24 Charles William Wallace 
friars to his second son, Richard—a transfer which was made 
much of in Robert Miles’s attack on the estate in 1597, and in 
Gyles Allen’s great suits against Cuthbert and Richard in 1599 
to 1602, and which also, forty years later, caused great suits 
among Burbage’s grandchildren, with serious but unsubstantiated 
charges of fraud against Cuthbert and Richard for depriving 
their mother and their two sisters, Alice and Eleanor, of their 
due portions. All these and many other new records on the 
Blackfriars will be published by the present writer in dealing 
finally with their relations to dramatic and theatrical history. 
The brief mention here given them is necessary to the under- 
standing of other matters in hand. 
Also by the close of the year 1596, shortly before his death, 
James Burbage and his son ‘Cuthbert had taken up with Allen 
the question of renewing the lease on the Theatre. Allen was 
unwilling, and made many objections and excuses. The elder 
Burbage frankly told him that if the lease were not renewed, he 
would remove the Theatre and take advantage of Allen’s bond, 
as one of Allen’s own witnesses, John Goborne, testified on May 
23, 1600. Finally, after much delay, a draft of a new lease was 
drawn up for them by Robert Vigerous, of the Middle Temple, 
who in 1600 testified to the nature of it. It was agreed, he says, 
that the lease should extend for another ten years (but Cuthbert 
Burbage, John Goborne and others on both sides say twenty-one 
years) at the rent of 24/. a year, an increase of Iol., and the 
payment of a disputed claim of 30/., all of which Burbage was 
willing finally to yield to, rather than lose the desired extension. 
Various witnesses testified that there was then no proposal to 
limit the use of the Theatre as a playhouse to only five years 
of the period, with requirement that it should then be converted 
into some other use, as Allen later claimed. That lease was never 
completed. James Burbage was engaged in the negotiations and 
was likewise just in the midst of making the old Blackfriars 
cloister building over into the second Blackfriars theatre, the one 
of famous Shakespearean memory, when, in February, 1597, he 
died. Then came the burden of both the Theatre and the new 
Blackfriars upon the shoulders of his sons Cuthbert and Richard. 
24 
