Pictorial Evidence for a Possible Replica of the London Fortune Theatre in Gdansk

Summary

It is widely known amongst scholars of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre that the contemporary English ‘Continental’ companies were extremely active and popular in the Protestant and Catholic countries of Western and Central Europe for many decades. However, the news that at the beginning of the seventeenth century a permanent public theatre was built in the city of Gdansk on the Baltic coast, and that this theatre was modelled on London’s Fortune, will be received with a large dose of understandable scepticism. The Fortune, of course, has been one of the ‘favourite’ theatres of reconstructors, but in spite of the fact that it is actually the only London theatre about which a vast amount of valid written evidence is preserved, with the builder’s contract being most important, its numerous modern reconstructions have mostly been of a highly conjectural nature. This discrepancy arises from the lack of pictorial evidence for the reconstructors; the only substitute being to take some details from other sources, like De Witt’s drawing of the Swan or Hollar’s ‘Long View of London’, and fuse them together with the features of the Fortune as described in the contract. This situation gave rise to a series of eclectic designs composed of elements taken from various sources.