The First London Theatre 35 
Times, March 28, 1913, A London Pageant of Shakespeare’s Time 
(with Burbage and Rice as speakers and Anthony Munday as 
author, from the City archives); Harpers Magazine, March, 
1910, on a signed deposition by Shakespeare, and his life in Lon- 
don; Century Magazine, August and September, 1910, on Shake- 
speare’s Globe and Blackfriars; Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, 1910, on 
Gervase Markham, Dramatist, and thirty-nine defendants, chiefly 
actors; Keyzar v. Burbage (privately printed, 1910) ; Englische 
Studien, 1911, on the Swan, Jonson, Nash, etc. (with bibliography 
of documents published from the Court of Requests, p. 344) ; 
and especially The Evolution of the English Drama up to Shake- 
Speare, a volume dealing with over 500 records (Berlin, 1912). 
The principal documents in the present collection are the 
voluminous depositions, which bring us into intimate touch with 
the people and events they deal with in connection with the 
Theatre. These were discovered by the writer and his devoted 
wife a few years ago in the course of a complete search of the 
proceedings of the Court of Requests, and the equally unknown 
Town Depositions of Chancery. The uncalendared records of 
these two enormous classes for the period of my research, in the 
reigns of Elizabeth, James I, and Charles I, had not before been 
examined since they were filed away three centuries ago, and 
were prepared for inspection at my request. Such materials as 
they contain in any way elucidating the history of the drama and 
stage, and of dramatists and actors, I now have and shall in due 
course publish, as soon as the task can be completed of bringing 
together the results with all related matters from various other 
original sources in a permanently useful form. The complete 
series of documents arising out of the trouble in different courts 
over the two events of building the Theatre in 1576 and of tearing 
it down in 15098 here follow. 
CHRONOLOGICAL ARRANGEMENT OF DOCUMENTS 
[The documents are printed in the following chronological order. None 
have previously been published in extenso, with the exception of five court 
orders printed by Collier. Documents hitherto known are indicated 
in head-notes or foot-notes. Those belonging to the present writer’s 
a3 
