- Salisbury Court Theatre
The Salisbury Court Theatre was a theatre in 17th-century
London . It was located in the neighbourhood of Salisbury Court, which was formerly the London residence of the Bishops of Salisbury. Salibury Court was acquired byRichard Sackville in1564 ; when Thomas Sackville was createdEarl of Dorset in1604 , the building was renamed Dorset House. (His descendant,Edward Sackville, 4th Earl of Dorset , was Queen Henrietta Maria's Lord Chamberlain in the 1630s, and was a prime mover in theatre and drama in London in that era, including the force behind the founding of the Salisbury Court Theatre.)According to contemporary chronicler Edmund Howes, "a new faire Play-house" was erected in
1629 , just to the west of the medieval walls of theCity of London , betweenFleet Street and theRiver Thames , in a building converted from a barn or granary in the grounds of Dorset House. An enclosed "private" venue like theBlackfriars Theatre , it was a successor to the earlierWhitefriars Theatre (which had been located just on the other side of Water Lane) and the short-livedPorter'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 situated 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. [Andrew Gurr withJohn Orrell , "Rebuilding Shakespeare's Globe," New York, Routledge, 1989; p. 139. See also pp. 129-38.]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" [Kinney, p. 161.] 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 theKing's Revels Company (1630–31 and 1633–36), byPrince Charles's Men (1631–33), and byQueen Henrietta's Men (1637–42); for a time it was a major locus of dramatic activity, a main rival to the theatrical establishment run byChristopher Beeston at the Cockpit and Red Bull theatres. [See:Richard Brome .]Salisbury Court was the last theatre to be built before the closing of the theatres in 1642, during the
Puritan era. After the theatres were closed, Salisbury Court was sometimes used for other purposes — and sometimes, as through much of 1647, it was used for theatrical performances in contravention of the local authorities. (The players played when they could get away with doing so—which was not always: the London authorities raided the Salisbury Court on October 6, 1647, breaking up a performance of "A King and No King " byBeaumont and Fletcher .) On January 1,1649 , the London authorities raided all four of the London theatres simultaneously; the actors at the Salisbury Court Theatre and the Cockpit Theatre were arrested, as was a "rope-dancer" or trapeze artist performing at the Fortune Theatre—but the actors at theRed Bull Theatre managed to escape. In March 1649, the authorities destroyed the interior of the Salisbury Court theatre, and the Fortune and the Cockpit too, making them useless for public performances.After years of being banned in the Interregnum, theatre was again permitted on the Restoration of Charles II in
1660 , with the grant of twoLetters Patent to two companies to perform "legitimate drama" in London. The Salisbury Court Theatre was refurbished byWilliam Beeston and used for a time by theDuke's Company , patronised by theDuke of York (later James II), from November 1660 to June 1661, when they moved to the nearbyLisle's Tennis Court next toLincoln's Inn Fields , which they found a better venue.George Jolly 's troupe also played there for a time.Samuel Pepys records visiting it several times in his diary for early1661 (often calling it the Whitefriars Theatre).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 Feb. 9, 1661; Middleton and Rowley's "The Changeling " on Feb. 23 (Thomas Betterton played De Flores); Massinger's "The Bondman " on March 1 (Betterton again); Fletcher and Massinger's "The Spanish Curate " on March 16; Heywood's "Love's Mistress" on March 2; and Fletcher's "Rule a Wife and Have a Wife " on April 1. [John Downes, "Roscius Anglicanus," 1708; Ayer Publishing (reprint), 1968; pp. 68-9.] (All dates new style.)The building burned down in the
Great Fire of London in1666 . It was replaced in1671 by theDorset Garden Theatre , which was built slightly further south to a design byChristopher Wren .Note
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.
* [http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=45036 'Whitefriars'] , Old and New London: Volume 1 (1878), pp. 182-99.
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