Bankside had bear pits next to the theatres, they were more popular than the plays, and Shakespeare was competing with them
The Thirsty Bear holds a 4.1 from seventeen hundred and thirty-five people, charges ten to twenty pounds, and the animal in the name has a very grim local history.
Bankside
The south bank of the Thames, outside the City’s jurisdiction, was where London went to do the things the City would not permit.
The theatres. The brothels. The prisons.
And the bear gardens.
Which were a few hundred metres from the Globe, and which were, by every commercial measure available, more popular than the plays.
What happened in them
A bear was chained to a stake in a ring, and dogs were set on it.
The bear was frequently blinded. Some were whipped. The dogs were killed in large numbers, which was part of the attraction.
And it was not a fringe amusement. It was licensed by the Crown. There was a court official called the Master of the Bears.
Elizabeth I enjoyed it and had it staged for visiting ambassadors.
And Shakespeare was competing with it
Which is the fact that reframes everything.
The Globe was not the entertainment of a refined age. It was a business on a street where the alternative attraction, a short walk away, was an animal being torn apart, and where the same crowd chose between them.
On some days the theatres were required to close so that the baiting could take its audience.
Which means the greatest plays in the English language were written by a man who had to be more interesting than a bear fight, on a Thursday, to the same people.
The Prat’s editorial desk regards this as the most useful thing anybody can know about Shakespeare and notes that it is almost never mentioned.
When it stopped
1835.
The Cruelty to Animals Act finally banned baiting – and the argument that won was not, in the main, about the animals.
It was about the crowd. The gatherings were held to be disorderly, drunken, and a threat to public order, and it was that which got it through.
Eight postcodes and seven hundred and seventy-seven articles: the right thing frequently gets done for the wrong reason, and it counts anyway.
Verdict
Good pub, cheap, honest number.
Go, and know what happened here.
The Globe
Which is three minutes from this pub and which is not the Globe.
It is a reconstruction, opened in 1997, built a couple of hundred metres from the original site – and it was driven, almost single-handedly, by an American actor called Sam Wanamaker, who spent decades on it and died four years before it opened.
He never saw it finished.
And the original Globe was itself a rebuild – the timbers were carried across the river from Shoreditch in 1598, when the company fell out with their landlord and dismantled the Theatre overnight.
It burned down in 1613, when a cannon set fire to the thatch during Henry VIII.
Nobody died. One man’s breeches caught fire and were put out with a bottle of ale.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
This reads like someone who’s attended enough meetings to understand they’re really just documentation of collective decisions not to decide.