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A View of the Thames with Saint Paul's Cathedral from Blackfriars by Henry Pether

Henry Cole, My room in 18 Stamford Street, Blackfriars, about AD 1829, c. 1829, watercolor.

Discover how Elizabethan noblewoman Lady Elizabeth Russell was prepared to take up arms to defend her post as keeper of Donnington Castle.

Elizabeth Russell was just as fiercely territorial in London, where she maintained a mansion in the upmarket district of Blackfriars. In 1596 the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the playing company to which William Shakespeare belonged, was facing a crisis. The lease for the land where the acting troupe’s main venue, the Theatre in Shoreditch, stood was about to expire. Facing an uncertain future, the impresario James Burbage, who had created the Theatre, sunk a fortune into a new venture: a playhouse in Blackfriars. It cost a colossal £1,000 to purchase and renovate the property.

Unfortunately for Burbage and the players, the theatre was just over 120 feet from Elizabeth’s doorstep. Neither she nor her neighbours had objected to a previous theatre nearby, which had operated under the guise of a ‘private’ rehearsal space for the queen’s choristers (even though the paying public had attended performances there). But when she discovered that a ‘common playhouse’ was about to open in her elegant neighbourhood she was furious.

Galvanising her local community into action, Elizabeth got up a petition against the opening of the Blackfriars Theatre. Among its 30 signatories were Richard Field, Shakespeare’s first publisher, and Sir George Carey, the playing company’s patron. Neither dared object to Elizabeth’s anti-theatrical uprising.