rear of the theatre: "Whereas the highway leading along
the backside of the Cockpit Playhouse near Lincolns Inn Fields, and
the street called Queens Street adjoining to the same, are become very
foul," etc. (See The Malone Society _Collections_, I, 383. Queens
Street may be readily found in Faithorne's _Map of London_.) Malone
(_Variorum_, III, 53) states that "it was situated opposite the Castle
Tavern." The site is said to be marked by Pit Court.]

It is possible, then, that the building was an old cockpit made into a
playhouse. Howes,[578] in enumerating the London theatres, says: "Five
inns or common hostelries turned into playhouses, one cockpit, St.
Paul's singing-school," etc. And Thomas Randolph, in verses prefixed
to James Shirley's _Grateful Servant_ (printed in 1630 as it was acted
"in the private house in Drury Lane"), suggests the same
metamorphosis:

When thy intelligence on the Cockpit stage
Gives it a soul from her immortal rage,
I hear the Muse's birds with full delight
Sing where the birds of Mars were wont to fight.

[Footnote 578: Stow's _Annals_ (1631), p. 1004.]

But in this fantastic conceit Randolph may have been thinking simply
of the name of the theatre; possibly he knew nothing of its early
history. On the whole it seems more likely that the playhouse was
newly erected in 1617 upon the site of an old cockpit. The name
"Phoenix" suggests that possibly the old cockpit had been destroyed
by fire, and that from its ashes had arisen a new building.[579]
Howes describes the Phoenix as being in 1617 "a new playhouse,"[580]
and Camden, who is usually accurate in such matters, refers to it in
the same year as "nuper erectum."[581]

[Footnote 579: Some scholars have supposed that the playhouse, when
attacked by the apprentices in 1617, was burned, and that the name
"Phoenix" was given to the building after its reconstruction. But
the building was not burned; it was merely wrecked on the inside by
apprentices.]

[Footnote 580: Continuation of Stow's _Annals_ (1631), p. 1026.]

[Footnote 581: William Camden, _Annals_, under the date of March 4,
1617. Yet Sir Sidney Lee (_A Life of William Shakespeare_, p. 60)
says, "built about 1610."]

Of its size and shape all our information comes from James Wright, who
in his _Historia Histrionica_[582] tells us that the Cockpit differed
in no essential feature from Blackfriars and Salisbury Court, "for
they were all three built almost e