vi PREFACE 
“shares” there, and the ownership of them from the first, par- 
ticularly in reference to Shakespeare’s relations to these two the- 
atres, they are more important than the famous Globe-Black- 
friars share-papers of 1635, announced by J. O. Halliwell in The 
Athenaeum, August 13, 1870, p. 212, and published by him four 
years later in A Fragment of Mr. J. O. Halliwell’s “Illustrations 
of the Life of Shakespeare.” Concerning the counter-petition 
of the Burbages in the Halliwell discoveries, the reviewer of the 
above publication, in The Athenaeum, February 21, 1874, in the 
course of a two-page article, gives the judgment (p. 250), which 
has ever since rightly prevailed, that “It is not too much to say 
that this is one of the most important passages regarding Shake- 
speare that has yet been discovered. As to his connexion with 
the stage it is the most important.” But the discoveries now an- 
nounced very greatly surpass the former ones in these regards. 
They also give, besides many other items, for the first time the 
exact location of the Globe, with complete boundaries, as de- 
scribed in several legal indentures. The length and nature of 
these documents require that I give them out later in a separate 
publication, with adequate accompanying treatment of the mat- 
ter involved. They constitute also an essential part of the present 
work in its complete form. 
The commissions to Edwards, Hunnis, and Gyles are new, and 
the use of Gyles’s commission as authority in establishing the 
Blackfriars in accord with the Queen’s will is peculiarly note- 
worthy. Queen Elizabeth’s connection with the establishment 
of Blackfriars, the maintenance of the Children of the Chapel 
there at royal expense, and her own attendance at that theatre 
are not only new, but of special value in understanding much of 
the theatrical history of the times. The whole course of stage- 
history from 1597 to 1603, involving Theatre, City, and Crown, 
made particularly alluring by several drastic orders, notably of 
1600-1, and hitherto baffling to scholars, has been cleared up by. 
evidence that seems final. The stage-quarrel between Jonson on 
the one side and Marston and Dekker on the other, debated vari- 
ously by scholars for two centuries, likewise finds for the first 
time its proper place and perspective in history as merely a minor | 
*Privately printed. Fifty copies only. Feb. 1874. 
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