In 1596-7, at considerable expense, James Burbage purchased, and furbished as an indoor theatre, a space within the Blackfriars, the former Dominican priory on Water Lane. The Children of the Chapel played there from 1576-84, and Burbage saw it as the answer to the imminent expiry of his lease on the land in Shoreditch where he built The Theater in 1576. But he spectacularly failed to prevent the Privy Council granting a petition, signed by the Lord Chancellor, the company’s patron, to forbid its use as a theatre, and promptly died, leaving his sons Richard and Cuthbert with a problem.
After theatrenapping the timbers from Shoreditch to build the Globe, the Burbages managed to lease the Blackfriars to the Children of the Chapel, from 1600-08 – they performing weekly rather than daily, and attracting an upmarket audience. But in 1608 the Children of the Chapel fell foul of the French Ambassador, and the lease reverted to the Burbages. All theatres were closed by plague for a period in 1608-09, but in 1609, finally, the King’s Men were able to begin playing at the Blackfriars as a winter venue, keeping the Globe for more clement weather.
Having written exclusively for the Lord Chamberlain’s/King’s Men since 1594, successively at the Theater and Globe – the same building – Shakespeare faced a new challenge, of writing plays that would still work at the Globe but also in a smaller, roofed, artificially lighted space where the established audience was used to seeing children perform. And it is a critical commonplace that the result was the Late Plays, with their strangeness of mode and tremendous spectacles. But the first Late Play, Pericles, is collaborative, and was performed in 1607-08, before the Blackfriars was available, and how exactly that space may be seen in Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest is distinctly moot.
After considering Shakespeare’s relationship with the Blackfriars, we will look in turn at each Late Play, and investigate how Shakespeare rose to the greatest technical challenge he ever faced.
