James Bubage

Little is known of James Bubage’s early life, although it is known that he originally followed the trade of a Joiner. According to his son, Cuthbert, Burbage was "in his younger yeeres a player", and reference is found to him being a member of the Earl of Leicester’s players in a patent dated 1574.

Some time before 1575, Burbage married his wife Ellen (possibly Helen) Brayne of London. Over time she would bear him three daughters: Alice, Joan and Helen, and two sons: Cuthbert and Richard Burbage.

In 1576, helped out by money donated by his father-in-law, Burbage obtained a twenty-one years’ lease of land and houses situated between Finsbury Fields and the public road from Bishopsgate to Shoreditch. Before the summer of 1577 Burbage had erected on part of this site the first building in England intended specifically for theatrical performances – the Theatre. The success of this enterprise was great, although another theatre, The Curtain, was built in the neighbourhood soon after the Theatre was opened.

For twenty years Puritan preachers, coupled with the corporation of London, objected to the running of the Theatre. The wanted it closed for two reasons – firstly, that in times of plague convergent crowds were more likely to spread disease, and secondly, that vicious characters made the Theatre their daily haunt.

Burbage wanted desperately to renew his twenty-one year lease, but in the face of such stiff opposition knew this would be unlikely. He made provisions against such an outcome, and in February 1596 Burbage obtained part of a large house in Blackfriars that he resolved to convert into a playhouse called the Blackfriars Theatre. Despite an appeal to the Privy Council to prohibit this conversion in 1596, the playhouse opened soon afterwards.

After beginning a lawsuit in order to have his lease on the Shoreditch land extended, Burbage died in the spring of 1597. His sons continued, and eventually lost, the lawsuit. Ultimately, the material of the Theatre was moved from Shoreditch to the Bankside and re-erected as the Globe.