom they chose as their spokesman, tells the story. *