playhouse, which is said to be the fairest that ever was in
England.[421]

[Footnote 421: Birch, _The Court and Times of James the First_, I,
329; quoted by Wallace, _The Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars_,
p. 35.]

[Illustration: THE SECOND GLOBE

From Hollar's _View of London_ (1647).]

With this New Globe Shakespeare had little to do, for his career as a
playwright had been run, and probably he had already retired from
acting. Time, indeed, was beginning to thin out the little band of
friends who had initiated and made famous the Globe organization.
Thomas Pope had died in 1603, Augustine Phillips in 1605, William Slye
in 1608, and, just a few months after the opening of the new
playhouse, William Osteler, who had been admitted to the
partnership in 1611. He had begun his career as a child-actor at
Blackfriars, had later joined the King's Men, and had married
Heminges's daughter Thomasine.

A more serious blow to the company, however, fell in April, 1616, when
Shakespeare himself died. To the world he had been "the applause,
delight, the wonder" of the stage; but to the members of the Globe
Company he had been for many years a "friend and fellow." Only Burbage
and Heminges (described in 1614 as "old Heminges"), now remained of
the original venturers. And Burbage passed away on March 13, 1619:

He's gone! and with him what a world are dead
Which he reviv'd--to be revived so
No more. Young Hamlet, old Hieronimo,
Kind Lear, the grieved Moor, and more beside
That lived in him have now for ever died![422]

[Footnote 422: From a folio MS. in the Huth Library, printed by J.P.
Collier in _The History of English Dramatic Poetry_ (1879), I, 411,
and by various others.]

Many elegies in a similar vein were written celebrating his wonderful
powers as an actor; yet the tribute that perhaps affects us most deals
with him merely as a man. The Earl of Pembroke, writing to the
Ambassador to Germany, gives the court news about the mighty ones of
the kingdom: "My Lord of Lenox made a great supper to the French
Ambassador this night here, and even now all the company are at a
play; which I, being tender-hearted, could not endure to see so soon
after the loss of my old acquaintance Burbage."[423]

[Footnote 423: Printed by Mrs. Stopes, _Burbage and Shakespeare's
Stage_, p. 117, with many other interesting references to the great
actor.]

[Illustration: THE TRADITIONAL SITE OF THE GLOB