30 Charles William Wallace 
ally, as we have seen, that the Burbages had no further lease on 
those grounds. So the work went ahead, and in a short time they 
had removed all the timbers across the Thames to the new site 
just north of Maiden lane in Southwark, thus anticipating Allen 
in his own purpose to tear the Theatre down and use its materials, 
who in the Court of Requests suit of 1600 claimed that they took 
advantage of his absence from town to accomplish their sudden 
and secret purposes. The whole proceeding was almost as sudden 
and precipitate and complete as the work of a band of Hallowe’en 
pixies, and was probably entered into with a similar sense of 
humor pervading their more serious determination. 
Then followed great suits at law and equity. Giles Allen im- 
mediately in the following term, Hilary, 1599, began a suit, first 
recorded in Easter following, in the Queen’s Bench, nominally 
against Peter Street, the head carpenter, but in fact against the 
Burbages, in the course of which the unexecuted lease of 1585, 
incorporating substantially the original lease of 1576, is quoted 
verbatim, and the history of the tenure of the property is related 
from 1576 to 1599. Allen estimated the value of the Theatre at 
700 /., and claimed also 800/. damages. 
In the following January, 1600, Cuthbert Burbage brought suit 
for relief in the Court of Requests, and that Court stopped 
Allen’s proceedings in the Queen’s Bench, first by an injunction, 
April 10, 1600, and finally by decree of October 18, 1600. It was 
a tremendous suit. The pleadings found by Halliwell-Phillips, 
and particularly the voluminous depositions unearthed by me and 
now first printed, furnish a gray background for the history of 
the new Globe and the Shakespearean drama. Allen lost his case, 
and by the final decree of October 18, 1600, was forbidden ever 
again to bring suit on the tearing down of the Theatre. 
Still Allen persisted. He was of a prominent family, brother ° 
of the former Lord Mayor of London, and was not to be beaten. 
Proud, wealthy, defiant, angered at the outcome, and humiliated 
by Cuthbert Burbage’s having him arrested for contempt of 
Court during the preceding suit, thus disgracing him in Essex, 
and binding him over in a bond of 200/., Allen then almost im- 
mediately after the adverse decision, in the next term, Hilary, 
30 
