viii. NEWINGTON BUTTS

A theatre, of which the history is very obscure, but which may have been built soon after the Theatre and Curtain, stood at Newington, a village one mile from London Bridge, divided from the Bankside by St. George’s Fields, and reachable by the road which continued Southwark High Street.[1182] Here there were butts for the practice of archery. Plays at Newington Butts, outside the City jurisdiction, are first mentioned in a Privy Council letter of 13 May 1580 to the Surrey justices. A similar letter of 11 May 1586 speaks more precisely of ‘the theater or anie other places about Newington’. A third letter, undated, but probably belonging to 1591 or 1592, recites an order of the Council restraining Strange’s men from playing at the Rose, and enjoining them to play three days a week at Newington Butts, and rescinds it, ‘by reason of the tediousness of the way, and that of long time plays have not there been used on working days’.[1183] Possibly the theatre had come into Henslowe’s hands, for his diary records that it was at Newington that the combined companies of the Admiral’s and Chamberlain’s men began their first season after the plague of 1592–4, apparently playing there from 5 to 15 June 1594, and then going their separate ways to the Rose and the Theatre respectively. The theatre is mentioned in the list given by Howes in 1631.[1184] It is said to have been ‘only a memory’ by 1599.[1185] A bad pun is called a ‘Newington conceit’ in 1612.[1186]