Inigo Jones at The Cockpit

Summary

Historians of the English stage have always had to do without that most desirable of source documents, a set of detailed drawings of a known and significant theatre of the early seventeenth century. The best picture of a pre– Caroline theatre we have is a rough copy of a traveller’s thumb–nail sketch of the interior of the Swan. It is useful but ambiguous, and even when supported by the building contracts for the Fortune and the Hope it cannot give historians the kind of information they want: an exact rendering of the plan, elevation and section of a major theatre of Shakespeare’s age.

In the collection of architectural drawings at Worcester College, Oxford, there are two sheets of designs by Inigo Jones for a U–shaped theatre which has so far remained unidentified. D. F. Rowan has performed a valuable service by publishing them in Shakespeare Survey and elsewhere, but with two exceptions to be discussed below no-one has found evidence directly to connect them with a known building. So imprecise is the theatre history of the seventeenth century that Mr Rowan finds that he can place the designs no more accurately than as a ‘missing link’ between the Swan (c. 1596) and the Cockpit–in–Court (1629).