Monday, December 4, 2017

Only one man had his breeches set on fire

From A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare's The Tempest by Hobson Woodward. Page 183.
Three months after Shakespeare's apartment purchase, on June 29, 1613, the Kings Men suffered a catastrophe that could have been an even greater disaster for English literature. During the performance of All is True, sparks from a stage cannon set the roof of the Globe ablaze. "Some of the paper or other stuff wherewith one of them was stopped did light the thatch," a Londoner wrote to a friend soon after, "where being thought at first an idle smoke and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very grounds. This was the fatal period of the virtuous fabric, wherein yet nothing did perish but wood and straw and a few forsaken cloaks; only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broiled him if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottle ale." Luckily the company's playbooks were carried from the house as the fire spread. If they had not been, the only copies of half of Shakespeare's works would have burned with the theater.

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