Boar's Head Theatre

Last updated

The Boar's Head Theatre was an inn-yard theatre in the Whitechapel area of London from 1598 to around 1616.

Contents

It was based in the yard of the Boar's Head Inn. During its lifetime as a playhouse, it was home to the Earl of Derby's Men (summer 1599 – summer 1601, summer 1602 – March 1603), the Earl of Worcester's Men (summer 1601 – summer 1602, April 1604–1605 or 1606), and Prince Charles's Men (summer 1609 – March 1616); the historian Herbert Berry suggests that many other unidentified companies may have played there, as well. [1]

Location

The Boar's Head was located on the north side of Whitechapel High Street. Berry notes that "it became a playhouse partly because of where it was — just outside the City of London … a few feet beyond the ordinary jurisdiction of the lord mayor and his aldermen". Until the end of the nineteenth century Boars Head Yard, named after the original inn, was a small alley running between Middlesex Street and Gulston Street, parallel to Whitechapel High Street and just to the northwest of Aldgate East station; Sisson, too, notes that this alley was just beyond the boundary of Portsoken Ward, and thus outside the jurisdiction of the City. [2] [3] [4]

History

As Alexander Leggatt notes, the Boar's Head was originally an inn, which was built in the 1530s. Before 1598, the Boar's Head was simply an inn and did not include any formal playing space. However, it was being used as an extempore venue for plays at least as early as 1557, when an injunction from the Privy Council ordered the Lord Mayor of London to send officers to the Boar's Head to prevent the performance of "a lewd play called a Sack full of News", arrest the performers and confiscate the play-book. The Lord Mayor complied, but in a further letter on the following day the Privy Council ordered the prisoners' release. [5]

It underwent two renovations for use as a playhouse: first, in 1598, when a simple stage was erected, and a second, more elaborate renovation in 1599. [6] In 1616, the lease of the space to Oliver Woodliffe, one of the men responsible for expanding the theatre, expired, and Charles Sisson surmises that this marked the end of the Boar's Head's days as a theatre space. [7]

On 28 November 1594, Jane and Henry Poley, who owned the inn, entered a lease agreement with Oliver and Susan Woodliffe. The agreement began on 25 March 1595 and ended on 24 March 1616 and included a promise to spend £100 during the following seven years to build, among other things, a tiring house and a stage. [8]

In 1598, a primitive stage was built in the middle of the yard, measuring 39 feet 7 inches (12.07 m) by 25 feet (7.6 m). The audience stood mostly in the yard, as the galleries were not big enough to accommodate a large audience. In 1599, Woodliffe and Richard Samwell (who had leased the inn in 1598 from Woodliffe; Woodliffe remained landlord of the theatre) took down the primitive stage setup and built a new playhouse apparently meant to compete with Shakespeare's Globe, which had just opened on the other side of the Thames. As Leggatt states, "the stage — essentially the same stage — was moved to the west wall so that actors could enter directly on to it from the tiring house, a roof was built over the stage, and the galleries were considerably expanded and roofed with tiles." [9]

Berry lists a number of plays that can be associated with the Boar's Head during its heyday, although he is careful to note that "we cannot show that any surviving plays were unquestionably written for performance at the Boar's Head." He lists "two plays that may well have been written for performance at the Boar's Head":

Also listed are six plays that are less likely to have been written specifically for performance at the Boar's Head but that were published as having belonged to the Queen's men and Prince Charles's men at the time of their respective stints at the Boar's Head:

In 1616, the lease agreement between the Woodliffes and the Poleys (now controlled by Mrs. Poley's heir, Sir John Poley) expired. By this time, the Prince's Men had merged with Lady Elizabeth's Men and had entered into an agreement to play in the Hope Theatre on Bankside. Sisson suggests that Poley "found it more profitable to develop the buildings and site of the Boar's head, or to dispose of it to a speculator, for other purposes than those of an inn and a theatre, in the rapid growth of this residential and industrial suburb of London.". [11] [12]

