[Footnote 579: Some scholars have supposed that the playhouse, when attacked by the apprentices in 1617, was burned, and that the name "Phoenix" was given to the building after its reconstruction. But the building was not burned; it was merely wrecked on the inside by apprentices.] [Footnote 580: Continuation of Stow's _Annals_ (1631), p. 1026.] [Footnote 581: William Camden, _Annals_, under the date of March 4, 1617. Yet Sir Sidney Lee (_A Life of William Shakespeare_, p. 60) says, "built about 1610."] Of its size and shape all our information comes from James Wright, who in his _Historia Histrionica_[582] tells us that the Cockpit differed in no essential feature from Blackfriars and Salisbury Court, "for they were all three built almost exactly alike for form and bigness." Since we know that Blackfriars and Salisbury Court were small rectangular theatres, the former constructed in a hall forty-six feet broad and sixty-six feet long, the latter erected on a plot of ground forty-two feet broad and one hundred and forty feet long, we are not left entirely ignorant of the shape and the approximate size of the Cockpit.[583] And from Middleton's _Inner Temple Masque_ (1618) we learn that it was constructed of brick. Its sign, presumably, was that of a phoenix rising out of flames. [Footnote 582: Hazlitt's Dodsley, XV, 408.] [Footnote 583: Fleay and Lawrence are wrong in supposing that the Cockpit was circular.] [Illustration: THE SITE OF THE COCKPIT IN DRURY LANE The site is marked by Cockpit Court. (From Rocque's _Map of London_, 1746.)] The playhouse was erected and managed by Christopher Beeston,[584] one of the most important actors and theatrical managers of the Elizabethan period. We first hear of him as a member of Shakespeare's troupe. In 1602 he joined Worcester's Company. In 1612 he became the manager of Queen Anne's Company at the Red Bull. He is described at that time as "a thriving man, and one that was of ability and means."[585] He continued as manager of the Queen Anne's Men at the Red Bull until 1617, when he transferred them to his new playhouse in Drury Lane. [Footnote 584: _Alias_ Christopher Hutchinson. Several actors of the day employed _aliases_: Nicholas Wilkinson, _alias_ Tooley; Theophilus Bourne, _alias_ Bird; James Dunstan, _alias_ Tunstall, etc. Whether Beeston admitted other persons to a share in the building I cannot learn. In a passage quoted by Malone (_Variorum_, III, 121) from the Herbert Manuscript, dated February 20, 1635, there is a reference to "housekeepers," indicating that Beeston had then admitted "sharers" in the proprietorship of the building. And in an order of the Privy Council, May 12, 1637 (The Malone Society's _Collections_, I, 392), we read: "Command the keepers of the playhouse called the Cockpit in Drury Lane, who either live in it or have relation to it, not to permit plays to be acted there till further order."] [Footnote 585: Wallace, _Three London Theatres_, p. 35.]