Salisbury Court Theatre
The Salisbury Court Theatre was a
According to contemporary chronicler Edmund Howes, "a new faire Play-house" was erected in 1629, just to the west of the medieval walls of the City of London, between Fleet Street and the River Thames, in a building converted from a barn or granary in the grounds of Dorset House. An enclosed "private" venue like the Blackfriars Theatre, it was a successor to the earlier Whitefriars Theatre (which had been just on the other side of Water Lane) and the short-lived Porter's Hall Theatre, and catered to an upscale and elite audience—in contrast to the open-air theatres like the Globe, Fortune, and Red Bull theatres that served a mass audience (especially in the latter two cases).
Little is known about the actual form and shape of the Salisbury Court Theatre. Yet since it was on a plot of land 42 feet (13 meters) wide, it may have resembled, to some greater or lesser degree, the plan for a small theatre drawn by Inigo Jones in the later Jacobean or Caroline era, which adheres to a very similar scale.[1]
The Salisbury Court was built at a cost of £1,000 by Richard Gunnell, a veteran actor and the manager of the Fortune, and William Blagrave, deputy to Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels. At some point in the middle of the 1630s, control of the theatre passed to the "dictatorial management"[2] of Richard Heton, who was in charge by October 1635. (Gunnell died in late 1634 or early 1635, while Blagrave would die in 1636.) During the 1630s, the theatre was occupied at various times by the King's Revels Men (1630–31 and 1633–36), by Prince Charles's Men (1631–33), and by Queen Henrietta's Men (1637–42); for a time it was a major locus of dramatic activity, a main rival to the theatrical establishment run by Christopher Beeston at the Cockpit and Red Bull theatres. [See: Richard Brome.]
Salisbury Court was the last theatre to be built before the
After years of being banned in the
Pepys' famous Diary provides information on the plays acted at the Salisbury Court Theatre immediately after the theatres re-opened. He saw Fletcher's The Mad Lover on 9 February 1661; Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling on 23 February (Thomas Betterton played De Flores); Massinger's The Bondman on 1 March (Betterton again); Fletcher and Massinger's The Spanish Curate on 16 March; Heywood's Love's Mistress on 2 March; and Fletcher's Rule a Wife and Have a Wife on 1 April.[3] (All dates new style.)
The building burned down in the Great Fire of London in 1666. It was replaced in 1671 by the Dorset Garden Theatre, which was built slightly further south to a design by Christopher Wren. The theatre is commemorated by a plaque on the Dorset Rise (east) side of the corporate building on the south side of Salisbury Square.
Notes
- Andrew Gurr with John Orrell, Rebuilding Shakespeare's Globe, New York, Routledge, 1989; p. 139. See also pp. 129–38.
- ^ Kinney, p. 161.
- ^ John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, 1708; Ayer Publishing (reprint), 1968; pp. 68–9.
References
- Bentley, G. E. The Jacobean and Caroline Stage. 7 Volumes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1941–68.
- Halliday, F. E. A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964 Baltimore, Penguin, 1964.
- Kinney, Arthur F. A Companion to Renaissance Drama. London, Blackwell Publishing, 2002.
- Stevens, David. "The Staging of Plays at the Salisbury Court Theatre, 1630–1642." Theatre Journal, Vol. 31 No. 4 (December 1979), pp. 511–25.
- Thomson, Peter, Jane Milling, and Joseph W. Donohue, eds. The Cambridge History of British Theatre. 3 Volumes, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
- 'Whitefriars', Old and New London: Volume 1 (1878), pp. 182–99.
External links
- Shakespearean Playhouses, by Joseph Quincy Adams, Jr. from Project Gutenberg