Blackfriars Theatre
In November 1629, a visiting French theatre company took the stage at Blackfriars Theatre in London. The actresses among them were hissed, booed, and pelted with small apples by the audience. No native English actress would be permitted on any stage for roughly another forty years. Blackfriars sat on the grounds of a former Dominican priory in the City of London, a site that had served political and religious purposes for centuries. It had been, in fact, two entirely separate theatres built on those grounds decades apart, each with its own cast of characters. The monks who once walked those cloisters could never have imagined what would follow.
The monastery stood between the Thames and Ludgate Hill, well within London's old city walls. The Dominican brothers who had lived there wore black habits, a detail that gave their neighbourhood, and eventually their successor theatres, their name. Before it served entertainment, the site handled matters of the highest political consequence. Henry VIII's annulment trial with Catherine of Aragon took place in its halls. Shakespeare's company would re-enact that same proceeding in the same room, roughly eighty years later.
After Henry's dissolution of the monasteries, the crown took possession of the property. Control passed to Sir Thomas Cawarden, who held the post of Master of the Revels. He used part of the complex as offices for his department. Other portions he sold or leased to wealthy neighbours, among them Lord Cobham and John Cheke. After Cawarden's death in 1559, Lady Cawarden sold the property to Sir William More. In 1576, a royal chapel master named Richard Farrant arrived with an unusual proposal for More's old building.
Richard Farrant held the title of Master of Windsor Chapel, one of the royal choirs. In 1576, he leased part of the former buttery from More. His stated justification was that the space would allow his child choristers to rehearse performances for the Queen. In practice, Farrant also charged admission from the public. It was a commercial venture dressed up as royal service.
The resulting theatre measured roughly 46 feet long by 25 feet wide. Admission ran from six pence in the gallery to three shillings for a box seat close to the stage. Those prices excluded most Londoners and drew a clientele of well-to-do gentry and nobles instead. Farrant combined his Windsor choristers with the Children of the Chapel Royal, a separate group directed by William Hunnis. His death in 1580 left the arrangement in uncertain hands.
William Hunnis and a partner named John Newman took over the sublease from Farrant's widow. They put up a £100 bond, promising to pay the rent and carry out repairs. The venture struggled financially. By November 1583, Farrant's widow had brought suit against them for failing on that bond. To escape the legal pressure, Hunnis and Newman transferred the sublease to Henry Evans, a Welsh scrivener with a passion for theatre. That transfer had not been authorised by the landlord More, who now had grounds to sue for possession.
Evans answered with legal delays. He eventually sold the sublease to Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, sometime after the Michaelmas Term in November of 1583. Oxford gave the property to his secretary, the writer John Lyly. As proprietor, Lyly installed Evans as company manager and turned his own energies to playwriting. The new company, Oxford's Boys, combined the Children of the Chapel with the Children of Paul's. Lyly's Campaspe was performed at Blackfriars and then at Court on New Year's Day of 1584. His Sapho and Phao followed, first at Blackfriars on Shrove Tuesday and then at court on the 3rd of March.
More kept pressing. At the end of Easter Term, in June of 1584, a court voided the original lease. The First Blackfriars closed after eight years. Lyly's third play, Gallathea, was left without a stage. Twelve years would pass before anyone attempted to revive theatrical ambitions on the property.
James Burbage, impresario of the Lord Chamberlain's Men and father of the actor Richard Burbage, made his move on Blackfriars in 1596. He purchased the former frater of the priory along with rooms below it, paying £600. The space was large: perhaps 100 feet long and 50 feet wide, with ceilings high enough to allow the construction of two full galleries. Burbage brought in a carpenter named Peter Street to carry out the work. In 1599, Richard Burbage would engage Street again for the Globe Theatre project.
Once fitted for playing, the space appears to have measured roughly 69 feet long by 46 feet wide. At least two and possibly three galleries looked down on the stage. Stage boxes may have flanked the playing area. Estimates of the theatre's capacity have ranged from below 600 to nearly 1,000. As many as ten spectators might at any given time be standing on the stage itself.
Lady Elizabeth Russell led a petition to the Privy Council warning of the inconveniences a common playhouse would bring to the precinct's honourable inhabitants. The letter gathered striking names. Lord Hunsdon, the patron of Burbage's own company, added his signature. So did Richard Field, a printer based in Blackfriars and a hometown neighbour of William Shakespeare. The Privy Council sided with the residents. Burbage's company was absolutely forbidden to perform there. The refusal would prove temporary, though the company that eventually took the stage would be children, not adults.
