De Witt knew what “amphitheatra” meant. His Latin is fully competent. We have it on irrefutable evidence that the Rose and the Swan were in fact round or polygonal, and on good evidence that the Theater was. De Witt himself left us a now famous drawing depicting the interior of the Swan, and it shows a round auditorium. Thus, it follows from de Witt’s choice of terms that—like the Rose, the Swan and the Theater—the Curtain was a round or polygonal building.
The same conclusion follows from the text of a play from around 1606 by Day, Rowley and Wilkins, The Travels of The Three English Brothers. The play was entered into the Stationers’ Company Register in June 1607, “as yt was played at the Curten.” “As it was played at the Curtain” is about as solid evidence as we may expect to find regarding where our period’s plays were performed. In the play’s epilogue the figure of Fame summarizes the destinies of the three brothers. But then she suggests that some in the audience may know more. Those folks in the audience are “some that fill up this round circumference.” The Curtain’s auditorium is, thus, a “round circumference.”
And that conclusion follows again from one of the most well-known plays performed, apparently, at the Curtain. Shakespeare finished Henry V, the evidence suggests, around May 1599. The Chorus to Act Five describes a victory parade for the king. It predicts that “the General of our gracious Empress” will, by “a high-loving likelihood,” soon be greeted by a similar parade, when he is “from Ireland coming, bringing rebellion broached on his sword.” The Empress is of course Elizabeth, the General, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. Essex had departed for Ireland at the head of a large army, amidst great fanfare, on March 27, 1599. His mission was to defeat the Irish rebellion.
But Essex’s mission did not go well, from its very beginning. And by the end June, it was obvious that Essex would not be returning amidst any triumphal parade. He had marched his army south from Dublin, away from the main rebel force led by the Earl of Tyrone. The march produced little but misery and ignominious military defeats. By the time the army limped back to Dublin at the end of June, its strength had been significantly reduced by disease, desertion and casualties. And it still had not confronted Tyrone. So the chorus to Act Five probably was written soon after March 27. Almost certainly, before the end of June, 1599.
Another token correspondingly suggests that Henry V must have been in performance by the summer of 1599. Henslowe loaned the Lord Admiral’s £10 to pay Munday, Drayton, Wilson and Hathaway for the first part of Sir John Oldcastle, plus an advance for a second part, on October 16, 1599. The sum is substantial. It would not have been paid in the company’s ordinary practice unless the first part of the play had been completed.
The first part of our journeyman playwrights’ play borrows several incidents and phrases from Henry V. The incidents and phrases were identified by C.F. Tucker Brooke in 1918, and the incidents are listed in J.H. Walter’s edition of Shakespeare’s play. Thus the journeyman playwrights saw Shakespeare’s play performed and wrote their own play before the middle of October. Allowing them, say, eight weeks to outline, propose, and write their play, they must have seen Henry V in performance by the middle of August.
Within these date limits, Henry V probably was first performed in the Curtain theater. And was written with performance there in mind. The Theater, in which the Lord Chamberlain’s Company previously had performed, had been dismantled at the end of 1598. The company had already been performing in the Curtain for some time. The company’s next theater, the Globe, probably was not finished and ready until late August 1599. The contract for construction of the Fortune contemplates 28 weeks for the job. If the Globe could have been finished in the same amount of time after the Theater was dismantled, it would have been completed in the middle of July. But I can tell you, from many years of litigating construction contracts, that major projects rarely are finished on time.
The Globe was finished and ready for performances in September. Thomas Platter saw Julius Caesar performed there on September 21. By that time Henry V had already been performed. If Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar to open the new theater, he must have finished his prior play, Henry V, around April or May.
At the beginning of Henry V, the Chorus questions the actors’ ability to perform such great events on so small a stage. How, the Chorus asks, “may we cram within this wooden ‘O’ the very casques that did affright the air at Agincourt?” The chorus’s reference to “this wooden ‘O’” tells us once again that the Curtain was a round or polygonal structure.
Now, may we be certain here? Of course not. Certainty is rarely possible in matters Elizabethan. But the balance of the probabilities, by a wide margin, says that the Curtain was round or polygonal. We have no fewer than four independent written records which tell us so. Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that there is a 40% chance that in each of the four cases the facts which have led us to our conclusion actually are explained by some other circumstance. The chance that all four of our conclusions are wrong, in that case, by the rules of statistics, would be about 2.5%. Possible? Yes. But exceedingly improbable.
By the balance of the probabilities a rectangular foundation cannot be the foundation of the Curtain theater.
But what of the “fragments of ceramic money boxes” that were found on the site, vessels which, it is said, were used to collect entrance fees, then smashed in a “box office” to count the money? I’m no expert on the objects used in everyday Elizabethan life. So I have no idea what these fragments represent. But until someone produces an intact vessel, I’m skeptical that these are fragments of vessels used for the asserted purpose. If the “boxes” had to be smashed in order to count the collected pennies, the pennies necessarily were inserted into a slot, not thrown into an open pot. Any such vessel would have been vulnerable to fraud. Elizabethans were adept at deceptive practices. Greene’s books on conny-catching make that clear. In the hubbub of a theater entrance, anyone could show a penny, then palm it. The collectors couldn’t know whether the penny actually went into a closed, slotted, vessel. To make the system work, the collectors needed to see the penny go into the pot. Necessarily an open pot.