s, served for the performance
of interludes or moralities.

Nor was it precisely in London proper that this primal theatre, which
is known in history simply as The Theatre, was set up. London in
Shakespeare's day was a small town, barely a mile square, with a
population little exceeding 60,000 persons. Within the circuit of the
city-walls vacant spaces were sparse, and public opinion deprecated
the erection of buildings upon them. Moreover, the puritan clergy and
their pious flocks, who constituted an active section of the citizens,
were inclined to resist the conversion of any existing building into
such a Satanic trap for unwary souls as they believed a playhouse of
necessity to be.

It was, accordingly, in the fields near London, not in London itself,
that the first theatre was set up. Adjoining the city lay pleasant
meadows, which were bright in spring-time with daisies and violets.
Green lanes conducted the wayfarer to the rural retreat of Islington,
and citizens went for change of air to the rustic seclusion of
Mary-le-bone. A site for the first-born of London playhouses was
chosen in the spacious fields of Finsbury and Shoreditch, which the
Great Eastern Railway now occupies. The innovation of a theatre, even
though it were placed outside the walls of the city, excited serious
misgiving among the godly minority. But, after much controversy, the
battle was finally won by the supporters of the play, and The Theatre
was launched on a prosperous career. Two or three other theatres
quickly sprang up in neighbouring parts of London's environment. When
Shakespeare was reaching the zenith of his career, the centre of
theatrical life was transferred from Shoreditch to the Southwark bank
of the river Thames, at the south side of London Bridge, which lay
outside the city's boundaries, but was easy of access to residents
within them. It was at the Globe Theatre on Bankside, which was
reached by bridge or by boat from the city-side of the river, that
Shakespearean drama won its most glorious triumphs.

VI

Despite the gloomy warnings of the preachers, the new London theatres
had for the average Elizabethan all the fascination that a new toy has
for a child. The average Elizabethan repudiated the jeremiads of the
ultra-pious, and instantaneously became an enthusiastic playgoer.
During the last year of the sixteenth century, an intelligent visitor
to London, Thomas Platter, a native of Basle, whose journal has
recently