gned for acting; "those playhouses that are erected and
built _only for such purposes_ ... namely the Curtain and the
Theatre,"[113] writes the Privy Council; and the German traveler,
Samuel Kiechel, who visited London in 1585, describes them as
"_sonderbare_" structures. They are usually mentioned together, and in
such a way as to suggest similarity of shape as well as of purpose. We
may, I think, reasonably suppose that the Curtain was in all essential
details a copy of Burbage's Theatre.[114] Presumably, then, it was
polygonal (or circular) in shape,[115] was constructed of timber, and
was finished on the outside with lime and plaster. The interior, as
the evidence already cited in the chapter on the Theatre shows,
consisted of three galleries surrounding an open yard. There was a
platform projecting into the middle of the yard, with dressing-rooms
at the rear, "heavens" overhead, and a flagpole rising above the
"heavens." That some sign was displayed in front of the door is
likely. Malone writes: "The original sign hung out at this playhouse
(as Mr. Steevens has observed) was the painting of a curtain
striped."[116] Aubrey records that Ben Jonson "acted and wrote, but
both ill, at the Green Curtain, a kind of nursery or obscure playhouse
somewhere in the suburbs, I think towards Shoreditch or
Clerkenwell."[117] By "at the Green Curtain" Aubrey means, of course,
"at the sign of the Green Curtain"; but the evidence of Steevens and
of Aubrey is too vague and uncertain to warrant any definite
conclusions.

[Footnote 113: Dasent, _Acts of the Privy Council_, XXVII, 313.]

[Footnote 114: It seems, however, to have been smaller than the
Theatre.]

[Footnote 115: Johannes de Witt describes the Theatre and the Curtain
along with the Swan and the Rose as "amphitheatra" (see page 167). It
is quite possible that Shakespeare refers to the Curtain in the
Prologue to _Henry V_ as "this wooden O," though the reference may be
to the Globe.]

[Footnote 116: Malone, _Variorum_, III, 54; cf. also Ellis, _The
Parish of St. Leonard_.]

[Footnote 117: Did Steevens base his statement on this passage in
Aubrey?]

Of the early history of the Curtain we know little, mainly because it
was not, like certain other playhouses, the subject of extensive
litigation. We do not even know who planned and built it. The first
evidence of its ownership appears fifteen years after its erection, in
some legal documents connected with the Theatre.[1