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 have been the disgrace brought upon these by Eastward Ho! in the course of 1605 that led him to transfer his activities elsewhere. With him he seems to have brought Marston's The Fawn, probably written in 1604 and ascribed in the first of the two editions of 1606 to the Queen's Revels alone, in the second to them 'and since at Poules'. The charms of partnership with Kirkham were not, however, sufficient to induce Pearce to continue his enterprise. The last traceable appearance of the Paul's boys was on 30 July 1606, when they gave The Abuses before James and King Christian of Denmark. Probably the plays were discontinued not long afterwards. This would account for the large number of playbooks belonging to the company which reached the hands of the publishers in 1607 and 1608. The earlier policy of giving plays to the press immediately after production does not seem to have endured beyond 1602. Those now printed, in addition to Bussy D'Ambois, What You Will, Westward Ho! and Northward Ho! already mentioned, included Middleton's Michaelmas Term, The Phoenix, A Mad World, my Masters, and A Trick to Catch the Old One, together with The Puritan, very likely also by Middleton, and The Woman Hater, the first work of Francis Beaumont. The Puritan can be dated, from a chronological allusion, in 1606. The title-pages of The Woman Hater, A Mad World, my Masters, and ''A Trick to Catch the Old One'' specify them to have been 'lately' acted. It is apparent from the second quarto of ''A Trick to Catch the Old One'' that the Children of the Blackfriars took it over and presented it at Court on 1 January 1609. This was probably part of a bargain as to which we have another record. Pearce may have had at the back of his mind a notion of reopening his theatre some day. But it is given in evidence in the lawsuit of Keysar v. Burbadge in 1610 that, while it was still closed, he was approached on behalf of the other 'private' houses in London, those of the Blackfriars and the Whitefriars, and offered a 'dead rent' of £20 a year, 'that there might be a cessation of playeinge and playes to be acted in the said howse neere S^t. Paules Church'. This must have been in the winter of 1608-9, just as the