from satisfactory. Not being masters of the inns, they were merely
tolerated; they had to content themselves with hastily provided and
inadequate stage facilities; and, worst of all, for their recompense
they had to trust to a hat collection, at best a poor means of
securing money. Often too, no doubt, they could not get the use of a
given inn-yard when they most needed it, as on holidays and festive
occasions; and at all times they had to leave the public in
uncertainty as to where or when plays were to be seen. Their street
parade, with the noise of trumpets and drums, might gather a motley
crowd for the yard, but in so large a place as London it was
inadequate for advertisement among the better classes. And as the
troupes of the city increased in wealth and dignity, and as the
playgoing public grew in size and importance, the old makeshift
arrangement became more and more unsatisfactory.

At last the unsatisfactory situation was relieved by the specific
dedication of certain large inns to dramatic purposes; that is, the
proprietors of certain inns found it to their advantage to subordinate
their ordinary business to the urgent demands of the actors and the
playgoing public. Accordingly they erected in their yards permanent
stages adequately equipped for dramatic representations, constructed
in their galleries wooden benches to accommodate as many spectators as
possible, and were ready to let the use of their buildings to the
actors on an agreement by which the proprietor shared with the troupe
in the "takings" at the door. Thus there came into existence a number
of inn-playhouses, where the actors, as masters of the place, could
make themselves quite at home, and where the public without special
notification could be sure of always finding dramatic entertainment.

Richard Flecknoe, in his _Discourse of the English Stage_ (1664), goes
so far as to dignify these reconstructed inns with the name
"theatres." At first, says he, the players acted "without any certain
theatres or set companions, till about the beginning of Queen
Elizabeth's reign they began here to assemble into companies, and set
up theatres, first in the city (as in the inn-yards of the Cross Keys
and Bull in Grace and Bishop's Gate Street at this day to be seen),
till that fanatic spirit [i.e., Puritanism], which then began with the
stage and after ended with the throne, banished them thence into the
suburbs"--that is, into Shoreditch and the Bankside,