The early history of the playhouses on the Bank involves many questions, and may be safely left to the antiquarian historian. The reader will find most of these questions raised and settled in a book, already quoted here, by Mr. T. Fairman Ordish ('Early London Theatres'). It appears, however, that there were players, if not playhouses, here as early as 1547. After the death of Henry VIII. Gardiner proposed to have a solemn dirge in memory of the King, but, he complained to the Council, the players of Southwark say that they also will have a 'solemn playe to trye who shall have most resorts, they in game, or I in earnest.'
Whether these players had a regular theatre, or whether they acted in the courtyard of an inn, or whether they had a moveable stage, I do not know. It is, however, quite certain that before the end of the sixteenth century there were four theatres in Bankside--the _Rose_, whose site was somewhere in Rose Alley: the _Hope_ in Bear Garden Lane: the _Swan_ in Paris Gardens--that is, on the west side of the Blackfriars Road, not far from the Bridge: and the _Globe_. The site of the Globe is generally allowed to have been at a spot 150 feet south of Park Street, close to the Southwark Bridge Road, and on the east of it. For twenty years, more or less, the stream of playgoers was turned steadily and continuously to the Theatres in Bankside, and poet and player lived beside the theatre, and the place was the pleasure resort of the people, and the haunt of sporting men, and the school of the citizens, in history at least: and the pride and glory of London for its dramatists, if the people knew: and the sink and shame of London for the iniquities and villanies practised there: the debauchery and the shamelessness of those who lived upon the Bank.
The Plague, not only of 1603 and of 1625, but those milder attacks which threatened from time to time were a deadly enemy to the players, for then the theatre must be closed and the Bear Garden too, for in crowds there was infection. Think what it meant to close these places of resort. The Elizabethan theatres maintained almost as many persons as our own: there were the players proper--the Company: there were the servants 'in the front' and the servants behind, the 'supers,' the money takers, the boys who went round selling nuts and cakes, wine and ale, new books and tobacco: there were the watermen required to carry the audience to and fro. Why, the shutting of the Theatres must have thrown out of employ many hundreds of men, and, if we consider their wives and families, many thousands of people. Can we wonder if the players, one and all, were Cavaliers, and were ready to fight for the side which allowed them their daily bread?
