Shakespeare

James Burbage’s plan to convert part of Blackfriars into a private I theatre, and thus circumvent the authority of the City fathers, was not advancing. In the early winter of 1596 it was criticised by thirty-one residents in the immediate vicinity. Their petition objected to the erection of “a common playhouse … which will grow to be a very great annoyance and trouble, not only to all the noblemen and gentlemen thereabout inhabiting, but also a general inconvenience to all the inhabitants of the said precinct, by reason of the gathering together of all manner of lewd and vagrant persons.” There were allusions to “the great pestering and filling-up of the same precinct,”¹ and to the loud sound of drums and trumpets coming from the stage.

Another piece of playhouse business was responsible for Shakespeare’s next entry in the public records. He had played some part in aborted negotiations for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to use Francis Langley’s theatre, the Swan, on Bankside. It was a readily available alternative to the Curtain and the disputed Theatre. The Swan had been erected by Langley two years before in the neighbourhood of Paris Garden. It was the latest, and grandest, of the public theatres. There is a famous drawing of it by Johannes de Witt, and such was the ubiquity of this print that for many years it was taken as the model of all the sixteenth-century playhouses. Since each playhouse differed from every other, it was an unwarrantable assumption. In his notes de Witt explains that the Swan is “the largest and most magnificent” of the London playhouses, capable of holding three thousand spectators; it was constructed of “a mass of flint stones (of which there is a prodigious supply in Britain), and supported by wooden columns painted in such excellent imitation of marble that it is able to deceive even the most cunning.” He also disclosed that “its form resembles that of a Roman work.” ² Langley’s intent was that of somewhat cheap magnificence. Despite its exterior lustre, however, the Swan never achieved any great theatrical eminence. If the Lord Chamberlain’s Men had moved there, in the winter of 1596, its theatrical history would have been very different.

The connection between Shakespeare and Langley is to be found in a petition of a certain William Wayte who, in the autumn of 1596, named them both – together with Dorothy Soer and Anne Lee – in a writ ob metum mortis. Wayte was alleging that he stood in danger of death or grave physical harm from Shakespeare and others. This was a legal device for the completion of a writ, however, and did not necessarily mean that Shakespeare had threatened to kill him. It transpired that Francis Langley himself had previously taken out a writ against Wayte and his stepfather, William Gardiner; Gardiner, Justice of the Peace with special jurisdiction in Paris Garden, had a reputation in the district for corruption and general chicanery, and had apparently sought to close down the Swan Theatre. Wayte may have encountered some kind of resistance from Shakespeare and his co-defendants while in fact attempting to do so. But that is supposition. We only know for certain that Shakespeare was somehow involved with the imbroglio. It has in fact been suggested by some theatrical scholars that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men played at the Swan for a short season, but there is no evidence of this except for a stray reference in Thomas Dekker’s Satiromastix- “My name’s Hamlet revenge: thou hast been at Paris Garden, hast not?”

It is perhaps worth noting that Langley himself enjoyed a somewhat dubious reputation as a money-broker and minor civic official who had managed to accumulate a large fortune; he had been charged by the Attorney General, in no less a tribunal than the Star Chamber, of violence and of extortion. Sharp practice has always been a London speciality. He had purchased the manor of Paris Garden in order to build and let out tenements, and of course there were also brothels in that particular neighbourhood. One of those named in the petition, Dorothy Soer, owned property in Paris Garden Lane and gave her name to cheap lodgings known as “Soer’s Rents” or “Sore’s Rents.” It is more than likely that some of the tenements in that lane were of low repute.