Three London Theatres of Shakespeare's Time y 



suit comes at a later date than the Wood ford-Holland and the 

 Smith-Beeston suits here presented, and as I hope later to pub- 

 lish other documents that supplement the Chancery suit, I shall 

 not here deal with its materials. 



The following sets of documents increase our information. 

 In spite of their repetitions and verbosity, they furnish us more 

 information about the organization, management, and dissolution 

 of the Red Bull company than all previous documents, except the 

 Chancery suit, and besides throw out valuable new hints as to 

 the methods prevalent in other theatres of the Shakespearean 

 period. I desire here merely to call attention to salient points of 

 interest, reserving for volumes already announced the privilege 

 of adequate correlated presentation and analysis of the history 

 involved. 



The Wood ford-Holland documents present an anomalous con- 

 dition. Time has played many pranks with ancient records, and 

 we may well be glad that he has not finished with these as he has 

 with so many. In our long search through some million of 

 records, and indexed names in multiplied number, we have again 

 and again traced a document to its lair, only to find it no longer 

 existed. It is our experience in some classes of documents that 

 nearly all are extant, and in others, of high historical importance, 

 that only about one document in ten or twelve is now preserved. 

 The rest have perished. Sometimes an entire class of docu- 

 ments is gone. The records are well cared for now ; but when 

 you see the moulded, rotten, or massed condition of some of 

 them, the result of damp or even neglect in past centuries, you 

 marvel at the perfect preservation and even beauty of others 

 side by side with them, and are thankful for the information 

 they yield in any form, whether whole or fragmentary. The 

 anomaly of the Woodford-Holland records is, that we have left 

 from the ravages of Time and his assistants a complete set of 

 the court's proceedings in a case begun in 1613, but none of the 

 pleadings; and in 1620-21 a complete set of pleadings in prac- 

 tically the same case renewed, but not a single scrap of evidence 

 of the court's proceedings. No witnesses were examined for 

 either Woodford or Holland in the suit of 1620-21, as shown 



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