The Bell Savage Inn and Playhouse in London

FOUR London inns were also playhouses in Shakespearean times, and notable theatrical events occurred in all of them. All four together, however, are less well known than any of the nineteen other Shakespearean playhouses. Unsurprisingly, they are barely mentioned in many studies of the Shakespearean stage. Of, for example, the 139 pages that E. K. Chambers devoted to specific playhouses in the second volume of his Elizabethan Stage, these four playhouses occupy only three and a quarter pages. Yet three were playhouses for nearly twenty years, longer than ten of the others, including some very famous places like the Rose, first Globe, and St. Paul's. The fourth could have been a playhouse for thirty years, longer also than the Theatre, both Fortunes, and the second Globe-and if it was not the first Shakespearean playhouse, it was probably the second. In a sense, another of the four was the last.1 Nobody has known anything about, for example, their ownership and management and the places in them where performances took place.2 Moreover, what has been known defies some conventional ideas about Shakespearean playhouses. They were public playhouses in the City of London, three of them actually within the walls. The other public playhouses were in suburbs to escape the attentions of City authorities who disapproved of such things. Unlike the other public playhouses, too, they belonged to commercial enterprises that otherwise had nothing to do with entertainments. The inns, that is, were regular inns long before, while, and long after the playhouses existed in them. All are supposed to have given up their business as playhouses in about 1596. Two later public playhouses (the Boar's Head and Red Bull) were in inns, too, but those places had ceased permanently to do business as inns before they became playhouses. Three of the four places that were also active inns were the Bull in Bishopsgate Street, the Cross Keys in Gracechurch Street, and the Bell, which adjoined the Cross Keys in the same street. The fourth was the the main subject of this essay. It was the north side of Fleet Street about 100 yards outside the City wall at Ludgate. That end of Fleet Street was then sometimes and is now always called Ludgate HiU. The was in the City ward of Farringdon Without and the parish of St. Bride. Most of the site of the playhouse is now a garden-cum-parking lot behind No. 50 Ludgate Hill. Even the spelling of the name of the place is a problem. Chambers in his Elizabethan Stage, Bentley in his Jacobean and Caroline Stage (Oxford, 1968), and others (including me) have spelled the name Bel Savage, having noted, presumably, that an entry about Richard Tarlton in the Stationers' Register spelled it so (2 August 1589) and Stephen Gosson and William Prynne spelled it nearly so, Belsauage and Belsavage (1579, 1633). In documents mentioned below, the author of Maroccus Extaticus also spelled it Belsauage in 1595. Others, however, wrote bell alias le bell (1555), the other way around (1558), and the alias Savoy again (1559). Its owners for more than 360 years usually preferred Bell Savage, but also used Savage, even La Belle Sauvage, never Bel Bryant Lillywhite preferred Bell Savage in his massive work London signs and did not mention Bel Savage as an alternative.3 Besides, the place was originally, or at least in the fifteenth century, called the Bell, and an owner or manager was or had been one Savage. At Easter 1420 Reginald Broke kept potables there, atte belle vocata Sauagis Inne in fletestrete. And John French (ffrenssh) described it as Savagesynne alias . . . le Belle the Hope 5 February 1453 when he conveyed its ownership to his mother, Joan French, widow, for her life. Many things inn signs could be on the hoop: various fowls, a George, hart, crown, miter, angel, and bunch of grapes. A messuage in the Strand was also a the Hoop in 1403. …

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