An Elizabethan Lawsuit: John Brayne, his Carpenter, and the Building of the Red Lion Theatre

Abstract

S IXTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH THEATRICAL entrepreneurs were an uncommonly quarrelsome lot; it is the good luck of modern historians that they were. Herbert Berry has pointed out that [n]early everything we know about Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses as buildings comes at random from documents about else and that, in the case of the Theatre in Shoreditch, the something else is basically a record of the misunderstandings, miscalculations, probably the chicanery of its builders and investors.' In short, it is a legal record. The endless complaints, witness lists, and court orders involved in the lawsuits surrounding the Theatre need not be detailed here; Berry sets them out as an appendix to his volume, The First London Playhouse, and the list stretches for almost twenty pages.2 But the Theatre is not the only London playhouse whose history is known from the litigation it precipitated. A plea roll for the Court of King's Bench in Hillary Term 11 Elizabeth-so far as I know never printed-outlines the tribulations of John Brayne, later James Burbage's partner at the Theatre, when Brayne was building his Red Lion playhouse in Stepney in 1567. The document is significant both because it sheds light on the Red Lion, heretofore known only from an entry in the rolls of the court of the Carpenters' Company, and