The King's Men continued to occupy the Blackfriars as their winter home until the closing of the theatres in 1642. Thereafter the building must have stood empty for a number of years. In 1653 Sir Aston Cokaine, in a poem prefixed to Richard Brome's _Plays_, looked forward prophetically to the happy day when Black, and White Friars too, shall flourish again. But the prophecy was not to be fulfilled; for although Whitefriars (i.e., Salisbury Court) did flourish as a Restoration playhouse, the more famous Blackfriars had ceased to exist before acting was allowed again. The manuscript note in the Phillipps copy of Stow's _Annals_ (1631) informs us that "the Blackfriars players' playhouse in Blackfriars, London, which had stood many years, was pulled down to the ground on Monday the 6 day of August, 1655, and tenements built in the room."[378] [Footnote 378: See _The Academy_, 1882, XXII, 314. Exactly the same fate had overtaken the Globe ten years earlier.] CHAPTER XII THE GLOBE As related more fully in the chapter on "The Theatre," when Cuthbert and Richard Burbage discovered that Gyles Alleyn not only refused to renew the lease for the land on which their playhouse stood, but was actually planning to seize the building and devote it to his private uses, they took immediate steps to thwart him. And in doing so they evolved a new and admirable scheme of theatrical management. They planned to bring together into a syndicate or stock-company some of the best actors of the day, and allow these actors to share in the ownership of the building. Hitherto playhouses had been erected merely as pecuniary investments by profit-seeking business men,--Burbage,[379] Brayne, Lanman, Henslowe, Cholmley, Langley,--and had been conducted in the interests of the proprietors rather than of the actors.[380] As a result, these proprietors had long reaped an unduly rich harvest from the efforts of the players, taking all or a large share of the income from the galleries. The new scheme was designed to remedy these faults. [Footnote 379: That even James Burbage is to be put in this class cannot be disputed.] [Footnote 380: Cuthbert Burbage in 1635 says: "The players that lived in those first times had only the profits arising from the doors, but now the players receive all the comings-in at the doors to themselves and half the galleries from the housekeepers." (Halliwell-Phillipps, _Outlines_, I, 317.)] [Illustration: RICHARD BURBAGE (Reproduced by permission from a painting in the Dulwich Picture Gallery; photograph by Emery Walker, Ltd.)]