32 Charles William Wallace 
was entered on the Stationer’s Register for publication, Septem- 
ber 15, 1598, and is there mentioned thus: 
“cc 
: J : ; but see yonder 
One, like the unfrequented Theatre, 
Walks in dark silence and vast solitude.” 
Moreover, as already mentioned, according to John Marston’s 
Scourge of Villainy, Satire XI, entered September 8, 1598, a 
week earlier than Skialetheia, the Burbage-Shakespeare company 
was about that time acting Romeo and Julict, not at the Theatre, 
but at the Curtain, which likewise had not been “ plucked down’ 
according to order. Here the company probably remained until 
the completion of the Globe, about the following May, 1599, 
according to a record I have found mentioning it, in connection 
with Shakespeare, as “ de novo edificata.” 
The important new state of affairs, whereby Cuthbert and 
Richard Burbage on the one side and Shakespeare, Heminges, 
Phillipps, Pope, and Kempe on the other were formed into a com- 
pany that should endure to the end of their lives, swinging the 
drama during the next fifteen years into the highest prominence 
ever attained in the world, and opening up a history that will be 
read with interest to the end of time, claims our full attention in 
certain other works on Shakespeare and his theatre, to which the 
present collection of records forms the gray background. Had 
the Brayne-Miles contention succeeded, the new company would 
not have come into being, and if Allen’s legal onslaughts on the 
Burbages had not failed, their company must have suffered great 
danger if not ruin. 
The changed tone of the dramatic products of Shakespeare and 
his associated actors fairly synchronizes with the business diffi- 
culties in their new enterprise—the wasteful, vicious suits of 
Allen, the almost immediate withdrawal of Kempe in 1599, the 
restrictions upon their acting, the successful rivalry of the children 
actors under the Queen’s patronage, the Essex conspiracy of 1601 
in which they were involved, and death that took off two of their 
number, in 1603 and 1605. The thought of possible disruption 
of a life-enterprise could not have been the least of cares that 
32 
