ah Banks wrote to Williamson on September 16, 1655: "At the
playhouse this week many were put to rout by the soldiers and had
broken crowns; the corporal would have been entrapped had he not been
vigilant."[514] And in the _Weekly Intelligencer_, September 11-18, we
read: "It never fared worse with the spectators than at this present,
for those who had monies paid their five shillings apiece; those who
had none, to satisfy their forfeits, did leave their cloaks behind
them. The Tragedy of the spectators was the Comedy of the soldiers.
There was abundance of the female sex, who, not able to pay five
shillings, did leave some gage or other behind them, insomuch that
although the next day after the Fair was expected to be a new fair of
hoods, of aprons, and of scarfs; all which, their poverty being made
known, and after some check for their trespass, were civilly again
restored to the owners."[515]

[Footnote 513: Hazlitt, _The English Drama and Stage_, p. 69.]

[Footnote 514: _The Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1655_, p.
336.]

[Footnote 515: For a further account of this episode see _Mercurius
Fumigosus_, No. 69.]

At the period of the Restoration the Red Bull was among the first
playhouses to reopen. John Downes, in his _Roscius Anglicanus_,
writes: "The scattered remnant of several of these houses, upon King
Charles' Restoration, framed a company, who acted again at the
Bull."[516] Apparently the company was brought together by the famous
old Elizabethan actor, Anthony Turner. From the _Middlesex County
Records_ (III, 279) we learn that at first the players were
interrupted by the authorities:

12 May, 1659.--Recognizances, taken before Ra: Hall, esq.
J.P., of William Wintershall and Henry Eaton, both of
Clerkenwell, gentlemen, in the sum of fifty pounds each;
"Upon condition that Antony Turner shall personally appear
at the next Quarter Sessions of the Peace to be holden at
Hicks Hall for the said County of Middlesex; for the
unlawful maintaining of stage-plays and interludes at the
Red Bull in St. John's Street, which house he affirms that
they hire of the parishioners of Clerkenwell at the rate of
twenty shillings a day over and above what they have agreed
to pay towards the relief of their poor and repairing their
highways, and in the meantime to be of good behaviour and
not to depart the Court without license.--Ra: Hall." Also
simil