The Queen's men most likely occupied the Red Bull at least until 1617 when, as shown by the lawsuit of 1623, they were on the point of moving to the Cockpit in Drury Lane. Plays of theirs were printed as acted there in 1608, 1611, 1612, and 1615. Swetnam the Woman Hater Arraigned by Women, printed in 1620, was also played there, before Anne's death in 1619. In 1637 Thomas Heywood, formerly one of the Queen's men, included in his Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas, a Prologue and Epilogue, to which he prefixed the note 'A young witty lad playing the part of Richard the third: at the Red Bull: the Author because hee was interessed in the play to incourage him, wrot him this Prologue and Epilogue'.[1] This was probably, and certainly if the play was Shakespeare's, some quite exceptional performance. Similarly the 'companie of young men of this citie', who are stated on the title-page of Wentworth Smith's Hector of Germany (1615) to have acted it at the Red Bull and Curtain, must be supposed to have used these theatres by some arrangement with the Queen's men.
The Red Bull afterwards passed to other companies, continued in use up to, and even occasionally during, the Commonwealth, and had a revived life after the Restoration to 1663.[2] Before 1633, and probably before 1625, it had been re-edified and enlarged.[3] Mr. Lawrence suggests that at this time it became a roofed house, which it seems certainly to have been after the Restoration.[4] But it is difficult to get away from Wright's explicit statement that it 'lay partly open to the weather, and there they always acted by day-*light'.[5] Nor need the quite modern identification of it with the roofed interior depicted in The Wits rest upon anything but an incidental reference to the house in the text of the pamphlet.[6] Nothing is known as to the shape or galleries of the Red Bull.
xv. THE HOPE
[Bibliographical Note.—The Dulwich papers relating to the connexion
of Henslowe and Alleyn with the bear-baiting and the Hope are to be
found with a commentary in Greg, Henslowe's Diary and Henslowe Papers.
Valuable material on the Bankside localities is in W. Rendle, The Bankside,
Southwark, and the Globe, 1877 (Appendix I to Furnivall, Harrison's
Description of England, Part II, with a reconstructed map of the Bankside
and a 1627 plan of Paris Garden), Old Southwark and its People (1878),
