Restoration; and when Davenant produced his Playhouse to be Let, in 1663, it was entirely abandoned : the Red Bull (he says) stands empty for fencers: 'there are no tenants in it but spiders.' The king's actors, under Thomas Killigrew, had previously played there, until they removed to the new theatre in Drury Lane.

THE COCKPIT, OR PHOENIX.

THE Cockpit theatre, which was also sometimes called the Phoenix*, (as Malone plausibly conjectures from the sign by which it was distinguished,) was certainly not converted into a playhouse until after James I. had been some time on the throne. How long before that date it had been used, as the name implies, as a place for the exhibition of cock-fighting, we are without such information as will enable us to form even a conjecture. Camden, in his Annals of James I., speaking of the attack upon it in March, 1616-17, says that the Cockpit theatre was then nuper erectum, by which we

* Randolph, in his Muses' Looking Glass, terms it 'the Phoenix,' as well as Sir Aston Cockayne, in his Præludium to Brome's Five New Plays, 1652

'Then shall learn'd Jonson re-assume his seat,
'Revive the Phoenix by a second heat.'

Wright, in his Historia Histrionica, 1699, expressly tells us, that it was called 'the Cockpit or Phoenix in Drury Lane.' It seems by degrees to have lost the name of the Cockpit, as the memory of cock-fighting there died away.

are to understand, perhaps, that it had been lately converted from a cockpit into a playhouse. Howes, in his Continuation of Stow, adverting to the same event, calls it a new playhouse,' as if it had then been recently built from the foundation.

6

Queen Anne's servants (of whom Thomas Heywood was one) played just after the death of Elizabeth at the Red Bull*, but they appear subsequently to have removed to the Cockpit, and they continued to perform there at the time when the apprentices and the mob attacked it on Shrove-Tuesday, the 4th March, 1616-17.

Prynne asserts, and there could be no doubt of the fact without his assertion, that the neighbourhood of a theatre was always filled with houses of ill-fame t, and he particularly points out the Cockpit in Drury Lane, as a great encouragement of immorality: he is careful not to state matters of the kind on his own knowledge this I have heard (he says) on good intelligence; that our common strumpets and adulteresses, ' after our stage-plays ended, are often times prosti'tuted near our playhouses, if not in them; that our theatres, if they are not bawdy-houses, (as they may. ' easily be, since many players, if reports be true, are

:

* Heywood's Rape of Lucrece, 1608, purports to have been 'acted by her Majesties servants at the Red Bull,' and possibly they played there until the Cockpit was ready to receive them. In later copies, into which a variety of new matter is introduced, it is said that the piece was performed at the Cockpit or Phoenix.

† Histriomastix, 1633, p. 390.

common pandars,) yet they are cousin-germans, at leastwise neighbours to them: witness the Cockpit and Drury Lane; Blackfriars playhouse and Duke Humphries; the Red Bull and Turnball-street; the 'Globe and Bankside brothel-houses, with others of 'this nature.' This, in fact, was the origin of the animosity of the London apprentices against the Cockpit, in March, 1616-17, for at Shrovetide they had always exercised the privilege of assailing and putting down houses of ill-fame. Camden says, à furente multitudine diruitur, et apparatus dilaceratur; but the fact does not quite bear out this statement, as will be seen by the account of the event in the Annals of the Stage' (i. 401). Howes in his Continuation of Stow, speaks more cautiously: he observes, that the disordered persons,' having assembled in Lincoln's-InnFields, 'spoiled' the playhouse, and they certainly rendered it unfit for use for a short time, besides tearing the dresses and burning many of the books. Soon afterwards we find the Queen's servants again performing at the Cockpit.

Malone suggests that after the death of Anne in 1619, the Queen's servants became those of the Princess Elizabeth, and were so called until the marriage of Charles I. in 1625, when they again took their old designation. In confirmation of this opinion, it may be noticed, that William Rowley's All's lost by Lust, 1633, (in which the author played Jaques, 'a simple clownish gentleman,') purports to have been 'divers times acted by the Lady Elizabeth's servants,

' and now lately by her Majesty's servants, with great ' applause, at the Phoenix in Drury Lane.' Hence it is clear that it was brought out between 1619 and 1625, and that it was revived at the same theatre not long before 1633.

In what has been said of the Red Bull playhouse, it will be seen that T. Carew, in 1630, puts the performances there and at the Cockpit on a level, and from two lines in F. Lenton's Young Gallants' Whirligig, 1629, it is evident that the productions at the Cockpit were usually esteemed of an inferior description to those at the Blackfriars

'The Cockpit heretofore would serve his wit,

'But now upon the Friars stage he'll sit,' &c.

The Hannibal and Scipio of Thomas Nabbes, and the same author's Bride (both pieces of no great merit) were performed respectively in 1635 and 1638 by the Queen's servants at their private house in Drury 'Lane.'

Richard Brome's excellent comedy The Antipodes, printed in 1640, was 'acted (as the title-page informs 'us) in the year 1638, by the Queen's Majesty's servants, at Salisbury Court in Fleet-street,' so that this play, comparing it with the title-page of The Bride by Nabbes, shows the precise date at which the Queen's players left the Cockpit and went to the Salisbury Court theatre, viz., 1638, between the time when The Bride was brought out at the former and The Antipodes at the latter. At the end of the last of these plays we read the following note by the

author of it: Courteous Reader, you shall find in this book more than was presented upon the stage, ' and left out of the presentation for superfluous length '(as some of the players pretended): I thought good ' it should be inserted according to the allowed original, ' and as it was at first intended for the Cockpit stage, in the right of my most deserving friend, Mr. William Beeston, unto whom it properly appertained; and so I leave it to thy perusal, as it was generally applauded and well acted at Salisbury Court. Fare‹ well. RI. BROME.'

It will be seen in the Annals of the Stage, that it was precisely at this date that William Beeston collected, what Sir H. Herbert calls a company of boys, and began to play with them at the Cockpit.' He mentions having at the same time 'disposed of Per

kins, Sumner, Sherlock and Turner to Salisbury 'Court,' and no doubt some or all of them assisted in the performance of Brome's Antipodes.

*

We learn from Wright and several other authorities, that the Cockpit was standing after the Restoration, and Sir W. Davenant's company, called the Duke's players, acted there until they removed to the new theatre in Portugal Row in the spring of 1662.

*Historia Histrionica, 1699.