Francis Langley

[1] After James Burbage and Philip Henslowe, Langley was the third significant entrepreneurial figure active at the height of the development of English Renaissance theatre.

Langley became involved in theatre in the mid-1590s, and operated much as Henslowe did,[4] contracting individual actors and troupes to work exclusively for him, and serving as their reliable creditor.

Langley's central achievement in Elizabethan drama was the building of the Swan Theatre in Southwark, on the south shore of the River Thames across from the City of London, in 1595–96.

The Lord Mayor's protest had no discernible effect; the Swan was certainly ready by February 1597, when Langley signed a contract with Pembroke's Men to play at his new theatre.

In November 1596 two writs of attachment, similar to modern restraining orders, were issued to the sheriff of Surrey, the shire in which Southwark is located.

If there was a period of good business in the spring and summer of 1597, it definitely did not last: in July came the scandal centred on Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson's play The Isle of Dogs.

On 28 July the Privy Council, angered by what it termed "very seditious and scandalous matter" in that play, ordered all the London theatres shut down for the remainder of the summer.

The Boar's Head Inn, outside the City of London's medieval walls on the northeast, had long been a venue for play-acting in previous decades; it was converted to a theatre in 1598 by a partnership between Oliver Woodliffe and Richard Samwell.

His theatre lived on after him, hosting miscellaneous events – fencing contests, boxing matches, stage-magic spectacles – and eventually becoming a venue for drama once again; the Lady Elizabeth's Men played at the Swan in the 1611–13 period.

Eventually the place fell into disrepair; a 1632 pamphlet refers to the building as "fallen to decay, and like a dying swan hanging down her head, seemed to sing her own dirge."