The “dwellinge howse on the Banckside”: John Heminges and the Neighborhood of the Globe Playhouse

Early tales of a haunted site, the presence of “curious remains,” and eventually an archaeological dig have sustained fascination with the second Globe playhouse over centuries.¹ The theater’s adjoining building and the network of streets surrounding it, however, have yet to receive the same level of scrutiny. The construction of a house on the Globe estate was funded by John Heminges, the King’s Men’s de facto financial manager; it is generally supposed, following a suggestion made by E. K. Chambers, to have been a tap-house serving drinks to playgoers.² Heminges’s commercial expertise as a freeman of the Grocers’ Company and the documented existence of “Tap-howses” connected to the King’s Men make this a plausible guess; yet, as Gabriel Egan has shown, the historical record is inconclusive when it comes to the property’s purpose.³ Herbert Berry, who located a circa 1634 reference to the “building adioyning to the … Playhowse late in the occupacion of John Hemings,” suggested that Heminges might have lived in his tap-house, but “occupacion” frequently implies lesseeship rather than residence, and the term “tenure” in the same document leaves us none the wiser.⁴ There is equally little certainty regarding the site, access points, and name of Heminges’s building. Pictorial evidence is limited to an ambiguous sighting in Wenceslaus Hollar’s Long View of London (1647) and its precedent sketch, while cartographical records of surrounding alleys were produced long after the Globe’s redevelopment. No trace of the building emerged during the partial excavation of the playhouse site in 1989 or work on adjacent areas in 1997.

A fresh examination of parochial and other archival records has now elicited some new information, both about the house that Heminges built and about the Globe tavern that served the playhouse community. These findings establish that the theater’s tenement was home to Heminges and his family for most of the 1620s, and that he died there on a date that can be fixed as October 10, 1630. The building’s address was Black Boy Alley, either a passage bordering the Globe precinct, or a rental tenement fronting Maid Lane. There are clues to suggest that Heminges may have operated as its residential landlord and even some circumstantial evidence to permit the hypothesis that it might have been called The Black Boy. Further, while it remains conceivable that “the other Tenement” did possess some form of tap-house, this may not have been the King’s Men’s primary hospitality outlet.⁵ A Globe tavern can be shown to have existed in a separate location, closer to the Thames and to Globe Stairs, a riverside disembarkation point maintained by Heminges and possibly situated farther east than previously thought. The model implied by this evidence suggests that the company was operating a more extensive leisure hub than conventionally supposed and was using an early form of “brand identity” to advertise the playhouse, broaden its economic reach, and facilitate the arrival and immediate capture of London patrons on busy Bankside. The Globe tavern and Globe Stairs, along with Globe Rents, Globe Gardens, and Globe Alley(s) emerge both as geographical markers of the Globe’s influence on the built environment of Clink Liberty, and as evidence of the integration of Heminges and the theatrical community within the wider life of the parish.

The essay that follows begins by tracking Heminges’s places of residence throughout the life of the second Globe, logging the members of his household, and unpicking misleading token-book records that appear to place him in multiple locations rather than at a single address in Black Boy Alley. The next section notes the socioeconomic demographic of the alley and presents the reasons for identifying the house Heminges occupied there with the Globe-adjoining tenement. Drawing on early maps and local sewer records, the essay goes on in its third part to consider possible site locations for the playhouse property, and in its fourth to explore indications that Heminges may have been running a rental tenement on or within the peripheries of the Globe estate. The final section moves away from the theatrical precinct to demonstrate the existence of a Globe tavern close to Bankside, and to establish its proximity to Globe Stairs. My exploration of administrative, kinship, and geographical networks as interdependent systems considers separate documentary corpora as mutually reinforcing evidential communities. These records show Heminges, his neighbors, and his colleagues embedded within intersecting professional, economic, and domestic structures. They offer opportunities, moreover, for future work on the victualers, tapsters, brothel-keepers, and watermen who lived in the immediate neighborhoods of playhouse, tavern, and stairs, and whose livelihoods were bound up with the economic nexus of the Globe and its affiliated sites (see figure 1).

I. On the Bankside

Following the fire that destroyed the first Globe on June 29, 1613, John Heminges sub-leased two plots of land on the Globe estate and committed at least £200 to build a house adjoining the second playhouse, apparently replacing an earlier dwelling that had also been destroyed.⁶ The “faire howse newe builded to his owne vse” was likely completed by mid-1614, but, while Heminges might have managed a commercial operation from the premises, his “vse” of the property did not entail residency there during the rest of that decade.⁷ Instead, he remained in the parish of St Mary Aldermanbury, his home of thirty years, where his wife Rebecca was buried on September 2, 1619, and where he is last recorded in December that year.⁸ At some point in the early 1620s, perhaps prompted by widowerhood, he and his unmarried daughters crossed the river to take up residence in the liberty of the Clink, the part of St Saviour parish that was home to the Globe. The parish’s token-books (see figures 2 and 3), annual records of householders buying mandatory tokens for Easter communion, list Heminges at three addresses: Maid Lane (1622–23), Iremonger’s Rents (1623), and Black Boy Alley (1624, 1628–29).⁹ He is also logged at the latter location in a token-book tentatively dated 1614 by William Ingram and Alan H. Nelson, but which new analysis shows to be the missing partner of paired 1624 books.¹⁰ Matthew Jones, “Mr Heminges servant,” bought a token in Black Boy Alley in 1621, before his name was deleted from the book at some point after Easter (April 1).¹¹ This may represent his master’s arrival in the parish during the second half of that year; Jones’s reappearance and proximity to Heminges in the 1622–23 books suggest that he continued to work for the household.¹²

