It has been briefly mentioned above that not long after the
establishment of The Theatre--at the latest in the following year--this
playhouse gained a companion in The Curtain, which thus became the
second of its kind in London.
The two playhouses were very close to each other, but for this very
reason it seems natural to suppose that they were rather meant to
support than to rival each other. They were like a kind of
double-barrelled gun directed against the corporation, and they seem,
indeed, to an equal extent, to have roused the anger of the Puritans,
for they are generally mentioned together in the Puritan pamphlets
directed against playhouses and all other wickedness.
However, the history of The Curtain is almost unknown to us. While we
know a good deal about the outward circumstances of The Theatre on
account of the constant troubles which the Burbage family had to endure
from the proprietor of the ground and the municipal authorities, and of
the subsequent lawsuit, the reports we find about The Curtain are
extremely meagre. We know neither when nor by whom it was built nor when
it was pulled down.
By a mistake which is natural enough, its name has been connected with
the front curtain of the stage. We shall see later that no such curtain
existed in the time of Shakespeare, and we do not know that the
background draperies of that period had the fixed name of "curtain.
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