Layout

As Berry explains, the Boar's Head differed from many other playhouses of the time in that it "was not a single free-standing building, like the Globe, Fortune, and others, but, except for the stage, mostly a scheme of additions and alterations to existing buildings originally meant for very different uses." [13] These other sections included various lodgings, stables, gardens, barns, and, thankfully for its customers, a privy. [14] The Boar's Head featured a covered, square playing area in an age of polygonal playhouses (such as the Globe, the Swan and the Rose) and was surrounded on all sides by the audience. [15]

Even after its expansion, the Boar's Head remained a comparatively small theatre for its time, with only two levels of galleries on the east side, and one each on the north and south sides. (For comparison, the Swan and Fortune theatres each had three levels of galleries.) [16]

Archaeology

In 2019 the Museum of London Archaeology began an excavation of the site, which will eventually be preserved within a new building which is intended for the location. [15]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Berry, 106-131.
  2. ↑ Sisson, pp.22–24
  3. ↑ Berry, 107
  4. ↑ London VII.67 (Map). 1:1,056. Ordnance Survey. 1896.
  5. ↑ Johnson, Samuel; Steevens, George, eds. (1778). "A farther account of the Early English stage". The Plays of William Shakespeare. Vol. 3 (1815 ed.). pp. 425–6.
  6. ↑ Leggatt, 14-16.
  7. ↑ Sisson, 77.
  8. ↑ Sisson, 27.
  9. ↑ Leggatt, 14.
  10. ↑ Berry, pp. 124-125.
  11. ↑ Sisson, 77.
  12. ↑ Berry has since found more evidence to corroborate Sisson's suggestion, and discusses at length the disposal of the property at the hands of Sir John Poley (pp. 76-83).
  13. ↑ Berry, 95.
  14. ↑ Berry, 107; 139-155.
  15. 1 2 "Excavation of Shakespearean-era 'theatre pub' The Boar's Head Playhouse begins". MOLA . Retrieved 2 October 2019.
  16. ↑ Leggatt, 14.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Globe Theatre</span> 16th/17th-century theatre in London

The Globe Theatre was a theatre in London associated with William Shakespeare. It was built in 1599 at Southwark, close to the south bank of the Thames, by Shakespeare's playing company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men. It was destroyed by fire on 29 June 1613. A second Globe Theatre was built on the same site by June 1614 and stayed open until the London theatre closures of 1642. As well as plays by Shakespeare, early works by Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker and John Fletcher were first performed here.

John Webster was an English Jacobean dramatist best known for his tragedies The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, which are often seen as masterpieces of the early 17th-century English stage. His life and career overlapped with Shakespeare's.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Dekker (writer)</span> English dramatist and pamphleteer (c. 1572–1632)

Thomas Dekker was an English Elizabethan dramatist and pamphleteer, a versatile and prolific writer, whose career spanned several decades and brought him into contact with many of the period's most famous dramatists.

Philip Henslowe was an Elizabethan theatrical entrepreneur and impresario. Henslowe's modern reputation rests on the survival of his diary, a primary source for information about the theatrical world of Renaissance London.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Rose (theatre)</span> Elizabethan theatre in London

The Rose was an Elizabethan theatre. It was the fourth of the public theatres to be built, after The Theatre (1576), the Curtain (1577), and the theatre at Newington Butts – and the first of several playhouses to be situated in Bankside, Southwark, in a liberty outside the jurisdiction of the City of London's civic authorities. Its remains were excavated by archaeologists in 1989 and are listed by Historic England as a Scheduled Monument.

