BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: All of the information used in this section was garnered from Irwin Smith's Shakespeare's Blackfriars Playhouse, pp. 164-174, 290-298, 306-317, and 343-350. Most of the information is based on conjecture from a multitude of sources gathered by Smith and too numerous to note here. In 1576 Richard Farrant acquired a lease for a building in the Blackfriars precinct of London. This building, which was really two connected buildings, previously housed the southern part of the Buttery and the Frater of the old Blackfriars Monastery. It was located on the west side of the monastery grounds, flush against the west wall of the Great Cloister and Inner Cloister. The southern section of the Buttery was forty-six feet in length and about twenty-six feet in width. The section above the Frater was longer, one hundred and ten feet, but only twenty-two feet wide. The greater width of the former section was one of the deciding factors in Farrant's choice to make it into his theatre. The other significant factor was accessibility. The Buttery section had been made more accessible by the recent addition of a set of external stairs by Sir Henry Neville. So Farrant knocked down the partition between the two rooms in the northern section, creating the Blackfriars theatre. There is almost no surviving documentation about the other modifications Farrant inevitably had to make to construct a functioning playhouse. Instead, our only guide is our knowledge about Elizabethan playhouses and stages in general. Knowledge of plays that were produced at the theater during this early time also contributes to our understanding of what the new theatre looked like. In general, we can assume the following about the First Blackfriars: it had a platform raised above the floor of the auditorium, behind the platform was a backstage area known as the "tiring-house," and the platform and the tiring-house were separated by a wall that served both as backdrop scenery and a means of concealing backstage activities. -- [[NAME, YEAR]]