About the year 1590 our company received an addition in the person of a young man, who was not only a skilled and useful actor, but who also possessed the accomplishment of being able to adapt older plays to the taste of the times, and even proved to have the gift of writing tolerably good plays himself, though older and jealous colleagues might hint at their not being altogether original. This young man, whose capacities became of no slight use to the company and The Theatre, was named William Shakespeare. At this time the leading actors of The Theatre were the great tragedian Richard Burbage, who was then quite a young man, Henry Condell, and John Heminge, who continued to be the mainstays of the company. There was also the clown, Augustine Phillips, an excellent comic actor of the old school. These four became the most intimate friends of Shakespeare, and to Condell and Heminge posterity owes special gratitude, since it was they who, after the death of Shakespeare, undertook the publication of the first printed collection of his plays. It is impossible to decide definitely which of Shakespeare's plays belonged to the repertoire of The Theatre. It is probable that his first plays, _Love's Labor Lost, The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona_, and his first tragedy, _Romeo and Juliet_, saw the light on this stage between 1589 and 1591. Afterward, between 1594 and 1597, these were possibly increased by _A Midsummer Night's Dream, Richard the Second, King John, The Merchant of Venice_, and _Henry IV_. The repertoire of The Theatre also included the so-called "jigs," merry after-plays, mostly consisting of songs and dances, with frequent allusions to the events of the day, sneering at the Puritans, the magistrates, and other enemies of the playhouses. It has been briefly mentioned above that not long after the establishment of The Theatre--at the latest in the following year--this playhouse gained a companion in The Curtain, which thus became the second of its kind in London. The two playhouses were very close to each other, but for this very reason it seems natural to suppose that they were rather meant to support than to rival each other. They were like a kind of double-barrelled gun directed against the corporation, and they seem, indeed, to an equal extent, to have roused the anger of the Puritans, for they are generally mentioned together in the Puritan pamphlets directed against playhouses and all other wickedness. However, the history of The Curtain is almost unknown to us. While we know a good deal about the outward circumstances of The Theatre on account of the constant troubles which the Burbage family had to endure from the proprietor of the ground and the municipal authorities, and of the subsequent lawsuit, the reports we find about The Curtain are extremely meagre. We know neither when nor by whom it was built nor when it was pulled down.