Anthony Munday was an English playwright and miscellaneous writer. He was baptized on 13 October 1560 in St Gregory by St Paul's, London, and was the son of Christopher Munday, a stationer, and Jane Munday. He was one of the chief predecessors of Shakespeare in English dramatic composition, and wrote plays about Robin Hood. He is believed to be the primary author of Sir Thomas More, on which he is believed to have collaborated with Henry Chettle, Thomas Heywood, William Shakespeare, and Thomas Dekker.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Theatre</span> An Elizabethan playhouse located in Shoreditch, London (1576–1598)

The Theatre was an Elizabethan playhouse in Shoreditch, just outside the City of London. Built in 1576, after the Red Lion, it was the first permanent theatre built exclusively for the showing of theatrical productions in England, and its first successful one. Actor-manager James Burbage built it near the family home in Holywell Street. The Theatre's history includes a number of important acting troupes including the Lord Chamberlain's Men, which employed Shakespeare as actor and playwright. After a dispute with the landlord, the theatre was dismantled and the timbers used in the construction of the Globe Theatre on Bankside.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Marston (playwright)</span> 16th/17th-century English poet, playwright, and satirist

John Marston was an English playwright, poet and satirist during the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods. His career as a writer lasted only a decade. His work is remembered for its energetic and often obscure style, its contributions to the development of a distinctively Jacobean style in poetry, and its idiosyncratic vocabulary.

City comedy, also known as citizen comedy, is a genre of comedy in the English early modern theatre.

The Lord Chamberlain's Men was a company of actors, or a "playing company", for which William Shakespeare wrote during most of his career. Richard Burbage played most of the lead roles, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. Formed at the end of a period of flux in the theatrical world of London, it had become, by 1603, one of the two leading companies of the city and was subsequently patronized by James I.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Red Bull Theatre</span>

The Red Bull was an inn-yard conversion erected in Clerkenwell, London, operating in the 17th century. For more than four decades, it entertained audiences drawn primarily from the City and its suburbs, developing a reputation over the years for rowdiness. After Parliament closed the theatres in 1642, it continued to host illegal performances intermittently, and when the theatres reopened after the Restoration, it became a legitimate venue again. There is a myth that it burned down in the Great Fire of London but the direct reason for its end is unclear.

Christopher Beeston was a successful actor and a powerful theatrical impresario in early 17th century London. He was associated with a number of playwrights, particularly Thomas Heywood.

Francis Langley (1548–1602) was a theatre builder and theatrical producer in Elizabethan era London. After James Burbage and Philip Henslowe, Langley was the third significant entrepreneurial figure active at the height of the development of English Renaissance theatre.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Inn-yard theatre</span>

In the historical era of English Renaissance drama, an Inn-yard theatre or Inn-theatre was a common inn with an inner courtyard with balconies that provided a venue for the presentation of stage plays.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Boar's Head Inn</span> Name of various pubs, mostly in the UK

The Boar's Head Inn is the name of several former and current taverns in London, most famously a tavern in Eastcheap that is supposedly the meeting place of Sir John Falstaff, Prince Hal and other characters in Shakespeare's Henry IV plays. An earlier tavern in Southwark used the same name, and an inn of the name in Whitechapel was used as a theatre.

Susan Shore Browne Greene Baskervile, or Baskerville, was one of the most influential and significant women involved in English Renaissance theatre, as theatre investor, litigant, and wife, widow, and mother of actors.

Robert Browne was an English actor of the Elizabethan era, and the owner and manager of the Boar's Head Theatre. He is also part of an enduring confusion in the study of English Renaissance theatre.

Robert Browne was an English actor and theatre manager and investor of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He was also part of a long-standing confusion in the scholarship of English Renaissance theatre.

John Brayne was a member of the Worshipful Company of Grocers. He built the Red Lion playhouse, and financed, with his brother-in-law, James Burbage, the building of the Theatre in Shoreditch, in which he was to have had a half interest. He also leased the George Inn in Whitechapel with a friend, Robert Miles. The latter two ventures, particularly the financing of the Theatre, bankrupted him, and he fell out with both James Burbage and Robert Miles. It was suspected that his death in 1586 was caused by blows received during an altercation with Miles. His widow, Margaret, backed financially by Miles, was involved in litigation with Burbage over Brayne's half interest in the Theatre until her own death in 1593.

References

51°30′54″N0°04′26″W / 51.5149°N 0.0740°W / 51.5149; -0.0740

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.