Shakespeare

Very shortly after the production of Every Man in His Humour Jonson became involved in an argument with an actor and erstwhile colleague from the Admiral’s Men, Gabriel Spencer. The quarrel may have arisen from Jonson’s recent defection to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, or it may have been entirely personal. Whatever the cause a duel was fought in the fields of Shoreditch, close to the Theatre, and Spencer was killed by Jonson’s sword. The playwright only saved himself from the gallows by pleading benefit of clergy – that is, by proving he was literate and could read. His thumb was branded with the letter “T,” for Tyburn, so that he would not escape a second conviction.

In this same period Burbage and Shakespeare, together with their colleagues, had arrived at an important decision which would also have consequences for the young Ben Jonson. Their negotiations concerning the lease with the landlord of the Theatre had got precisely nowhere. They had read the existing contract very carefully, over the period of these strained discussions, and its wording seemed to offer a solution. The landlord owned the land upon which the Theatre stood, but he did not own the theatre itself. So he could keep the land, and they would take away the theatre. They literally moved it. Three days after Christmas 1598, on a day of heavy snow, the Burbage brothers, Cuthbert and Richard, and their mother, together with twelve workmen and their surveyor and carpenter, Peter Streete, arrived in front of the Theatre in Shoreditch. The aggrieved landlord, Giles Allen, has left a picturesque description of the extraordinary scene.

The Burbages and their cohorts did “ryotouslye assemble themselves” armed with “swords daggers billes axes and such like,” whereupon they “attempted to pull downe the sayd Theater.” Allen alleges that diverse people asked them “to desist from their unlawfull enterpryse,” but the Burbages violently resisted their objections and then began “pulling breaking and throwing downe the sayd Theater in verye outragious violent and riotous sort.” In the course of this operation they were responsible for “the great desturbance and terrefyeing” of the local inhabitants of Shoreditch.⁵ It is interesting how Tudor legalese encourages melodrama; it was a dramatic society on every level.

The great and terrifying disturbance, if such it was, lasted for some four days. Within that period the Burbages and their employees took down the playhouse’s old timbers and loaded them onto wagons; the tiring-house, the beams, the galleries, were all taken up and transported across the river by ferry or by means of London Bridge. There is no reference to the ironwork that was also employed in its construction, although they are unlikely to have left such a valuable asset on site. Much had to be discarded, however, as a result of the speed of the operation. The appurtenances of the Theatre were then deposited south of the river on some land that the Burbages had recently leased for thirty-one years. The plot of ground was a little to the east of the Rose, in the pleasure grounds of Southwark, but further back from the Thames. Ben Jonson described the area as “flanked with a ditch and forced out of a marsh.”⁶ It would have been filled with tidal waters, ooze and garbage. At the time of its redevelopment by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men it comprised seven gardens, a house, and a row of tenements that held fifteen people.

In these watery and insalubrious surroundings the Globe would rise. It was a bold and enterprising decision. The landlord of the plot where the Globe was erected, Nicholas Brend, was in fact brother-in-law of the queen’s Treasurer of the Chamber. So he had impeccable references. But the trustees engaged in the negotiation also throw a little light on the intricate social networks of Elizabethan society. One of them, a goldsmith called Thomas Savage, came from the town of Rufford in Lancashire – where it has been deemed that the juvenile Shakespeare was once in the employment of Sir Thomas Hesketh as schoolmaster and actor. Savage’s wife was a member of the extended Hesketh family. It may simply be coincidence, in a relatively small society, but it is suggestive. The other trustee was a merchant named William Leveson, who became a part of the colonial enterprise to Virginia that also involved the Earl of Southampton. Two of Shakespeare’s early patrons, therefore, can be glimpsed in the dramatist’s later career.

Giles Allen was obviously surprised and angered by the sudden disappearance of the playhouse. He sued the Burbages for £800 in damages, and the litigation lasted for two years through various courts and tribunals. But the Burbages had in fact behaved within the strict interpretation of the law, and Allen received no compensation.