n Ralph, and his business partner,
Nicholas Bishop, went "to the Theatre upon a play-day to stand at the
door that goeth up to the galleries of the said Theatre to take and
receive for the use of the said Margaret half of the money that should
be given to come up into the said gallery." In the Theatre they were
met by Richard Burbage, then about nineteen years old, and his mother,
who "fell upon the said Robert Myles and beat him with a broom staff,
calling him murdering knave." When Myles's partner, Bishop, ventured
to protest at this contemptuous treatment of the order of the court,
"the said Richard Burbage," so Bishop deposed, "scornfully and
disdainfully playing with this deponent's nose, said that if he dealt
in the matter, he would beat him also, and did challenge the field of
him at that time." One of the actors then coming in, John
Alleyn--brother of the immortal Edward Alleyn--"found the foresaid
Richard Burbage, the youngest son of the said James Burbage, there
with a broom staff in his hand; of whom when this deponent Alleyn
asked what stir was there, he answered in laughing phrase how they
came for a moiety, 'But,' quod he (holding up the said broom staff)
'I have, I think, delivered him a moiety with this, and sent them
packing.'" Alleyn thereupon warned the Burbages that Myles could bring
an action of assault and battery against them. "'Tush,' quod the
father, 'no, I warrant you; but where my son hath now beat him hence,
my sons, if they will be ruled by me, shall at their next coming
provide charged pistols, with powder and hempseed, to shoot them in
the legs.'"[80]

[Footnote 80: Wallace, _op. cit._, pp. 63, 97, 100, 101, 114.]

But if the Burbages could laugh at the efforts of Myles and the widow
to secure a moiety of the Theatre from Cuthbert, they were seriously
troubled by the continued refusal of Gyles Alleyn to renew the lease.
James Burbage many times urged his landlord to fulfill the original
agreement, but in vain. At last, Alleyn, "according to his own will
and discretion, did cause a draft of a lease to be drawn, wherein were
inserted many unreasonable covenants." The new conditions imposed by
Alleyn were: (1) that Burbage should pay a rental of L24 instead of
L14 a year; (2) that he should use the Theatre as a place for acting
for only five years after the expiration of the original
twenty-one-year lease, and should then convert the building to other
uses; (3) that he should ultimately lea