Heminges’s family members also flicker briefly into view: daughter Margaret appears in the 1622 token-book, as does someone identified by Ingram and Nelson as another daughter, Susan. There is no record of such a person among Heminges’s well-documented children, and the messily inserted familial designator may apply to Margaret, with the other, uncertainly named, occupant perhaps a servant—or an error for Rebecca, Margaret’s sister.¹³ The youngest girl, Elizabeth, was under sixteen, so did not require a token. Another daughter, Alice, died following childbirth in her father’s house, where she had been staying with her husband, scrivener John Atkins, in June 1624.¹⁴ No Clink token-books survive for 1625–26, but in 1625, the year of the plague that ravaged St Saviour and saw most who could afford to leaving the area, Heminges was living with Atkins in the City parish of St Bartholomew-by-the-Exchange.¹⁵ The arrangement probably continued in 1626: on March 30, Rebecca was noted as being from St Bartholomew-by-the-Exchange at her marriage to William Smith, an associate and neighbor of her brother-in-law Ralph Merefield.¹⁶ Merefield, with whom Heminges and Atkins had business dealings in February 1626, and on whose behalf Heminges may have traveled to Macclesfield that summer, lived minutes away in Bearbinder Lane, St Mary Woolchurch Haw.¹⁷ Heminges perhaps remained in the area in 1627, for there is no trace of him in the St Saviour token-books until 1628, and Margaret was married from St Mary on December 11. He is also absent from the 1630 token-book, but the probate record that followed his death that year gives his parish as St Saviour.

Additional evidence confirms that Heminges did indeed spend his final year in Clink Liberty and allows us a brief glimpse of his home there. His “dwellinge howse” is mentioned in Chancery lawsuits of 1630–31 and 1633 that concern a dispute over Margaret Heminges’s marriage portion, which arose following Heminges’s death.¹⁸ Margaret’s husband, lawyer Thomas Sheppard, claimed that William Heminges, advised by John Atkins, had unlawfully withheld the unpaid balance of Margaret’s portion when he inherited his father’s estate; the defendants argued it had been forfeited by non-settlement of a reciprocal jointure. All litigants testified that they had attended on Heminges in early October 1630 at his house “on the Banckside in the parrish of St Saviour in Southwarke”; Bankside functions here as the collective term for Clink Liberty and Paris Garden (as opposed to Boroughside, the parish’s third sector).¹⁹ Their accounts reveal that “the house of John Hemminges” had more than one story: on visiting, Sheppard asked Atkins “to goe vp with him into the chamber” of the sick man.²⁰ It also possessed a study, which William described helping his father clear of superfluous papers, and from which Sheppard accused Atkins of removing a bond. Either the house, or the land on which it stood, was leasehold, with William spending £30 on “funerall Charges probat of the will arrerages of rente and servantes wages” at his father’s death.²¹ The impression given is of a reasonably sizeable property, or at least one containing a study, upper floor, and sufficient sleeping space for various adults of both sexes: Heminges, at least three adolescent/adult children, approximately three apprentices, and further “servantes.”²² Margaret was probably replaced by William in the late 1620s: he graduated from Oxford in 1628, but failed to secure a promised canon’s place and described himself in early 1631 as “a Scholler and vnexperienced in the world.”²³ His brother John may also have been present, given that, in 1629, Heminges borrowed money to send his eldest son to sea; John reportedly died abroad in late 1630.²⁴ Heminges’s own death took place at home on October 10, 1630: an unnoted lawsuit that arose as a corollary to the Sheppard altercation specifies that events “the next day after the death of … John Hemings” occurred “the very same day” that his will was proved (October 11).²⁵ Following the funeral on October 12, William remained briefly in the property before going into hiding from creditors.²⁶

Heminges thus spent at least six years in Clink Liberty, conceivably up to eight or nine, and, despite apparent evidence to the contrary, is overwhelmingly likely to have lived in only one dwelling there. The token-books’ ostensible documentation of three relocations in as many years is misleading: two of the addresses Heminges is logged at (Maid Lane and Black Boy Alley) designate the same site, and the third record (Iremonger’s Rents, a brewhouse-tenement complex) is erroneous. Figure 3 illustrates the apparent movement of not only the Heminges household but also many of its neighbors from Black Boy Alley to Maid Lane and back again. The evidence suggests, however, that Black Boy Alley, co-located with Maid Lane in thirteen of the twenty token-books in which it features, was in fact a proximate subsidiary to the larger thoroughfare, for which it was sometimes named. The two locations deputize for one another in the remaining seven books, including that of 1622, in which the alley’s 1621 residential cohort is absorbed by the Maid Lane entry and the alley’s presence masked from view. In the 1623 book, Black Boy Alley inhabitants are split unevenly between the alley and Maid Lane. Such porosity in the labeling of locations was not unusual, not least in a neighborhood that was, despite the efforts of parish officials, becoming significantly more densely populated and built-up.²⁷ Residential sites might be known in terms of their access points in differing streets at front and rear or via the lateral alleys that served and were often named for specific tenements or their landlords.

The rogue reappearance of Heminges and a sizeable group of his neighbors in Iremonger’s Rents in 1623, however, can be disregarded as the legacy of revision in a token-book subject to unusually heavy alteration. Its original compiler placed Heminges in Maid Lane, but a subsequent record-keeper adjusted the positions of the book’s location markers, inserting Iremonger’s Rents into the margin partway through the Maid Lane entry and marking the original Iremonger header for deletion. The names of residents already entered under the initial Maid Lane and Iremonger headings were then reinserted several pages earlier, resulting in the transfer of whole neighbor groups within the book. The volume of names affected meant that the original entries were marked with ambiguous horizontal lines, rather than being fully deleted, creating the illusion of duplicate entries with variant addresses. The most accurate location for Heminges is thus the one at which he, or at any rate his man, is first detectable living in Clink Liberty, and where he is recorded for the longest period and with the greatest chronological consistency: Black Boy Alley. As we shall see in what follows, this was the address of the Globe-adjoining tenement, denominating either a playhouse-adjacent passage or a site on the Globe estate itself.

