Cuthbert Burbage

• 1. Introduction

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  Cuthbert Burbage was baptized on the 15th of June 1565 at St. Stephen Coleman Street, in the shadow of the London Guildhall. He grew up in a family that would become central to the most remarkable theatrical era England had ever seen. His father, James Burbage, built the Theatre in Shoreditch, the first permanent playhouse of its kind in London. His younger brother, Richard, became the most celebrated actor of the age. But Cuthbert occupied a different role entirely. He was the one who kept the whole enterprise from falling apart. For four decades he held leases, fought creditors, survived lawsuits, and made the decisions that allowed Shakespeare's company to survive and flourish. The question the rest of this story will answer is how a man who was never an actor, never a playwright, became indispensable to the greatest theatre company in English history.

• 2. The Cope Connection

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  James Burbage found his elder son a place with Sir Walter Cope, a second cousin of Lady Burghley and gentleman usher to William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley. The scholar C.W. Wallace judged that Cuthbert's role as a 'servant' to Cope was most likely that of a clerk in the Treasury. It was a position of proximity to power rather than power itself. But the connection would prove decisive years later, when the Burbages needed a favor that only someone with Cope's access could arrange. When Cuthbert came of age in June 1586, he stepped directly into his father's ongoing legal war over the Theatre in Shoreditch, joining disputes that had already stretched across years and would stretch across many more.

• 3. A Decade of Legal War

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  The Theatre in Shoreditch was born in debt and dispute. James Burbage and his brother-in-law John Brayne had jointly financed its construction, but the terms of their partnership were never committed to writing. Brayne had signed the 21-year ground lease with Giles Allen on the 13th of April 1576, keeping it solely in his own name rather than assigning Brayne a half interest despite a bond signed on the 22nd of May 1578 requiring him to do so. Brayne accused Burbage of double-dealing, and their quarrel descended at one point into a fistfight during arbitration proceedings. On the 12th of July 1578, arbitrators submitted their decision, and both men signed bonds of £200 as surety. Brayne died in August 1586, possibly as a result of violence at the hands of the London goldsmith Robert Miles, who was tried for murder at a coroner's inquest. He died childless, having failed to revise his will to leave his Theatre interest to the Burbages as promised. His widow, Margaret, backed by Miles, then sued James Burbage to recover on those bonds. Further creditors, including the executor of a Robert Gardner to whom Brayne had made a deed of gift, also filed suit. James Burbage sued in Chancery, Margaret counter-sued in Chancery, and the legal battles ran for a full decade, with Burbage emerging as the winner each time.

• 4. The Assignment of the Lease

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  Beneath those courtroom battles ran a separate, equally dangerous financial crisis. To raise money, James Burbage had mortgaged the ground lease of the Theatre to the London grocer John Hyde on the 26th of September 1579, borrowing £125 8s 11d. Hyde was not repaid. The lease was forfeited in September 1580, forfeited again for a second non-payment, and in June 1582 Hyde had Burbage arrested for debt. In June 1589 both James and Cuthbert turned to Walter Cope, Cuthbert's employer. Cope wrote to Hyde suggesting he might assist Hyde with Lord Burghley, the Lord Treasurer, in some future matter, if Hyde would assign the ground lease to Cuthbert. Hyde agreed with some reluctance, and on the 7th of June 1589 transferred his interest to Cuthbert. Hyde later said he would not have done it without Cope's letter. Cuthbert himself was not pleased with the arrangement; he later testified that he had agreed only to save his father from debt, and believed he could have used his influence with Cope to better personal advantage. He was forced to borrow nearly the full original debt of £125 8s 11d plus interest to pay Hyde. From that moment, the Theatre was legally Cuthbert's, and so were all the fights that came with it.

• 5. The Night the Theatre Moved

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  On the 16th of November 1590, Margaret Brayne, Robert Miles, his son Ralph, and a friend named Nicholas Bishop arrived at the Theatre with a court order entitling them to take half the day's gallery profits. James Burbage's wife and her son Richard, then about nineteen years old, came into the yard and beat Robert Miles with a broomstaff. Richard Burbage, after what a witness later described as 'scornfully and disdainfully playing with Nicholas Bishop's nose', threatened to beat him as well. When Cuthbert arrived, he threatened the group with 'great and horrible oaths' before all four were thrust violently from the yard. John Alleyn, brother of the famous actor Edward Alleyn, was among the actors drawn by the tumult; his intervention on the widow's behalf failed, and the Admiral's Men, of which both Alleyn brothers were members, withdrew from the Theatre and went south of the river to play at Philip Henslowe's venue. Margaret Brayne died in late April 1593, leaving everything to Miles, who continued the suit until the court finally ended it on the 28th of May 1595. James Burbage died in February 1597. Two months later, Giles Allen refused to renew the ground lease. Cuthbert was now solely responsible for finding the Lord Chamberlain's Men a new home. After a last failed attempt to renew the lease, he leased the Blackfriars Theatre to the impresario Henry Evans for use by children's companies, which bypassed the wealthy residents' objections. For the Theatre itself, the ground lease still gave him the right to use its framing timber before the lease expired. When he waited too long, Allen announced his intention to take the timber himself. Cuthbert acted. He made a verbal agreement with Nicholas Brend for a plot of land on Maid Lane in Bankside, near Henslowe's Rose Theatre, and hired Peter Streete to carry out what may be one of the most audacious property relocations in London's history. On the night of the 28th of December 1598, Cuthbert and Richard, along with William Smith of Waltham Cross in Hertfordshire, Streete, and twelve others, dismantled the old Theatre, hauled every piece of wood and timber across the River Thames, and rebuilt it on the south bank. That new building was renamed the Globe. It opened by September 1599.

• 6. Making Shakespeare's Company

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  The financial structure Cuthbert and Richard devised for the Globe was as significant as the building itself. They brought in five actors as half-sharers in the house profits: William Shakespeare, John Heminges, Augustine Phillips, Thomas Pope, and William Kempe. As a group, these five actors held half the ownership stake. The arrangement gave the performers a direct stake in the venue's success and appears to have stabilized the company in a way that proved lasting. The Chamberlain's Men became the King's Men under James I and remained the preeminent troupe in London for the decades that followed. Cuthbert stayed involved in the Globe's management for the rest of his life. On the 28th of January 1632, together with Richard Robinson, Winifred (who died in 1642), William Heminges, Joseph Taylor, and John Lowin, he filed a Bill of Complaint in the Court of Requests against Sir Matthew Brend, seeking confirmation of an extension to the 31-year lease originally granted by Nicholas Brend, Sir Matthew's father.

• 7. A Life in the Theatre

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  Cuthbert Burbage died in 1636, aged seventy-one, having remained one of the keepers of the Globe until the end. His position there appears to have been lucrative; he lived in a house in the parish of St. Leonard's Shoreditch, not far from where his father had first built the Theatre six decades earlier. His family had come to London from Bromley in Kent, and the city had kept them, through lawsuit and fistfight, forfeiture and midnight demolition, for three generations. Richard Robinson and Winifred, his companions in that 1632 legal action, outlived him. The Globe itself had burned and been rebuilt in 1614. The parish of St. Leonard's Shoreditch, where Cuthbert lived out his final years, is also the place where his sister Ellen had been baptized in 1574 and buried in 1596 - a span of lives compressed into the same streets where English theatre first took permanent root.