yn: "I hope you
mistake not our removal from the Bankside. We stood the intemperate
weather, 'till more intemperate Mr. Meade thrust us over, taking the
day from us which by course was ours."[558]

[Footnote 558: Greg, _Henslowe Papers_, p. 93. Cf. also the chapter on
"Rosseter's Blackfriars."]

After the company quarreled with Meade and deserted the Hope, there is
no evidence that the building was again used for plays. It became
associated almost entirely with animal-baiting, fencing, feats of
activity, and such-like performances; and gradually the very name
"Hope," which was identified with acting, gave way to the earlier
designation "Bear Garden." In 1632 the author of _Holland's Leaguer_
remarks that "wild beasts and gladiators did most possess it"; and
such must have been the chief use of the building down to 1642, when
animal-baiting was prohibited by Parliament.[559]

[Footnote 559: Collier, _The History of English Dramatic Poetry_
(1879), III, 102; Ordish, _Early London Theatres_, p. 237.]

On January 14, 1647, at the disposition of the Church lands, the Hope
was sold for L1783 15_s._[560]

[Footnote 560: Arthur Tiler, _St. Saviour's_, p. 51; Reed's Dodsley,
IX, 175.]

In certain manuscript notes entered in the Phillipps copy of Stow's
_Annals_ (1631), we read:

The Hope, on the Bankside, in Southwarke, commonly called
the Bear Garden, a playhouse for stage-plays on Mondays,
Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and for the baiting of
Bears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the stage being made to
take up and down when they please. It was built in the year
1610, and now pulled down to make tenements, by Thomas
Walker, a petticoat-maker in Cannon Street, on Tuesday, the
25 day of March, 1656. Seven of Mr. Godfrey's bears, by the
command of Thomas Pride, then high sheriff of Surrey, were
then shot to death on Saturday the 9 day of February, 1655
[i.e. 1656], by a company of soldiers.[561]

[Footnote 561: Printed in _The Academy_, October 28, 1882, p. 314. As
to "Mr. Godfrey" see Collier, _The History of English Dramatic Poetry_
(1879), III, 102.]

The mistakes in the earlier part of this note are obvious, yet the
latter part is so circumstantial that we cannot well doubt its general
accuracy. The building, however, was not pulled down "to the ground,"
though its interior may have been converted into tenements.

At the Restoration, when the royal sport of