rles became King, and took under
his patronage his father's troupe, the King's Men. Some of the
members of the Prince Charles Troupe were transferred to the King's
Men, and the rest constituted a nucleus about which a new company was
organized, known simply as "The Red Bull Company."

About this time, it seems, the playhouse was rebuilt and enlarged. The
Fortune had been destroyed by fire in 1621, and had just been rebuilt
in a larger and handsomer form. In 1625 one W.C., in _London's
Lamentation for her Sins_, writes: "Yet even then, Oh Lord, were the
theatres magnified and enlarged."[503] This doubtless refers to the
rebuilding of the Fortune and the Red Bull. Prynne specifically states
in his _Histriomastix_ (1633) that the Fortune and Red Bull had been
"lately reedified [and] enlarged." But nothing further is known of the
"re-edification and enlargement" of the Red Bull.

[Footnote 503: Quoted by Collier, _The History of English Dramatic
Poetry_ (1879), III, 121.]

After its enlargement the playhouse seems to have acquired a
reputation for noise and vulgarity. Carew, in 1630, speaks of it as a
place where "noise prevails" and a "drowth of wit," and yet as always
crowded with people while the better playhouses stood empty. In _The
Careless Shepherdess_, acted at Salisbury Court, we read:

And I will hasten to the money-box,
And take my shilling out again;
I'll go to the Bull, or Fortune, and there see
A play for two-pence, and a jig to boot.[504]

[Footnote 504: Malone, _Variorum_, III, 70.]

In 1638, a writer of verses prefixed to Randolph's _Poems_ speaks of
the "base plots" acted with great applause at the Red Bull.[505] James
Wright informs us, in his _Historia Histrionica_, that the Red Bull
and the Fortune were "mostly frequented by citizens and the meaner
sort of people."[506] And Edmund Gayton, in his _Pleasant Notes_,
wittily remarks: "I have heard that the poets of the Fortune and Red
Bull had always a mouth-measure for their actors (who were terrible
tear-throats) and made their lines proportionable to their compass,
which were sesquipedales, a foot and a half."[507] Probably the ill
repute of the large public playhouses at this time was chiefly due to
the rise of private playhouses in the city.

[Footnote 505: Randolph's _Works_ (ed. Hazlitt), p. 504.]

[Footnote 506: Hazlitt's Dodsley, XV, 407.]

[Footnote 507: _Pleasant Notes on Don Quixote_, p. 24.]

In 1635 the Red Bul