Cockpit Theatre

Cockpit or Phoenix Theatre, in Drury Lane, stood in the parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, on the site of Cockpit Place or Alley, afterwards named Pitt Place, and is said by Prynne to have demoralised the whole of Drury Lane. The performances appear to have been of a low class.

Volpone. The bells, in time of pestilence, ne'er made
Like noise, or were in that perpetual motion!
The Cock-pit comes not near it.
Ben Jonson's Volpone, Act iii. Sc. 6.

The Cockpit Theatre was certainly not converted into a playhouse, until after James I. had been some time on the throne. How long before that date it had been used, as the name implies, as a place for the exhibition of cock-fighting, we are without such information as will enable us to form even a conjecture. Camden, in his Annals of James I., speaking of the attack upon it in March, 1616-1617, says that the Cockpit Theatre was then nuper erectum, by which we are to understand, perhaps, that it had been lately converted from a cockpit into a playhouse. Howes, in his continuation of Stow, adverting to the same event, calls it a "new playhouse," as if it had then been recently built from the foundation.—Collier, vol. iii. p. 328.

The attack to which Mr. Collier alludes was made on Shrove Tuesday, March 4, 1616-1617, by the apprentices of London, who, from time immemorial, had claimed, or at least exercised, the right of attacking and demolishing houses of ill-fame on that day. Mr. Collier published "A Ballade in praise of London 'Prentises, and what they did [on this occasion] at the Cockpit Playhouse, in Drury Lane." They nearly destroyed the house, and a second structure on the same site. The house was converted in 1647 into a schoolroom;¹ but it soon returned to its old use, as Evelyn notes under February 5, 1648, that he "saw a tragi-comedy acted in the Cockpit, after there had been none of these diversions for many years during the war." On Saturday, March 24, 1649, the house was pulled down by a company of soldiers, "set on by the sectaries of those sad times."² A third house appears to have been erected on the site, in which, as a sort of opera, was played in 1658 "The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, exprest by instrumental and vocal music, and by art of perspective in Scenes, by Sir William Davenant, represented daily at the Cock Pit in Drury Lane, at three in the afternoon punctually." Evelyn went to see it in the following May:—

May 5, 1659.—I went to visit my brother in London, and next day to see a new Opera, after the Italian way, in recitative music and scenes, much inferior to the Italian composure and magnificence; but it was prodigious that in a time of such public consternation such a vanity should be kept up or permitted. I being engaged with company could not decently resist the going to see it, though my heart smote me for it.—Evelyn.

In 1660 a company of players, under Rhodes, acted here until Killigrew and Herbert managed to suppress them. Charles II. had authorised two companies of players, and two only—one under Killigrew, called the King's Servants; and one under Davenant, called the Duke's. Rhodes's players (Mohun, Hart, etc.) joined Killigrew; and Davenant's newly-formed company, with Betterton in its ranks, began to act in the Cockpit Theatre, vacated by Rhodes. Here they continued till they removed, in 1662, to their new theatre in Portugal Row, Lincoln's-Inn-Fields.³ Killigrew's house (opened April 8, 1663) was erected on the site of the present Drury Lane Theatre.

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¹ Pattern's History of St. Giles, p. 235.
² Collier's Life of Shakespeare, vol. i. p. ccxiii.
³ Malone's Shakespeare, by Boswell, vol. iii. pp. 252, 254.