purposely built, within man's memory"; and
Cuthbert Burbage confidently asserted that his father "was the first
builder of playhouses"--an assertion which, I think, cannot well be
denied.]

The building that he designed and erected he named--as by virtue of
priority he had a right to do--"The Theatre."

Of the Theatre, unfortunately, we have no pictorial representation,
and no formal description, so that our knowledge of its size, shape,
and general arrangement must be derived from scattered and
miscellaneous sources. That the building was large we may feel sure;
the cost of its erection indicates as much. The Fortune, one of the
largest and handsomest of the later playhouses, cost only L520, and
the Hope, also very large, cost L360. The Theatre, therefore, built at
a cost of L700, could not have been small. It is commonly referred to,
even so late as 1601, as "the great house called the Theatre," and the
author of _Skialetheia_ (1598) applied to it the significant adjective
"vast." Burbage, no doubt, had learned from his experience as manager
of a troupe the pecuniary advantage of having an auditorium large
enough to receive all who might come. Exactly how many people his
building could accommodate we cannot say. The Reverend John Stockwood,
in 1578, exclaims bitterly: "Will not a filthy play, with the blast of
a trumpet, sooner call thither a thousand than an hour's tolling of
the bell bring to the sermon a hundred?"[62] And Fleetwood, the City
Recorder, in describing a quarrel which took place in 1584 "at Theatre
door," states that "near a thousand people" quickly assembled when the
quarrel began.

[Footnote 62: The rest of his speech indicates that he had the Theatre
in mind. The passage, of course, is rhetorical.]

In shape the building was probably polygonal, or circular. I see no
good reason for supposing that it was square; Johannes de Witt
referred to it as an "amphitheatre," and the Curtain, erected the
following year in imitation, was probably polygonal.[63] It was built
of timber, and its exterior, no doubt, was--as in the case of
subsequent playhouses--of lime and plaster. The interior consisted of
three galleries surrounding an open space called the "yard." The
German traveler, Samuel Kiechel, who visited London in the autumn of
1585, described the playhouses--i.e., the Theatre and the Curtain--as
"singular [_sonderbare_] houses, which are so constructed that they
have about three galleries, one above