II. House Adjoining

Typically narrow and dark, and often poor, alleyways were frequently named for the buildings found at their intersections with larger thoroughfares. This was the case with Southwark’s second Black Boy Alley, located off Bermondsey Street and named for The Black Boy Inn.²⁸ Alleys had often evolved from such properties, enabling access to their backsides (the term for land at the rear of a building) or bisecting clusters of rental accommodation. The alley was a transitory space, both geotemporally, as it served as a conduit for human traffic and did not always outlast the buildings it served, and semantically: within a residential context, “alley” could be synonymous with “rents.” These tenanted housing complexes comprised divided tenements providing often basic multi-occupancy accommodation, along with the passages, yards, and related sprawl generated by such micro-communities (see figure 4). Entries in the token-books often represent not individual houses, but households within such shared residential environments. Callan Davies, noting the fluidity of the term, suggests that the alley enabled the “monopolistic” provision of food, drink, and commercial-residential services by its controlling lessee, an observation worth recalling when we go on to consider Heminges’s possible operations within Black Boy Alley.²⁹ Davies’s discussion of alleys as recreational sites is also pertinent; embedded in the thick of the theater community, Black Boy Alley contained three alleged brothels and at least two victualing-houses, a cluster of which were located strikingly close to Heminges’s accommodation.³⁰ Yards away were more brothels and alehouses, a bowling-alley, and bull- and bear-baiting on or immediately off Maid Lane.³¹

Heminges’s neighbors included those operating such enterprises, as well as possible members of the King’s Men network: carpenter William Gascoigne may have been the company stagehand and/or a relative of Atkins’s second wife; brewer-cum-waterman Oliver Patrick’s son William was the right age to have been Heminges’s apprentice of 1628; painter Anthony Knight may have been the King’s Men employee of that name and a relative of theatrical bookkeeper Edward.³² In immediately surrounding alleys lived the hitherto unnoted and impoverished harper/fiddler Henry Cissell/Cassell; William Monk, tobaccoman, weaver, and musician; and Peter Daliland, a distiller and bearward, among others who worked in local entertainment.³³ Such doubled identities were not uncommon, especially among poorer sectors of the community, as people drew on opportunities to make a living, recorded themselves selectively in the interests of perceived status, and were labeled with variant descriptors used interchangeably by record-keepers.³⁴ Parish clerk John Boston noted the primary occupations of 148 adults living in Maid Lane, Black Boy Alley, and Globe Alley in 1619–25: 29 percent worked in the textile industries, 19 percent were watermen, and 13 percent had occupations relating to food and drink.³⁵ A quarter of 252 adults and children in this micro-neighborhood were noted by the clerk as “poor,” including several of Heminges’s close neighbors. Globe landlord Matthew Brend’s thirty-six Globe Alley tenements were, similarly, recorded by parish officials as “pore.”³⁶ Despite the socioeconomically mixed nature of urban seventeenth-century milieux, it remains noteworthy that Heminges, described in 1619 as “of greate lyveinge wealth and power,” admitted to the livery of the Grocers’ Company in 1621, and in receipt of a coat of arms in 1629, had moved with his teenage daughters from affluent St Mary Aldermanbury to live next door to servingmen, a sailor, and a brothel-keeper, among others.³⁷ His decision might suggest a financial or operational motive; at the very least, it affirms Heminges’s active working involvement with the King’s Men and the Globe site right up until his death.

The token-books witness the deaths and departures of many Black Boy Alley residents during Heminges’s years in Clink Liberty, not least following the 1625 plague. Temporary absences and differing record-keeping or visitation practices are also reflected in the many revisions with which these documents are strewn. Despite such disruptions, clusters of households remain reasonably consistent, as we saw with the 1621–24 Black Boy/Maid Lane/‘Iremonger’ cohort (see figure 3), and can be used to anchor individuals within particular sites and to track tenancy progression. Importantly, fourteen households found within ten token-book entries either side of Heminges at various points during his time in the alley remained in situ in 1631, the year following his death.³⁸ Those families, chief amongst them the Tapps and Gascoigne households, now became the comparably close neighbors of the tenant who replaced Heminges, whom I suggest, based on his equivalent position within the neighbor cluster, was William Millet. Millet had formerly lived, and likely worked with, his kinsman James Barlow, innkeeper of the Boar’s Head, Boroughside; he may have remained at the inn for some months after Barlow’s death in 1620, before disappearing from the record.³⁹ In 1631–36, having acquired the honorific “Master,” he surfaces in Black Boy Alley.⁴⁰ His location can be pinned down further by the parish’s 1635 report on new buildings, which describes him living by “The Globe Playhouse nere Maidelane” in a “house thereto adioyninge built aboute the same tyme [i.e., ‘20 yeares past’] with tymber.”⁴¹ Millet’s token-book placement in Black Boy Alley during the same year gives us an address for the Globe-adjoining house, one that has compelling parallels with that of Heminges. The overlap of neighbors located close to each man and the fact that both Millet and Heminges had known proprietary connections to the playhouse tenement, makes it a strong likelihood that the pair consecutively inhabited the same property, and that the “Howse adioyning to the Globe” mentioned circa 1634 was indeed “in the occupacion of John Heminges,” not merely at the end of his life, but for much of its final decade.⁴²

A final thread of evidence is supplied by the tenant who succeeded Millet, following the latter’s departure circa 1636–37.⁴³ Richard Hodges is signposted in Millet’s spot with particular exactitude in the 1638–39 and 1641 token-books, due to the unusually consistent contiguous placement of William Gascoigne’s widow Elizabeth 1633–41.⁴⁴ Hodges’s “ten aside” neighbor cluster during his years in the alley includes ten households in common with Millet, and four who were still there from Heminges’s time, while his occupation of the playhouse tenement is indicated by a 1642 record of his tax contribution “for his landlords ye company of Players his Maiesties servants”; he paid thirty shillings, a further suggestion that the Globe house might have been sizeable.⁴⁵ Heminges, Millet, and Hodges can be placed with a high degree of probability in the playhouse tenement, their documented links to that property and to their neighbors mutually reinforcing the likelihood of each being its tenant. Identifying the site occupied by Black Boy Alley thus has the potential to inform our understanding of the distribution of buildings on the Globe estate and their access points. A paucity of references to the alley makes this challenging, but the circumstantial evidence discussed below may offer some locational possibilities and strengthen the case for a position in the northern sector of the estate.

