Theatre,
both in Shoreditch, were also opened to the public. The Mayor and
Corporation persistently endeavoured to assert authority over these
establishments, but without much practical result. It may be added
that the Blackfriars Theatre was permanently closed in 1647, part of
the ground on which it stood, adjoining Apothecaries' Hall, still
bearing the name of Playhouse Yard; that The Theatre in Shoreditch was
abandoned about 1598 (it was probably a wooden erection, and in twenty
years might have become untenantable); and that The Curtain fell into
disuse at the beginning of the reign of Charles I.

The prices of admission to the theatres varied according to the
estimation in which they were held, and were raised on special
occasions. "Twopenny rooms," or galleries, were to be found at the
larger and more popular theatres. In Goffe's "Careless Shepherdess,"
1656, acted at the Salisbury Court Theatre, appear the lines:

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 twopence and a jig to boot.

The money received was placed in a box, and there seems to have been
one person specially charged with this duty. Dekker, dedicating one of
his plays to his "friends and fellows," the queen's servants, wishes
them "a full audience and one honest doorkeeper." Even thus early the
absolute integrity of the attendants of the theatre would appear to
have been a subject of suspicion. "Penny galleries" are referred to by
some early writers, and from a passage in the "Gull's Horn Book,"
1609--"Your groundling and gallery commoner buys his sport for a
penny"--it is apparent that the charges for admission to the yard,
where the spectators stood, and to the galleries, where they sat on
benches, were the same. In Dekker's "Satiromastix," one of the
characters speaks scornfully of "penny bench theatres," where a
gentleman or an honest citizen "might sit with his squirrel by his
side cracking nuts." But according to the Induction to Ben Jonson's
"Bartholomew Fair," first acted in 1614, at the Hope, a small dirty
theatre on the Bankside, which had formerly been used for
bear-baiting, the prices there ranged from sixpence to half-a-crown.
"It shall be lawful for any man to judge his six pen'worth, his twelve
pen'worth, so to his eighteen pence, two shillings, half-a-crown, to
the value of his place; provided always his place get not above his
wit ... M