Hope Theatre

Located in Surrey : Southwark
Theatre
Performance Space: Playhouse
Built: 1614 Demolished: 1656

'The playhouse had a removable stage '...to be carried or taken away, and the roof over the stage ("the heavens") was to be held up so that no posts stood on the stage. There were, however, to be "turned columns upon and over the stage", perhaps a banistered railing around it. The place was to have three galleries, one above the other, and the bottom one (like that at the Fortune) to be 12 feet high. If the size of the timbers holding up the other two galleries are a guide, the middle one was to be less high and the top one less high yet, also as at the Fortune. There were to be a tiring house and, somewhere in the bottom gallery, "two boxes...fitt and decent for gentlemen to sit in"' (Wickham et al, English Professional Theatre, 595--6).