III. Black Boy Alley

Unnamed on any maps depicting Clink Liberty, Black Boy Alley has left little trace of itself beyond the token-books. Its toponomastic documentation therein fits Jeremy Boulton’s estimate that it took five to ten years for new alleys to become fully populated, and closely approximates the lifetime of the second Globe; Black Boy Alley seems to have emerged not long after the playhouse precinct was redeveloped in 1614, reinforcing its identification with the adjoining tenement.⁴⁶ Inserted and almost lost on its first appearance in the 1621 token-book (see figure 2), it straggles into view as a messy afterthought in 1623, and only gains established status as a pre-entered header in 1624. It blinks out of existence following the 1638 token-book and one final appearance in the sparse, parish-wide 1643 “book,” a folded sheet of paper possibly marked for cancellation.⁴⁷ The Globe was closed at roughly the same time (1642) and demolished circa 1645–53.⁴⁸ The 1632 and 1638 token-books, which differentiate the north and south sides of Maid Lane, confirm Black Boy Alley’s position to the south of that thoroughfare, while its frequent co-occurrence with Maid Lane and Globe Alley raises the possibility that it may have connected the two. The alley’s substitution for Maid Lane, but never for Globe Alley, in the 1624–29 books, the marginal insertion of the 1621 “blackboy Alley” locator partway through the Maid Lane entry, and the token-collector’s usual route (Globe Alley→Maid Lane→Black Boy Alley), imply that it was more closely associated with the wider thoroughfare. Black Boy residents are shuffled to Maid Lane in books where the alley is omitted, although occasional migration of households from Globe to Black Boy Alley may support a junction. Boston, whose notebook recording church business is apparently the only other source to mention Black Boy Alley, confirms it or its nominal tenement as a Maid Lane affiliate in a 1619 baptismal entry for “Thomas Leybutter base son of William a saylor black boy maidlane.”⁴⁹ If the alley took its name from a building called The Black Boy or was synonymous with Black Boy “rents,” this property likely bordered Maid Lane southside, with an associated passageway running south and either joining Globe Alley or affording access to the tenement’s backside and/or the Globe precinct.

Pre-1750 cartographical representations of Maid Lane’s southern alleyways comprise the maps of William Morgan (1682; see figure 5) and John Rocque (1746; see figure 6), compiled decades after the redevelopment of the Globe site.⁵⁰ They furnish a couple of nameless contenders for Black Boy Alley, although it is highly possible that, like many of the Maid Lane–Bankside cut-throughs, this short-lived passage or rental property remains an unmapped site whose dependence on a designatory edifice saw it disappear with its host. Globe Alley, which originally continued west across the playhouse site, had a three-foot-wide northern spur by 1682: the date of its emergence is unknown, but William Braines does not find it named for its parent alley until the eighteenth century.⁵¹ It bordered a Maid Lane inn called The (Blue) Anchor, which was, by 1750, conjectured to have been the Globe’s tavern, and is identifiable operating as a victualing-house circa 1660.⁵² Yet if this was the playhouse tap-house and/or a post-Globe incarnation of a hypothetical Black Boy, it cannot also have been Heminges’s adjoining property: the Anchor was neighbored by Globe Alley’s extension to its east and a passage on the Globe estate’s easternmost periphery, known by 1799 as Blue Anchor Alley (and variants), on its west.⁵³ It was thus beyond the bounds of the playhouse lease.

Seven-foot-wide Blue Anchor Alley, however, was situated on the estate, along its perimeter, according to Braines’s mathematically neat reckoning; he assumes that it was formed after the lifetime of the playhouse, although archaeological evidence of a contemporary drainage ditch is suggestive of an associated through-route.⁵⁴ Rocque either omits it or has mislabeled the Globe Alley extension. A Maid Lane property west of Blue Anchor Alley would be on company land, plausibly adjoining the playhouse. By 1655, when Matthew Brend had replaced the Globe with tenements, this spot was occupied by Edward Simmonds’s six-hearth house; presumably, although not indubitably, the Heminges property—especially if it was structurally dependent on its adjoining edifice—had been lost, too.⁵⁵ If it was replaced by Simmonds’s tenement, its foundations might have provided at least some of the footprint of the new building: when Thomas Brend was fined for constructing property on new foundations, no penalty was applied to Simmonds’s dwelling.⁵⁶ A generally accurate eighteenth-century account of the Globe’s location describes the playhouse’s “north side and building adjoining, extending from the west side of Counter-alley [Blue Anchor Alley],” but remains ambiguous as to whether the structure abutting the alley is the playhouse or its annex.⁵⁷ The former disposition would place Black Boy Alley west of the playhouse, where an unnamed passage of uncertain date might have been present during the period, approximately where an accessway is visible on Morgan’s map, but just beyond the estate’s western boundary.⁵⁸ Alternatively, but less plausibly given available space, the “building adjoining” sat directly north of the playhouse, somewhat like the Bear Garden’s 1606 “gatehouse” (fifty-six feet wide, but only sixteen deep), which likely included a tap-house and access to the Bear Garden.⁵⁹

Millet’s residence in the playhouse tenement may yield a possible clue. On May 24, 1633, the local commissioners of sewers, responsible for enforcing householders’ maintenance of the drainage conduits close to their properties, ordered Millet to “sett a sufficient grate of Iron in the sinke [sewer] against his house there by Maide Lane to keepe his soyle from comeing into the sewar there.”⁶⁰ Sewers ran down Maid Lane’s north and south sides, roughly six feet wide and traversable by wooden bridges. The order issued to Millet places him at the Black Boy Alley/Maid Lane junction and implies that the Globe house was sited at the northern end of the playhouse precinct, with its northern elevation close to (“against”) the ditch running down Maid Lane southside into which his waste was discharged. His 1635 token-book proximity to “The backside of the Bearegarden,” which had a door onto Maid Lane, and his and Hodges’s near adjacency to Maid Lane northside (1636–41) reinforces the connection.⁶¹

