The Chamberlain’s Men were barely settled in the Theatre before their patron, Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain, wrote to the Lord Mayor of London, 8 October 1594:83
Where my now company of players have been accustomed for the better exercise of their quality, and for the service of Her Majesty if need so require, to play this winter time within the City at the Cross Keys in Gracious Street: these are to require and pray your lordship (the time being such as, thanks be to God, there is now no danger of the sickness) to permit and suffer them so to do. The which I pray you the rather to do for that they have undertaken to me that, where heretofore they began not their plays till towards four o’clock, they will now begin at two and have done between four and five and will not use any drums or trumpets at all for the calling of people together and shall be contributors to the poor of the parish, according to their abilities. (ES, 4: 316)
This is among the clearest evidence we have that the players always really preferred playing in the City center, at least in the dark, cold, wet days of winter, when the appeal of the large, open‐air suburban amphitheaters must have been considerably muted for actors and audiences alike. Hunsdon’s letter, with an old soldier’s concision, anticipates the full raft of all the City father’s usual objections to the players: service of the Queen; no plague; start and end times to ensure they will be done before full dark, even in winter; no disruptive drums and trumpets; reasonable taxes for the poor. We have no actual proof that the Lord Mayor agreed to this, but the letter leaves little room for dissent (Gurr, 2005).
One curious feature of it is the way it talks of “my now company of players” as if they have regularly performed at the Cross Keys in this way in the past. Hunsdon had not patronized players since the late 1580s until the new company was created earlier in this year. Possibly there was a recognition that the Chamberlain’s players were, in many respects, essentially the old Strange’s Men (albeit stripped of Alleyn) and this had been their usual winter recourse. They had certainly played there in 1589, in defiance of the Lord Mayor’s attempts to restrain them from playing at all (EPF, 213).
Professional playing in the City inns can be traced back at least as far as the 1540s, but it was around the time that the Theatre was being built in 1576 that four inns emerged as regular playing places and they would be used by the actors until at least 1596. This was despite the 1574 Act of the Common Council which, as we have noted, played its part in driving the purpose‐built amphitheaters into the suburbs, but under whose conditions the inns’ owners were apparently prepared to operate (see p. 117). The inns themselves may have been somewhat adapted for the purposes of playing, but not radically. Unlike, say, the Boar’s Head in Whitechapel and the Red Bull in Clerkenwell, which were later converted into playhouses, the City inns – the Bell Savage on Ludgate Hill, the Bull in Bishopsgate Street, and the Cross Keys and Bell, both on Gracechurch Street – remained in business as inns, putting up travellers, handling cargoes, and purveying food and drink.
“Inn‐playing in London was largely … a winter phenomenon” (Kathman 2009b, 158). The Queen’s Men had been granted permission to play in two of the inns in the winter of 1583/4, and Lord Hunsdon’s letter explicitly ties his company’s occupation of the Cross Keys to winter. Their preference for the City inns seems to have been driven by the realities of securing an audience. In 1584 the Corporation of London ruled “that no playing be in the dark, nor continue any such time but as any of the auditory may return to their dwellings in London before sun set, or at least before it be dark” (ES, 4: 302). One suspects that this was not only what the City authorities required but also what most respectable members of the audience would prefer. Negotiating the minimally policed city after dark, its roads always in a dubious state of repair and cleanliness, would always have been a daunting prospect. Performances in a nearby inn would always be preferable at that time of year to a playhouse in the suburbs.
Although some have rather hastily jumped to the conclusion that performances at inns were indoor, most of the accounts we have of their actual use speak of outdoor playing, such as we observed with the Queen’s Men’s affray in Norwich. Robert Greene describes the trickery of pickpockets at the Bull inn, in his The Third and Last Part of Conny‐Catching (1592), in a context where it is clear that the audience is outside: a thief, having “nipped” a purse “stepped into the stable to take out the money” (D4r). The story is probably fictional, but Greene certainly knew the Bull, where several of his own plays had been performed. He describes a stage and the audience being free to move about to get the best view. This is consistent with what we know of the Bull, which was a very large, L‐shaped property with three courtyards – which meant that two could cater to the inn’s regular trade while the third was being used for plays. As David Kathman puts it “The Bull’s northernmost yard would seem to be ideal for [playing] … The dimensions of the northern yard, roughly 45 ft by 35 ft [13.72 × 10.69 m], would have made it comparable in size to the original yard of the Rose playhouse” (2009b, 161). If we combine this with the characteristics I have described before – galleries to accommodate higher‐paying members of the audience, as well as accessible doors for stage and tiring house business – we have all the elements necessary for playing. (William Lambarde’s account of penny‐by‐penny payment specifically mentions the Bell‐Savage inn and the Theatre, but doubtless applied also to the Bull: see p. 95).
