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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 Bell Savage, the main subject of this essay. It was on 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....