Such a location would render it less likely that the house seen to the south of the Globe in Wenceslaus Hollar’s circa 1638 sketch (see figure 7) and his Long View (1647), often interpreted as the playhouse’s tap-house, was also the house Heminges built in 1613–14. Egan rules this building out on the grounds that it is detached from the playhouse, and the Heminges house is indeed described as “adjoining” the Globe in three primary sources, suggesting that material attachment, like that seen in the Newcourt/Faithorne generic “Bear Garden” image, or proximity with a connecting accessway, such as that of the Fortune’s tap-house, was a defining feature.⁶² Nevertheless, the term “adjoining,” although it commonly signifies physical contiguity, is semantically flexible enough to permit proximate “belonging” of the sort exhibited in Hollar’s etching; we might compare John Cholmley’s house and the Rose, or the house immediately west of the Swan.⁶³ However, a property located directly south of the playhouse cannot neighbor the Maid Lane sewer, for which the King’s Men would then bear responsibility, and is unlikely to border a section of cross-ditch identified in relation to Maid Lane, rather than in terms of Globe Alley or the Bishop of Winchester’s Park. If Millet was required to repair the cross-ditch by the eastern boundary of the Globe estate, which fed into Maid Lane, this would place his dwelling on the Simmonds site, by the Blue Anchor Alley perimeter (see figure 5).⁶⁴ The playhouse itself was positioned towards the northeastern quadrant of the estate, set back somewhat from Maid Lane; a tenement here would presumably sit slightly north of the playhouse and directly on the street (and its sewer), but would need to avoid compromising the playhouse’s eastern stair-tower, especially if this enabled external access.⁶⁵ The probable foundations of this latter structure, and a metaled surface to its east, interpreted as a yard, were exposed in the excavation of a limited portion of the site in 1989.⁶⁶ A 1738 plan of the neighboring Anchor shows that it possessed a yard between its Maid Lane tavern and an outbuilding to the south; a similar configuration might allow the Globe house to accommodate the stair-tower and permit access to it via a lateral alleyway, extended yard/garden, or even the building itself.⁶⁷

The site on or by Maid Lane that is implied by the sewer record would increase the intriguing possibility that the Globe-adjoining house was the eponymic Black Boy, as well as implying the rough depth of its plot: properties fronting Maid Lane sat on plots running south 100 feet (the depth of the Globe estate’s northern plot), their yards or outbuildings abutting Globe Alley.⁶⁸ Heminges may have had further land in addition to a yard on the Maid Lane plot: he had obtained “two litle parcells of ground” on the Globe estate, that is, plots that were demarcated either administratively or materially, “vpon parte whereof … [he] hath built a howse.” ⁶⁹ It is therefore possible that he also controlled land on the southernmost of the two plots leased by the company from Brend, which lay between Globe Alley and the Park ditch. The remainder of his ground might have served as a garden, storage area, or yard enabling overflow from a tap-house, among other possibilities. The Fortune’s adjoining tap-house had a “yard or garden plot” used on one occasion to feast a visiting dignitary.⁷⁰ Possibly there was further accommodation on the Globe estate: an isolated and hitherto unnoticed entry within Boston’s notebook records the burial on May 6, 1620, of “Cole a crisam base son … of John globe gardens.”⁷¹ Cole might have been a tenant of Heminges’s second plot and/or of the company’s land to the south of the Globe, where gardens had been leased prior to the building of the first playhouse and that archaeological evidence suggests may have remained open land; the source, perhaps, of the yearly £6 generated by the estate.⁷² According to company members in 1635, between £20–30 per annum, likely from rent, was generated by the Globe and Blackfriars “Tap-howses & a Tenement & a Garden belonging to the premisses,” the latter two items plausibly allusions to Heminges’s house and second plot.⁷³ If so, the differentiation of the tenement from the tap-houses rather implies that the former did not sell refreshments, and invites the questions of what its function was and where the tap-house was situated in relation to it. The existence of a rental tenement with Globe connections offers one possibility.

IV. Globe Rents

The annual rental value of the playhouse-adjoining property was given by witnesses of varying partiality as 20 shillings (£1) in 1619, and £8–9, £10, and 20 marks (£13 6s. 8d.) circa 1634.⁷⁴ Millet’s annual rent was noted by parish officials as £4 in 1635.⁷⁵ The 1619 figure, the only one cited during Heminges’s lifetime, may represent ground rent at a favorable rate, whereas the 1630s sums are in keeping with commercial tenancy rates for a sizeable property or divided tenement(s), with garden/yard.⁷⁶ It is unclear, if the figure is accurate, why Millet was paying, at most, half of Heminges’s rent—perhaps this represents a reduced commercial benefit from the house or the absence of the second plot. The cost of the house’s construction was specified as £200 by both Atkins, who contracted carpenters for the Globe rebuild and held in trust the land Heminges acquired, and by its builder, Richard Hudson.⁷⁷ George Archer, Brend’s rent-gatherer, landlord of four Maid Lane–Globe Alley tenements, and long-term resident of a Maid Lane property called The Ship, put the cost at £200–300.⁷⁸ The simultaneous rebuilding of the playhouse cost somewhere between £800 and £1400, suggesting that its companion building was not insubstantial. Philip Henslowe and Jacob Meade paid £360 for the Hope in the same year, while the Bear Garden’s nine-room, circa 2,240-square-foot “gatehouse” property cost £65 in 1606.⁷⁹ The value of Heminges’s house implies that it is likely to have been the defining Black Boy Alley edifice, further strengthening the possibility that it was called The Black Boy. Heminges’s new investment was his most substantial property purchase—his former Addle Street house had cost £90 in 1605—and suggests that the Globe property had a profitable function in addition to its domestic one.⁸⁰ This is even more likely when we consider that Heminges did not own the house absolutely: any structures the company built on the Globe estate would pass to Brend once its lease expired. Neither, apparently, was Heminges’s lease alienable; his will and the legal wrangle over his estate show that he did not leave property or, apparently, financial interest therein.⁸¹ The implication is that he expected the house to make money, enough to defray the substantial financial outlay required to build it, and to do so in sufficient time to allow it to yield a worthwhile profit.

