[Footnote 16:  The lease of the building for the first Blackfriars Theater, on Ludgate Hill, London, was taken in 1576 by Richard Farrant, master of the boys of Windsor Chapel, and canceled in 1584.  In 1595 James Burbage bought a building for the second Blackfriars Theater, near the site of the first.  This was a private theater, competing with the Globe, with which Shakespeare was connected.  The chief dramatists for the second Blackfriars were Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and John Marston.  James I. suppressed the second Blackfriars in 1608 because its actors satirized him and the French king.  A few months later, Shakespeare and his associates assumed the management of the Blackfriars and gave performances there as well as at the Globe.

These facts explain Wallace’s discovery that Shakespeare at the time of his death owned a one-seventh interest in the second Blackfriars, a theater that had formerly been a rival to the Globe.]

[Footnote 17:  Dr. Faustus, Scene 6.]

[Footnote 18:  Tamburlaine, Act II., Scene 7.]

[Footnote 19:  The Winter’s Tale, Act IV., Scene 4.]

[Footnote 20:  Tradition says that Shakespeare occupied the desk in the farthest corner.]

[Footnote 21:  Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, Grosart’s edition of Greene’s Works, Vol.  XII., p. 144.]

[Footnote 22:  The contract price for building the Fortune Theater was L440.]

[Footnote 23:  Adapted from Furnivall.]

[Footnote 24:  Entered one year before at Stationers’ Hall.]

[Footnote 25:  May be looked on as fairly certain.]

[Footnote 26:  Henry V., Act II., Scene 3, line 10.]

[Footnote 27:  Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 327.]

[Footnote 28:  The Tempest, Act V., Scene 1.]

[Footnote 29:  Ibid., Act I., Scene 2.]

[Footnote 30:  For a list of books of selections from the drama, see p. 216.]

[Footnote 31:  For full titles, see p. 6.]

[Footnote 32:  For full titles of books of dramatic selections, see the preceding paragraph.]

CHAPTER V:  THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660

History of the Period.—­James I. (1603-1625), son of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, and the first of the Stuart line to reign in England, succeeded Elizabeth.  His stubbornness and folly not only ended the intense patriotic feeling of the previous reign, but laid the foundation for the deadly conflict that resulted.  In fifty-four years after the defeat of the Armada, England was plunged into civil war.

The guiding belief of James I. was that kings governed by divine right, that they received from the Deity a title of which no one could lawfully deprive them, no matter how outrageously they ruled, and that they were not in any way responsible to Parliament or to the people.  In acting on this belief, he first trampled on the religious liberty of his subjects.  He drove from their churches hundreds of clergymen who would not take oath that they believed that the prayer book of the Church of England agreed in every way with the Bible.  He boasted that he would “harry out of the kingdom” those who would not conform.