Three years after Burbage's company was barred from the space, Richard Burbage leased Blackfriars to Henry Evans. Evans had a history with the property: he had been ejected from it more than fifteen years earlier. His new arrangement paired him with Nathaniel Giles, who had succeeded Hunnis as master of the Chapel Royal. Together they assembled a company called the Children of the Chapel. Its members came from the royal choir and from local grammar schools. Giles held a royal warrant to provide entertainment at court, and the company operated under that authority. The legal standing of those recruitments was questioned. A father challenged the practice in 1600. Whatever its legality, the approach produced talented performers, among them Nathaniel Field and Salmon Pavy.
Remarkably, the Blackfriars neighbourhood raised no objection to child players. That tolerance opened the door to a period of unusually bold drama. Ben Jonson and George Chapman wrote almost exclusively for Blackfriars during this period. John Marston began his career at Paul's Children but had switched to Blackfriars by around 1605, where he appears to have been a sharer. Thomas Middleton also contributed. The plays produced by these writers pushed hard against accepted limits of satire, stage violence, and sexual frankness.
Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle and John Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess both had their first stagings at Blackfriars. Both failed on their initial productions. Both nevertheless marked the debuts of playwrights whose work would shape Stuart drama for decades.
Blackfriars was also a site of broader innovations in English staging. It was among the first commercial theatres to rely on artificial lighting. Music was performed between acts, an innovation the public theatres had not adopted. The induction to Marston's The Malcontent, written in 1604, makes this contrast explicit. The private theatre sold seats on the stage itself. Its clientele of gallants and Inns of Court men came not only to watch a play but to be seen. A passage in Hamlet referring to 'little eyasses' suggests that even the adult companies felt the competitive pressure of the children's theatre. By the later part of that decade, however, the fashion had begun to shift.
In 1608, the King's Men took possession of the Blackfriars Theatre without any petition from the neighbourhood. Seven sharers were named in the original arrangement. Five came from the acting company: Richard Burbage, William Shakespeare, Henry Condell, John Heminges, and William Sly. Cuthbert Burbage and Thomas Evans, agent for the theatre manager Henry Evans, completed the group. The arrangement resembled how the Globe Theatre was organised, with sharers holding their interests as housekeepers. Sly died not long after the agreement was made, and his share passed to the other six.
After renovations, the King's Men began performing at Blackfriars in 1609. They used it as their winter playhouse for seven months of the year, moving to the Globe for the summer months. Blackfriars was the more profitable venue. A single good performance could bring shareholders as much as £13, on top of what went to the actors separately. Total revenue ran to a little over twice what the Globe generated.
On the 13th of May, 1634, Queen Henrietta Maria attended with her attendants to see a play by Philip Massinger. She returned in late 1635 or early 1636 for Lodowick Carlell's Arviragus and Philicia, part 2, then came a third time in May of 1636. The playhouse that had once been forbidden to adult players was welcoming the Queen herself. When the English Civil War began and the theatres closed in 1642, Blackfriars never reopened. On the 6th of August, 1655, the building was demolished. Eleven years later, the Great Fire of London swept through and destroyed whatever remained of the surrounding area.
In Staunton, Virginia, the American Shakespeare Center opened a reconstruction of Jacobean indoor theatre in September 2001. The project cost $3.7 million and produced a 300-seat playhouse. Architect Tom McLaughlin drew on plans for other 17th-century theatres and made trips to England to study surviving halls of the period. He also consulted Shakespeare's stage directions in developing his design. The lighting in the Staunton theatre is intended to imitate what the original Blackfriars may have used.
During the construction of Shakespeare's Globe in London in the 1990s, a shell for a second indoor theatre was built next door. Its planners intended it as a simulacrum of the Blackfriars. The difficulty was that no reliable plans of the original survive. Drawings found in the 1960s at Worcester College, Oxford, were initially believed to date from the early 17th century. They were attributed to the architect Inigo Jones, and the new theatre was accordingly to be called the Inigo Jones Theatre. In 2005, those drawings were redated to 1660 and attributed instead to John Webb. Despite the revision, they remain the earliest known plans for an English theatre, and scholars believe they approximate the general layout of Blackfriars.
Completed at a cost of £7.5 million, the theatre opened as the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in January 2014. Jon Greenfield designed it in collaboration with Allies and Morrison as an oak structure built inside the building's existing brick shell. A thrust stage sits beneath a musicians' gallery, and an ornately painted ceiling covers the house. The 340 seats are arranged on benches in a pit and two horseshoe galleries, placing the audience close to the actors. Shutters around the first gallery can be opened to admit natural light. When they are closed, the house is lit by beeswax candles in sconces and six height-adjustable chandeliers. Sometimes the actors themselves hold candles, bringing the lighting of the 17th century into the room.
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Common questions
Where was Blackfriars Theatre located in London?
