After finding no trace of Shakespeare in earlier records we suddenly can place him with some precision in five distinct playing‐places in 1594, assuming that he was part of the Chamberlain’s Men from the company’s inception: Newington Butts; the Theatre; the Cross Keys inn; the court at Greenwich; and Gray’s Inn. I have already covered all that we usefully know about Newington Butts (p. 77) and will turn to the other four in order.
But first, a word of caution. I want to remind you that my Introduction devoted many words telling you how much we do not know about Elizabethan playing spaces. This is where that rubber touches the road. We think of a typical playhouse as having, like “Shakespeare’s Globe” in Southwark, a “heavens” and supporting pillars, a “hell” beneath the stage, trapdoors, a discovery space, lords’ rooms, descent machinery, and other familiar furniture. But we can only know whether any particular playhouse had any or all of these features – or had them from when it was first built – if evidence fortuitously survives: in building contracts, in records left by visitors (usually foreigners), in the texts of plays performed there (remembering always that if a play was printed long after its earliest performances, it might reflect staging in another place).
In the search for the historical truth about such matters we are in fact often forced to fall back on “best‐guesses,” hoping that something we can identify in one playhouse was common to them all or that something true in 1594 was still true in 1609. As I make my way through the public playhouses which Shakespeare is known to have used (after his presumed early experience at the Rose) – the Theatre, the Curtain and the Globe – and the one private playhouse for which he wrote, the Blackfriars, I shall address all of these issues as and when the evidence accumulates to a credible pitch, relying as much as I can on the plays likely to have been played in those venues. I can, however, immediately address the distinction between “public” and “private” playhouses, lest these terms give rise to misconceptions.
They were all in fact “public,” in the sense that anyone who had the money could pay to see a play there. But the “private” playhouses charged considerably more for entrance – the minimum for the Blackfriars was 6d., against 1d. for the Globe – so some of the key distinctions were social and economic. But there were also very distinct differences in the designs of their theatrical spaces. The “public” playhouses were what we commonly think of as the Elizabethan theatres, amphitheaters largely open to the elements, whose design seems to have owed something both to animal‐baiting houses and galleried inn‐yards, such as that in Norwich where we observed the Queen’s Men. The “private” playhouses were enclosed auditoria, perhaps more appropriately known as hall theatres, “built in large rooms on the model of the banqueting halls in royal palaces and great houses where plays were provided for banqueting guests” – the kinds of great houses Shakespeare would have visited with any major troupe touring the country in the 1580s (Gurr, 2004b, 14). The Blackfriars theatre in Staunton, Virginia, and the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse erected close to “Shakespeare’s Globe” both approximate such a theatre, while the Prescot theatre planned by Shakespeare North on Merseyside is to be based on one, specifically the 1629 design by Inigo Jones for the Cockpit‐in‐Court theatre in Whitehall palace (1629). It was around the time the boy companies were revived in 1599/1600 – Paul’s boys and the Children of the Chapel – that a kind of snobbish antagonism grew up in the use of “public” and “private” designations. The adult companies exclusively used “public” playhouses at this time, while the boys always performed in their “private” halls. But that distinction disappeared within a decade. The boy companies virtually went out of business, and Shakespeare’s company found itself using both a public and a private playhouse. But their first resident base in London was the Theatre.