In Shakespeare’s day, the Blackfriars district was home to two distinct theaters that occupied different parts of the old Dominican friary buildings at different times. The first Blackfriars playing space was installed in converted rooms on the upper floor of the western range in 1576. It doubled as a choir school and public theatre, although performances by the boy choisters were occasional and audiences were small. This theatre closed in 1586, but a decade later the playhouse builder and manager James Burbage purchased a suite of different rooms in the southern part of the same western range. Burbage’s plan was to install the Chamberlain’s Men (Shakespeare’s playing company) here after they lost access to their old outdoor venue the Theatre north of the city in Clerkenwell. But in 1596, the intervention of several powerful local residents prevented this new indoor venue from opening. It was not until 1600 that another group of boy choristers started acting here, followed in 1608 by the King’s, formerly Chamberlain’s, Men.
In one sense, the Blackfriars is the easiest of our four districts to define because the original ecclesiastical precinct covering approximately eight acres was surrounded by, and set apart from the surrounding city by, a series of walls and gates, and the natural boundaries of the Thames and Fleet rivers. Along with many of the original ecclesiastical buildings and spaces, these walls and gates survived long after the dissolution of England’s religious houses by Henry VIII in the 1540s. After the Reformation, this enclosed area retained certain legal privileges as an ex-ecclesiastical Liberty; it was also the parish of St. Anne Blackfriars and part of the ward of Farringdon Within. For the sake of convenience, the first stage of mapping the Blackfriars focuses inside the walled precinct, but many of the actors, playgoers,and suppliers would have lived outside these walls in London and the suburbs. The theaters’ economic footprint or zone of influence would have reached far and wide and would no doubt have overlapped with the other districts studied here.
