ii. THE BULL INN

The first notice of the Bull is on 7 June 1575 when the playing of a ‘prize’ there is recorded in the register of the School of Defence. It appears to have been the most popular of all localities for this purpose and there are fourteen similar notices of its use in the register, ending with one on 3 July 1590.[1077] Florio refers to it as a place for plays in 1578.[1078] Stephen Gosson in his _Schoole of Abuse_ (1579) exempts from his ordinary condemnation of plays _The Jew_ and _Ptolemy_ ‘shown at the Bull’.[1079] On 1 July 1582 the Earl of Warwick asked permission from the Lord Mayor for his servant John David to play his provost prizes at ‘the Bull in Bishopsgatestrete or some other conuenient place to be assigned within the liberties of London’. This was refused, much to Warwick’s annoyance, on the ground that an inn was a place ‘somewhat to close for infection’, and David appointed to play ‘in an open place of the Leaden hall’.[1080] The Bull, with the Bell, was assigned by a civic order of 28 November 1583 to the Queen’s men for their first winter season. Tarlton and the Queen’s men are said in the _Jests_ to have played ‘oftentimes’ at ‘the Bull in Bishops-gate-street’, and here their play of _The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth_, with Tarlton in the parts of the judge and the clown and Knell in that of Henry, was given.[1081] This must, of course, have been between 1583 and Tarlton’s death in 1588. In 1592 the translator of _The Spaniard’s Monarchie_ disclaims any ‘title fetched from the Bull within Bishopsgate, as a figge for a Spaniard’. I do not know whether any old play underlying the Admiral’s (q.v.) _Spanish Fig_ of 1601–2 can be referred to. The house was still in use during 1594, for in April or May of that year Anthony Bacon settled in Bishopsgate, to the vexation of his mother, ‘on account of its neighbourhood to the Bull Inn, where plays and interludes were continually acted, and would, she imagined, corrupt his servants’.[1082] Richard Flecknoe mentions the Bull in Bishopsgate Street, with the Cross-Keys, as one of the inns turned into theatres at the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, as was ‘at this day to be seen’ in 1664.[1083] The site was at No. 91 on the west of Bishopsgate Street, and is shown in Hatton’s map of 1708, and the Ordnance Survey maps of 1848–51 and 1875.