INTRODUCTION 7 
~ other parts of the house, and special privileges of sitting on the 
stage. 
The only other private playhouse at the close of Elizabeth’s 
_ reign was Paul’s, where a theatre was maintained by the church 
under favor of the Queen. 
The Blackfriars, Paul’s, and Whitefriars constitute the early 
Jacobean list of private theatres. All were occupied, as we shall 
see, by children-companies,—a fact of large significance in the- 
atrical and dramatic history. 
Blackfriars and Whitefriars were the “Great Halls” of the old 
monasteries of these names, refitted to new uses. That is, they 
were simply large monastic houses rearranged. Paul’s was, as 
it seems, the church Singing School “back of the convocation 
house.” There is no record of any galleries in either Paul’s or 
Whitefriars. They seem to have had no larger seating capacity 
than that afforded by one flocr. It appears that Whitefriars 
room, however, was larger than Blackfriars, while Paul’s was 
smaller. 
The public theatre, of more plebeian origin and patronage, 
evolved out of the four-walled coach-court of the public inn. 
Like man’s first temples, it was open to the sky and lighted by 
the heavens. The great yard where the groundlings made merry 
was not seated. But rows of galleries, after the manner of the 
inn-balconies, ran around three sides and were provided with 
seats. A thatched shed-like roof overhung the balconies and the 
tiring-house. A part or all of the stage was protected by a long 
sloping roof called “the heavens.”’? 
*Richard Flecknoe, 4 Short Dis- 
course of the English Stage (ca. 
1660), in English Drama and Stage 
under the Tudor and = Stuart 
Princes, 7543-1664 (ed. W. C. Haz- 
litt, Roxburghe Library, 1869), 276. 
*In 1888 Dr. K. Th. Gaedertz 
discovered in the library at Utrecht 
the only known view of the interior 
of an Elizabethan theatre. It is a 
rough, inexact sketch of the inte- 
rior of the Swan, of probably 1596, 
by Arend van Buchell after the de- 
scription of his friend Johannes de 
Witt, Priest of St. Marvy’s, Utrecht. 
The sketch was published by Dr. 
Gaedertz in Zur Kenntnis der Ali- 
englischen Biihne (1888), and since 
then has been generously repro- 
duced in most of the publications 
on the period 
The next oldest picture of an in- 
terior is on the title-page of a Latin 
play, Roxana, 1622. The Roxana 
and the Messalina (1640) picture, 
both with full title-page from the 
British Museum, are well repro- 
duced by G. F. Reynolds, Some 
Principles of Elizabethan Staging 
(Modern Philology, 1904-5, IT, 582- 
83). The Roxana picture is badly 
reproduced by W. Keller in Shake- 
I21I 