We know less about the Cross Keys inn than we do some of the others. But what we do know suggests that playing there may not have been outdoors. For one thing it only had one courtyard, so that playing there would seriously have interfered with the regular business of the inn. Another argument against it is that, unlike the Bull and the Bell Savage (especially the former), neither the Bell nor the Cross Keys is known to have hosted fencing prizes, which were probably better suited to outdoor presentation, in larger arenas. So we may cautiously hypothesize that the Cross Keys contained a room large enough for commercial playing, possibly not as big as the Stratford Guildhall, but surely no smaller than the country houses we reviewed earlier, capable of holding a hundred people. Even at that size, it would barely be economic – unless the players were able to charge a significant premium for indoor accommodation, some of it possibly seated. That was the formula pioneered by the management of the boy companies, though on a larger scale, and which the King’s Men were to replicate, when they took over the Blackfriars. It is not impossible that the specific appeal of the Cross Keys over other potential venues among the inns was that it gave the company its first experience of this end of the market. But this is pure speculation.
Virtually everything we do know about the Cross Keys is contained in David Kathman’s article, “Alice Layston and the Cross Keys” (2009c). Like so many of the theatrical properties, it was surrounded by vexatious, spiteful, and deceitful litigation over a number of years. Between 1571 and 1590 it was owned by Alice Layston, a legacy from her late (second) husband. Playing began there “probably by 1576 and certainly by 1579” (Kathman, 154), though renting the property to the actors was more likely a business decision of the leaseholder rather than the owner. From 1564 to 1584 the leaseholder was a Yorkshireman, Richard Ibbotson. By 1588 the lease passed to John Franklin, who “spent considerable money on wainscott, glass, settles (high‐back wooden benches) and ironwork, among other things, to get the inn into presentable shape” (161). He was thus the leaseholder when Strange’s Men defied the Lord Mayor and played there in 1589. Is it possible that Franklin’s outlay on putting “the inn into presentable shape” was associated with a business plan to attract higher‐paying customers?
Physically, we know that the Cross Keys was “located on the west side of Gracechurch Street … immediately north of the parish church and immediately south of the Bell inn … It was about 140 ft [42.67m] long extending west from the street, and was 80 ft [24.38m] wide at the back end but narrower on the Gracechurch Street end, with 32 ft [9.75m] of street frontage. There was a single yard in the middle, roughly 48 ft long (east‐west) by 32 ft wide (north‐south)” (147).27 The proximity to the parish church doubtless explains why Hunsdon was so explicit about no drums and trumpets, and about the timing of shows. One of the striking features of his letter is that the proposed 2 p.m. start time would clash with evensong, whenever that service was being conducted (see p. 114). This might only have been on holy‐days, and Hunsdon does not go into sufficient detail to explain if there would be special arrangements for such eventualities. But if there was tacit acceptance that shows and services would overlap it was certainly important that there be no drums and trumpets in the streets.
The dimensions show that the building was certainly large enough to contain a substantial interior playing space, especially if (as we may suppose) it rose more than one storey. But just as we do not know the size of this room we cannot know how the players adapted their shows to it. There was, presumably, no need to arrange the seating to include places of honor, but in other respects it might have been very like playing in a great house. Securing payment from an audience would have been very straightforward, with a limited number of doors, especially if there was no differentiated pricing.
On Alice Layston’s death in 1590 the inn passed to her late husband’s brother, William Layston, who went to law to dispossess John Franklin of his lease. He installed in his stead James Beare, who was somewhat improbably a sailor and privateer (some would say pirate). He was thus the leaseholder with whom Shakespeare’s company presumably did business in 1594 and for as many years thereafter as they might have been allowed to play there. It is commonly assumed that playing in the City inns came to an end by 1596, when the petition by Blackfriars residents to stop the company using the new theatre which James Burbage had built there contained the passage “now all players being banished by the Lord Mayor from playing within the City … they now think to plant themselves in liberties” (EPF, 508). It is also the case that none of the foreign visitors to London mentions the inns in their surveys of the theatres after this date. Paul Menzer, however, has recently argued that players continued to perform in the City inns almost up to the end of Elizabeth’s reign (2006b). There is, however, no specific record of the Chamberlain’s Men doing so (or even requesting to do so) after 1594/5, and my assumption is that they did not. Their experience of playing at the Cross Keys was brief, but if my speculation about the business model it involved is correct, it was far from unimportant.