In 1619, former Globe shareholder John Witter alleged that the “faire howse newe builded to [Heminges’s] owne vse … will in a fewe yeares yeild a greater some in rente then the newe buildinge of the play howse and galleries did cost.”⁸² Even allowing for legal hyperbole, this seems a patently illogical claim from the man who put Heminges’s annual rent at twenty shillings. Perhaps Witter suggests that the rent payable to company shareholders was proportionate, tied exponentially to growing profits from a commercial operation such as a tap-house. Yet the term “yield” may be suggestive of another kind of gain: the personal profit generated by a rental tenement of the sort run by a good number of St Saviour’s more affluent parishioners, including several grocers, and identified by the term “rents” or “alley.” There is evidence of this sort of activity within the company’s network, too: James Burbage, using the same carpenter as Heminges, converted a barn on the Theatre estate into eleven basic rental units, which were let “to poor persons” for “20s [£1] by the year to be paid by every tenant.”⁸³ Shakespeare’s Blackfriars “gatehouse” property, bought for £140 with Heminges as nominal co-purchaser, remained in the hands of a tenant, perhaps a rent-gathering lessee. John Lowin and John Atkins ran divided tenements close to the Swan playhouse, which had itself been constructed in conjunction with rental property (Langley’s Rents).⁸⁴ Lowin appears “next door” to his tenants in the 1620–30s token-books, while his apprentices and other King’s Men employees are listed close by: a hub with similarities to the Black Boy cluster. Might Heminges have committed to such a sizable spend because he intended to let his property as a divided tenement of the sort typically tenanted by the Black Boy Alley demographic? A 1637 account of income from poorer multi-occupancy Boroughside housing shows that it yielded on average £2–3 per year per tenant, with individual rental units within a house typically comprising one or two rooms. St Saviour innkeeper Nicholas Newton made £130 a year from forty-two rental units in Goat Yard, some mere “Cells vnderground.”⁸⁵ A “faire howse newe builded” could command higher rents for fewer units, although shared space was extremely common; as Lena Cowen Orlin has shown, what constituted a room within a divided tenement was highly variable, often improvisatory, and frequently lacking in “structural integrity.”⁸⁶ William C. Baer estimates that up to 20 percent of all London households comprised two families per rental unit, while subletting to lodgers was also common; three-quarters of London households were tenants.⁸⁷

The building might, of course, have offered both refreshments and accommodation, like that managed by William Blewett, who lived at, but was not innkeeper of, St Saviour’s Talbot inn “in a house adioyning” two divided tenements.⁸⁸ Retaining apartments and a tap-house in tenanted accommodation might dovetail well with Millet’s occupancy: like a number of St Saviour lessees, Millet was a man of the “middling sort” with experience in the hospitality industry. The four primary sources to mention the Globe house explicitly, legal and administrative documents of 1619, 1624, circa 1634, and 1635, identify it solely as a building, house, messuage, or tenement, rather than an ale-house, although such standard legal superordinates might easily accommodate one; we see similar language used about the Fortune’s tap-house in that playhouse’s lease of 1618.⁸⁹ A double function of this nature at the second Globe, however, might problematize the 1635 reference by company members to rental income from tap-houses and a garden-tenement, which implies that these were operated on separate tenancies (or adds a house to the Blackfriars precinct). However, even if the house did not offer public hospitality per se, Heminges may still have used it for the storage and/or preparation of food, drink, and tobacco to be sold to playgoers by mobile vendors operating during performances.⁹⁰ Certainly the name of the alley that either served or was synonymous with the tenement admits particular speculation about the highly popular latter product, with which the Heminges family had significant colonial involvement.

In the early 1620s, Heminges invested £60 in Ralph Merefield and Thomas Warner’s expedition to establish the first English settlement in St Christopher (St. Kitts), presumably in expectation of a return derived from the tobacco plantations his son-in-law would establish there.⁹¹ Lucy Munro has suggested he may even have sent his eldest son, John, to the colony.⁹² Although Atkins, as it was in his interest to, denied that Heminges had ever benefitted financially from the venture, Merefield and Warner, aided by Heminges’s other son-in-law, William Smith, were importing tobacco by 1625, landing 9,500 lbs. of it while Heminges was staying in Bartholomew Lane.⁹³ Judith Merefield confirmed that her husband used tobacco for debt-settlement, and dealt in it herself following his death in 1631.⁹⁴ Was some of it destined for playgoers at the Globe, and might the sign for Heminges’s house have been one commonly used to indicate the availability of tobacco: a black boy? Seventeenth-century representations of Indigenous American boys, often unclothed or holding pipes, were found on the signs and trade tokens of London tobacco-shops and taverns called The Black Boy(s).⁹⁵ One wonders how such iconography, in dialogue with that of the Globe (not to mention George Archer’s neighboring Ship), would have been experienced by the real “black boy” to have visited Heminges’s house. An early account of Merefield bringing a Kalinago child from St. Kitts to England following the massacre of the Indigenous population there in 1626 can be confirmed through an entry in the parish register of St Giles Cripplegate.⁹⁶ This shows that “Tegremond” (Tegreman/Tegremante), the surviving namesake and son of the Kalinago leader, lived with the Merefields until his death in 1635.⁹⁷