Blackfriars Theatre stood on the grounds of a former Dominican priory in the City of London, between the Thames and Ludgate Hill. The neighbourhood took its name from the black habits worn by members of the Dominican order.
Who built the second Blackfriars Theatre and how much did it cost?
James Burbage, impresario of the Lord Chamberlain's Men and father of the actor Richard Burbage, purchased the site in 1596 for £600. He converted the former frater of the priory into an indoor playhouse with room for at least two galleries and a capacity estimated at between 600 and nearly 1,000.
What playwrights wrote plays for Blackfriars Theatre?
Ben Jonson and George Chapman wrote almost exclusively for Blackfriars during the children's company era. John Marston, Thomas Middleton, Francis Beaumont, and John Fletcher also had significant works staged there, including Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle and Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess.
When did Shakespeare's company take over Blackfriars Theatre?
The King's Men took possession of Blackfriars in 1608 and began performing there after renovations in 1609. The original seven sharers included William Shakespeare, Richard Burbage, Henry Condell, John Heminges, and William Sly.
What theatrical innovations did Blackfriars Theatre introduce?
Blackfriars was among the first commercial theatres in England to rely on artificial lighting and to feature music performed between acts, a practice then unfamiliar to public theatre audiences. The theatre also sold seats directly on the stage.
When was Blackfriars Theatre demolished?
The theatre closed at the onset of the English Civil War in 1642 and was demolished on the 6th of August, 1655. The Great Fire of London destroyed the entire surrounding area eleven years later in 1666.
All sources
34 references cited across the entry
- 2Henry VIII, apparently a collaboration between Shakespeare and John Fletcher, probably dates to 1613.
- 3BookJacobean private theatreKeith Sturgess — Routledge and Kegan Paul — 1987
- 4Bond, III, p. 310.
- 5JournalPeter Street, 1553–1609: Builder of PlayhousesMary Edmond — Cambridge University Press — 17 December 1992
- 6In 1609 Francis Beaumont described the Blackfriars as a place in which "a thousand men in judgment sit"—Gurr, p. 213. His figure may be hyperbole.
- 7BookShakespeare's BookChris Laoutaris — William Collins — 2023
- 8Stopes, p. 12.
- 9BookShakespeare The Poet in His WorldMuriel Bradbrook — Weidenfeld and Nicolson — 1978
- 10Cook, p. 210.
- 11Cook, p. 115.
- 12BookThe Palgrave handbook of the history of women on stageJane Milling — Palgrave Macmillan — 2019
- 13Halliday, p. 235.
- 14BookInside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars StagePaul Menzer — Associated University Presses — 2006
- 15There's much ado about the Bard in VirginiaMichael Klein — Philadelphia Media Network — 14 July 2002
- 16NewsBlackfriars Shakespearean PlayhouseWilliam Lebovich — 14 November 2001
- 17BookShakespeare in the Theatre: The American Shakespeare CenterPaul Menzer — Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare — 2016
- 18Press releaseShakespeare's Globe Announces Plans to Build an Indoor Jacobean TheatreShakespeare's Globe — 20 January 2011
- 19NewsAll the world's a stage (or two): Shakespeare's Globe to be joined by a candlelit indoor theatreHolly Williams — 22 June 2013
- 20NewsInnovation in the theatre: Old spaces and new globes19 May 2005
- 21The Duchess of Malfi (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)Michael Coveney — 16 January 2014
- 22NewsSam Wanamaker Playhouse – reviewRowan Moore — 12 January 2014
- 23NewsThe Duchess of Malfi, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, reviewCharles Spencer — 16 January 2014
- 24BookThe Complete Works of John LylyR. Warwick Bond — Oxford at the Clarendon Press — 1902
- 25BookThe Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London, 1576–1642Ann Jennalie Cook — Princeton University Press — 1981
- 26BookThe Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642Andrew Gurr — Cambridge University Press — 1992
- 27BookInside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars StageAndrew Gurr — Susquehanna University Press — 2006
- 28BookInside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars StagePaul Menzer et al. — Susquehanna University Press — 2006
- 29Oxford Dictionary of National BiographyG. K. Hunter — 2004
- 30Cawarden, Sir Thomas (c.1514–1559)'William B. Robison — 2008
- 31BookShakespeare's Blackfriars Playhouse: Its History and DesignIrwin Smith — New York University Press — 1964
- 32BookInside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars StageTiffany Stern — Susquehanna University Press — 2006
- 33BookShakespeare's Warwickshire ContemporariesCharlotte Carmichael Stopes — Shakespeare Head Press — 1907
- 34BookThe Evolution of the English Drama up to Shakespeare With a History of the First Blackfriars TheatreCharles William Wallace — George Reimer — 1912