vious
advantage of artificial light for producing beautiful stage effects
must have added not a little to the popularity of the Blackfriars
Playhouse.

[Footnote 304: Cf. Playhouse Yard in the London of to-day.]

[Footnote 305: _The Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars_, p. 43,
note 3.]

[Footnote 306: _The Diary of the Duke of Stettin-Pomerania_, in
_Transactions of the Royal Historical Society_ (1892), VI, 26.]

The cost of all the alterations and the equipment could hardly have
been less than L300, so that the total cost of the property was at
least L900, or in modern valuation approximately $35,000. Burbage's
sons, in referring to the building years later, declared that their
father had "made it into a playhouse with great charge."

"And," they added significantly, "with great trouble." The
aristocratic inhabitants of the Blackfriars precinct did not welcome
the appearance in their midst of a "public," or, as some more
scornfully designated it, a "common," playhouse; and when they
discovered the intentions of Burbage, they wrote a strong petition to
the Privy Council against the undertaking. This petition, presented to
the Council in November, 1596, I quote below in part:

To the right honorable the Lords and others of Her Majesty's
most honorable Privy Council.--Humbly shewing and beseeching
your honors, the inhabitants of the precinct of the
Blackfriars, London, that whereas one Burbage hath lately
bought certain rooms in the same precinct near adjoining
unto the dwelling houses of the right honorable the Lord
Chamberlaine [Lord Cobham] and the Lord of Hunsdon, which
rooms the said Burbage is now altering, and meaneth very
shortly to convert and turn the same into a common
playhouse, which will grow to be a very great annoyance and
trouble, not only to all the noblemen and gentlemen
thereabout inhabiting, but also a general inconvenience to
all the inhabitants of the same precinct, both by reason of
the great resort and gathering together of all manner of
vagrant and lewd persons ... as also for that there hath not
at any time heretofore been used any common playhouse within
the same precinct, but that now all players being banished
by the Lord Mayor from playing within the city ... they now
think to plant themselves in liberties, etc.[307]

[Footnote 307: For the full document see Halliwell-Phillipps,
_Outli