Boston’s notebook offers a glimpse of a possible solution to the tenement/tap-house question. Almost entirely unremarked upon previously is a collection of entries that identify parishioners’ locations in terms of the playhouse and affiliated sites.⁹⁸ Living “by ye globe,” for example, were waterman Thomas Black, gentleman Richard Kassburrow, and Dinah Redhead.⁹⁹ Black/Blackman, whom the token-books place in Horseshoe Alley, was a legal witness for the King’s Men circa 1634, deposing that he had known the playhouse since its 1599 inception, while Kassburrow (Knastborrowe in the parish register) may have been a relative of the “James Knasborough gent,” who was a witness in Witter v. Heminges and Condell (1619–20).¹⁰⁰ Token-book cross-referencing suggests that thirteen households whose location is noted as “globe” by Boston may have lived in Globe Alley or possibly an intersection of this passage with Black Boy Alley near the playhouse. Entries of March 15, 1620/21, and January 18, 1621/22, however, specify addresses of particular interest: “globe taverne” and “globe Rentes.”¹⁰¹ These overlooked locations currently constitute the only pieces of primary evidence for the existence, during the lifetime of the Globe, of a St Saviour tavern of this name and of rental accommodation with some form of connection to the playhouse. Their documentation within a ten-month window appears to demonstrate the contemporaneous presence of both types of commercial enterprise, although whether or to what extent the company exercised control over either business is uncertain. We should also consider the possibility that Globe Rents, occupied by grocer James Hall, might be a generic reference to tenanted property in Globe Alley, although generally Boston is careful to specify lessee identities. However, Hall, who only makes it into the token-books once, is recorded in 1621 in Black Boy Alley, with only five live entries between his name and that of Heminges’s servant Matthew Jones, and only one between Hall and William Gascoigne (see figure 3). This places him at the heart of the Heminges neighbor cluster and—if he is Boston’s man—gives us our strongest indicator yet that Heminges might have been operating a rental tenement in or adjacent to the Globe house, or was located “next door” to tenanted accommodation with a nominal Globe connection.

V. Globe Tavern

While Hall was living at Globe Rents, William Cole was a tenant of the “globe taverne,” either an independent tavern called The Globe or the playhouse’s own tap-house, and the address Boston recorded in his note of the baptism of Cole’s daughter Elizabeth in 1621. Hall and Cole, however, were not neighbors: despite the frequency of the surname in parochial records, there is only one William Cole in the Clink token-books throughout the 1610s and 1620s, a waterman born in 1593.¹⁰² He can be found in the same domicile from 1616 to 1639, the Vine site leased by William Iremonger in the 1620s (see figures 8 and 9). Boston’s record of Elizabeth Cole’s burial confirms this identification: the four-year-old was buried from “Irmongers rentes,” as was her baby brother Edward, at the height of the 1625 plague.¹⁰³ This is an unexpected finding: the Vine extended north to Bankside from the eastern end of Maid Lane and was across two sewers from the Globe, albeit still a short walk away. If Boston, who is reliable in his attribution of the numerous parishioner locations that can be verified from external sources, was equally accurate in recording Cole’s address, then the tavern concerned was not on the playhouse site.

Although the clerk’s notebook is the only primary source to mention the Globe T/tavern, there is a contemporary record of “mr George white a vinner [vintner] at the Globe,” who was located in Clink Liberty.¹⁰⁴ He was presented to parish authorities on January 8, 1636/7, “for having one Richard Sharpe in his house” drinking during divine service; Sharpe was noted as a neighbor.¹⁰⁵ On May 7, 1637, described as a victualer, White was presented again for “haveinge company in his house.”¹⁰⁶ The 1636–37 token-books pick him up in Dodson’s Rents, a location confirmed by the sewer commission’s record of a fine issued on May 6, 1636, to “William Dodson and his Tennant George White of St Saviors.”¹⁰⁷ Dodson’s property, which went by both its own name and those of its changing lessees, occupied the site previously invested in by Iremonger: the Vine.¹⁰⁸ A Sharpe household neighboring White in the token-books may be the Sunday drinker Richard’s. William Cole of the Globe tavern can thus be placed in the same location as George White the Globe vintner, at a token-book address he inhabited both in the year Boston logged him at the tavern and during the years of White’s Vine residence and Globe affiliation. This appears to rule out the playhouse-adjoining property being White’s place of work, suggesting instead that he ran a separate tavern, either independently, as a form of franchise, or as part of a playhouse hub that stretched beyond the Globe estate itself.

The Vine is not unknown to theater historians, for it was briefly home to Edmund Shakespeare in 1607. He appears a mere two token-book entries from Lawrence Fletcher, who has been understood to be the King’s Men actor, but is more likely to be the tapster/victualer of that name: the Vine tenant and the tapster were still alive on September 12, 1608, when the player was buried.¹⁰⁹ If the Globe tavern was active during Shakespeare’s lifetime, perhaps Fletcher worked there and Edmund was a tenant, like the King’s Men’s bookkeeper Edward Knight, recorded as “a lodger” at the Vine in 1620–22.¹¹⁰ The parish-owned property was in a state of chronic disrepair when Edmund arrived, but was improved to some extent when brewer Henry Draper, who controlled the neighboring Beer Pot, acquired the lease in 1609. In 1616, a fifty-one-year lease for both the Beer Pot and the Vine went out to tender, and the resultant bidding war among influential property-holders, including Edward Alleyn, testifies to what a profitable prospect the complex had become; Iremonger eventually secured it for £840.¹¹¹ By the time White was there in 1637, Dodson controlled “20 pore tenements whereof 8 devided … aboute 10 yeares past”; victualer and former Black Boy Alley resident William Watkins, a close neighbor of Cole in 1636–37, occupied one of them, a brick tenement “lately built” on old foundations.¹¹² In 1640, the value of a fifty-year lease had increased by 37 percent and a surviving copy of a plan from that year reveals a nearly 30,000-square-foot site stretching 253 feet west from Bank End and extending south to Maid Lane (see figure 8).¹¹³ The tavern might have occupied part of the northern extension to the property, formerly the site of three tenements that may have included The Antelope/Lion.¹¹⁴ “Butting on the Thames from west to East,” the site was optimally positioned for capturing riverside custom.¹¹⁵ If so, the Globe competed for patrons among the large quantity of neighboring Bankside taverns, as well as tap-houses within the messuages abutting the Vine’s recessed frontage or affiliated to its brewery. When he was presented to parish authorities, White, alongside Watkins, was listed in a group of victualers who can be identified as occupying Thameside properties, including the Vine-neighboring Elephant.¹¹⁶ However, his responsibility for “the sewar close to … Drapers bridge against … [his] dwelling house” implies that part of his property was closer to the southeast of the site; the bridge was at the eastern end of Maid Lane, where Henry Draper had pigsties and a privy.¹¹⁷ This may have been the backside to White’s house, too—buildings on Bankside generally ran north–south, and Iremonger had “his backe gate” near the bridge.¹¹⁸

