Inn-yard theatre

In the historical era of English Renaissance drama, an Inn-yard theatre or Inn-theatre was a common inn with an inner courtyard with balconies that provided a venue for the presentation of stage plays.

[1] The Elizabethan era is appropriately famous for the construction of the earliest permanent professional playhouses in Britain, starting with James Burbage's The Theatre in 1576 and continuing through the Curtain (1577), the Rose, Swan, Globe and others —; a development that allowed the evolution of the drama of Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and their contemporaries and successors.

(It is an often-stated truism of the critical literature that the open-air public theatres or amphitheatres of Burbage and his successors were modeled on the inn yards, with their surrounding balconies, open space in the center, and stage to one side.)

[8] In his famous anti-theatre diatribe Histriomastix (1632), Puritan polemicist William Prynne recounts one of the classic urban legends of his generation, which held that the Devil was conjured up onstage during a performance of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, an event so horrifying that several members of the audience lost their sanity.

A late report (from 1628) gives a somewhat defective and ambiguous list of the inn-theatres suppressed during 1596;[10] but it seems clear that at least the Bull, the Bell, the Cross Keys, and the Bel Savage Inns were victimized.

In 1602, Worcester's Men received official permission to become the third playing company permanently based in London; their first performing venue was the Boar's Head Inn.