21.]

[Footnote 242: The sale took the form of a lease for one thousand
years.]

Langley had purchased the Manor as an investment, and was ready to
make thereon such improvements as seemed to offer profitable returns.
Burbage and Henslowe were reputed to be growing wealthy from their
playhouses, and Langley was tempted to erect a similar building on his
newly acquired property. Accordingly at some date before November,
1594, he secured a license to erect a theatre in Paris Garden. The
license was promptly opposed by the Lord Mayor of London, who
addressed to the Lord High Treasurer on November 3, 1594, the
following letter:

I understand that one Francis Langley ... intendeth to erect
a new stage or theatre (as they call it) for the exercising
of plays upon the Bankside. And forasmuch as we find by
daily experience the great inconvenience that groweth to
this city and the government thereof by the said plays, I
have emboldened myself to be an humble suitor to your good
Lordship to be a means for us rather to suppress all such
places built for that kind of exercise, than to erect any
more of the same sort.[243]

[Footnote 243: The Malone Society's _Collections_, I, 74-76.]

The protest of the Lord Mayor, however, went unheeded, and Langley
proceeded with the erection of his building. Presumably it was
finished and ready for the actors in the earlier half of 1595.

[Illustration: THE MANOR OF PARIS GARDEN AND THE SWAN

A survey executed in 1627 by royal command.

(Printed from Rendle's _The Bankside_.)]

The name given to the new playhouse was "The Swan." What caused
Langley to adopt this name we do not know;[244] but we may suppose
that it was suggested to him by the large number of swans which
beautified the Thames. Foreigners on their first visit to London were
usually very much impressed by the number and the beauty of these
birds. Hentzner, in 1598, stated that the river "abounds in swans,
swimming in flocks; the sight of them and their noise is vastly
agreeable to the boats that meet them in their course"; and the
Italian Francesco Ferretti observed that the "broad river of Thames"
was "most charming, and quite full of swans white as the very
snow."[245]

[Footnote 244: The swan was not uncommon as a sign, especially along
the river; for example, it was the sign of one of the famous brothels
on the Bankside, as Stow informs us.]

[Footnote 245: Quoted in R