A river-facing tavern, or at least one readily accessible within a Thameside site, would tally well with key transport links to the playhouse, which Heminges was instrumental in maintaining. A 1630 sewer-commission list of those required to repair “wharfes to the Thames … on the banckside” names him as responsible for the wharf “against the Globe staires,” a waterside (dis)embarkation point that Julian Bowsher and Pat Miller suggest might have been Horseshoe Alley Stairs (see figure 9).¹¹⁹ An overlooked and apparently unique reference to “Horshooe alias Globe alley” supports this logical identification, although the sewer record in which it features attributes responsibility for the adjacent “Thames wharfe” to Iremonger, who owned property at the Bankside/Horseshoe junction.¹²⁰ Additional new evidence offers the possibility that the landing-place might have been farther east, about halfway between the stairs at Horseshoe Alley and those at Bank End. In 1622 and 1625, Boston recorded deaths from three households at “globe staires,” whose locations can be fixed by triangulating his records with token-book and other evidence. The family of tailor Erasmus Swetnam, who buried two daughters and his fifteen-year-old maid within a week in 1625, can be placed in Tallowchandlers’ Rents in 1618–27.¹²¹ Their neighbor and father of Agnes (d. 1622), waterman Thomas King, moved into Tallowchandlers’ to join his new wife and mother-in-law, Judith and Dorothy Lucas, in 1614; Judith remained in the property until 1643.¹²² The John Fletcher who closely neighbors King in 1623–27 might have headed the household containing Globe Stairs baker James Fletcher (d.1625).¹²³ The Company of Tallow Chandlers owned two Bankside properties, the Crane and the Elephant (see figure 4), but a 1648 mortgage indenture names Widow Swetnam, John Fletcher, and many of their token-book neighbors, common also to King, as previous tenants of the former site, which included, by 1637, “4 pore tenements” (two divided) and abutted the northwestern frontage of the Vine (see figure 8).¹²⁴ A later plan of the Crane shows that, by 1790, it did indeed have stairs and a wharf directly opposite it.¹²⁵ Playgoers disembarking at “globe staires,” therefore, might have found themselves facing the site that hosted the Globe tavern, an association that would strengthen the likelihood of that enterprise’s affiliation to Heminges and/or the King’s Men.

Operating or franchising off-site hospitality, likely in addition to promenade-vending and/or other provision on the Globe estate, would have been a sound commercial move: given the denser prevalence of hostelries and greater footfall on Bankside than on Maid Lane, the company could position itself more effectively against rival providers and cater to both playgoer and commuter custom as soon as it arrived. A riverside Globe tavern would, additionally, serve as a London-facing advertisement for the concealed backstreet presence of the playhouse. Whether patrons alighted at Horseshoe Alley or Crane-adjacent stairs, the tavern was within easy reach. From the Vine they could be funneled to Maid Lane through the site itself or via Beer Pot or Elephant Alleys, bypassing the competing diversions of the bowling alley by Horseshoe Alley and the Hope playhouse/bear garden.¹²⁶ Playgoer traffic management was facilitated by the company’s maintenance of a sewer-bridge on Maid Lane northside, probably at the Horseshoe Alley exit but possibly further east.¹²⁷ A system of this nature would constitute an interesting early example of what we would now term “destination branding,” whereby engineering travel through and exposure to a wider neighborhood both maximizes brand value and contributes to the economic development of a community. Were the tavern an independent enterprise, a similar effect would be achieved, its name an articulation of the far-reaching influence of “Globe” identity within the Clink neighborhood and beyond.

Increasingly, there is a sense of the second playhouse not as a monolithic entity within an outlying liberty, “the Fort of the whole Parish, / Flanck’d with a Ditch, and forc’d out of a Marish,” as Jonson described its predecessor, but as an integral part of the fabric of the neighborhood and its evolving cultural-commercial identity.¹²⁸ It was, perhaps, an evolution of the model established by James Burbage, who ran a Holywell Street victualing-house in parallel to the playhouse and rental tenement on the Theatre site, and one that also drew on the operations of Henslowe and Francis Langley.¹²⁹ If Heminges was running Globe Rents on or just off the playhouse estate, the evidence for which is suggestive rather than definitive, then the Globe site was an accommodational-entertainment zone with imbricated economic identities. Certainly, it seems clear that the working lives of Heminges’s neighbors in Black Boy Alley intersected with that of the theatrical precinct they inhabited and for which they almost certainly provided services, while the economic halo effect of the playhouse saw many establish independent money-making activities either on site or within the peripheries of the estate. The playhouse and its company were thus engaged in an act of placemaking, one that shaped the built spaces and communities both of the primary site and of its connected economic nodes. Heminges himself, a 25 percent shareholder in the Globe, was domestically and financially at the heart of this process. His home over much of a decade was the “other” house, decorated with portraits of his daughters and his late wife’s cushions, where, within earshot of the noise of playhouse audiences, he worked on the Shakespeare Folio, transacted business with people from financial, parochial, and colonial networks, underwent the loss of his daughter in childbirth, and himself died, three weeks after last being nominated payee for the services of the King’s Men.¹³⁰

I am extremely grateful to William Ingram for his encouragement and intellectual generosity, and for prompting me to present my early findings at the Shakespeare Association of America’s 2023 conference. Thank you to participants in the Theater History seminar there, especially Elizabeth Tavares and Paul Whitfield White. Alan H. Nelson and Lucy Munro were kind enough to share some of their work on members of the Heminges family, while Tom Lockwood and Tiffany Stern offered valuable feedback on an early draft of this essay. My thanks, also, to Callan Davies, Meryl Faiers, and Lucy Holehouse for fruitful research conversations, to the various archivists who assisted me, and to David Law for help with producing a map. I am indebted to Jeremy Lopez and the anonymous readers of this essay for their helpful comments on it, and to Jennifer Linhart Wood and those at Shakespeare Quarterly who participated in its production.

Footnotes