The building was probably opened to the London public in the summer or autumn of 1577. The first reference to it is found in T[homas] W[hite]'s _Sermon Preached at Pawles Crosse on Sunday the Thirde of November, 1577_: "Behold the sumptuous theatre houses, a continual monument of London's prodigality and folly";[111] and a reference to it by name appears in Northbrooke's _A Treatise_, licensed December, 1577: "Those places, also, which are made up and builded for such plays and interludes, as the Theatre and Curtain."[112] [Footnote 111: J.D. Wilson, _The Cambridge History of English Literature_, VI, 435, says that this sermon was "delivered at Paul's cross on 9 December, 1576 and, apparently, repeated on 3 November in the following year." This is incorrect; White did preach a sermon at Paul's Cross on December 9, but not the sermon from which this quotation is drawn.] [Footnote 112: Ed. by J.P. Collier, for The Shakespeare Society (1843), p. 85.] Like the Theatre, the Curtain was a peculiarly shaped building, specially designed for acting; "those playhouses that are erected and built _only for such purposes_ ... namely the Curtain and the Theatre,"[113] writes the Privy Council; and the German traveler, Samuel Kiechel, who visited London in 1585, describes them as "_sonderbare_" structures. They are usually mentioned together, and in such a way as to suggest similarity of shape as well as of purpose. We may, I think, reasonably suppose that the Curtain was in all essential details a copy of Burbage's Theatre.[114] Presumably, then, it was polygonal (or circular) in shape,[115] was constructed of timber, and was finished on the outside with lime and plaster. The interior, as the evidence already cited in the chapter on the Theatre shows, consisted of three galleries surrounding an open yard. There was a platform projecting into the middle of the yard, with dressing-rooms at the rear, "heavens" overhead, and a flagpole rising above the "heavens." That some sign was displayed in front of the door is likely. Malone writes: "The original sign hung out at this playhouse (as Mr. Steevens has observed) was the painting of a curtain striped."[116] Aubrey records that Ben Jonson "acted and wrote, but both ill, at the Green Curtain, a kind of nursery or obscure playhouse somewhere in the suburbs, I think towards Shoreditch or Clerkenwell."[117] By "at the Green Curtain" Aubrey means, of course, "at the sign of the Green Curtain"; but the evidence of Steevens and of Aubrey is too vague and uncertain to warrant any definite conclusions. [Footnote 113: Dasent, _Acts of the Privy Council_, XXVII, 313.] [Footnote 114: It seems, however, to have been smaller than the Theatre.]