The Playhouse at Newington Butts: A New Proposal

Abstract

HE playhouse at Newington Butts is such a little-known theater that it can scarcely be said to exist at all for the average student of Elizabethan drama. Our knowledge of it is confined to a very few statements about its existence, none at all about its characteristics or proprietors. We know that Henslowe entered in his Diary some receipts for the Admiral's and Chamberlain's companies, which were playing there together for a week or so in June I594, and we-know that the Privy Council sent directives to the Surrey Justices to suppress illegal playing there in the summers of I580 and I586. We know also that among the Henslowe papers at Dulwich is an undated Privy Council warrant (Chambers conjectures I592) in which a petition from Lord Strange's men to abandon Newington Butts and return to the City was approved. But aside from these four items with their scanty facts, there has been little to go on. The presence of two companies at the Butts in I594 under Henslowe's auspices led Chambers to muse that possibly the theatre had come into Henslowe's hands by that time, and C. W. Wallace claimed in I9I3 to have seen a document which confirmed that the playhouse had disappeared by