to have been used for acting. Richard Burbage himself
seems to say so. In leasing the building to Evans, in 1600, he says
that he considered "with himself that" Evans could not pay the rent
"except the said Evans could erect and keep a company of playing-boys
or others to play plays and interludes in the said playhouse in such
sort _as before time had been there used_."[311] Now, unless this
refers to Farrant's management of the Chapel Boys in Blackfriars--nearly
a quarter of a century earlier--it means that before 1600 some actors,
presumably "playing-boys," had used Burbage's theatre. Moreover, there
seems to be evidence to show that the troupe thus vaguely referred to
was under the management of Evans; for, in referring to his lease of
Blackfriars in 1600, Evans describes the playhouse as "then or late in
the tenure or occupation of your said oratour."[312] What these vague
references mean we cannot now with our limited knowledge determine.
But there is not sufficient evidence to warrant the usual assumption
that Evans and Giles had opened the Blackfriars with the Children of
the Chapel in 1597.[313]

[Footnote 310: The constables and other officers in the Petition of
1619 say: "The owner of the said playhouse, doth under the name of a
private house ... convert the said house to a public playhouse." (The
Malone Society's _Collections_, I, 91.)]

[Footnote 311: Fleay, _A Chronicle History of the London Stage_, p.
234.]

[Footnote 312: _Ibid._, p. 211.]

[Footnote 313: This theory has been urged by Fleay, by Mr. Wallace in
_The Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars_, and by others.]

The known history of Blackfriars as a regular theatre may be said to
begin in the autumn of 1600. On September 2 of that year, Henry Evans
signed a lease of the playhouse for a period of twenty-one years, at
an annual rental of L40. This interesting step on the part of Evans
calls for a word of explanation as to his plans.

The Children of the Chapel Royal, who had attained such glory at
Blackfriars during the Farrant-Hunnis-Evans-Oxford-Lyly regime, had
thereafter sunk into dramatic insignificance. Since 1584, when Lyly
was forced to give up his playhouse, they had not presented a play at
Court. Probably they did not entirely cease to act, for they can be
vaguely traced in the provinces during a part of this period; but
their dramatic glory was almost wholly eclipsed. Evans, who had
managed the Boys under Hunnis, Oxford, and Lyly,