The Werburgh Street Theatre, also the Saint Werbrugh Street Theatre or the New Theatre, was a seventeenth-century theatre in Dublin, Ireland. Scholars and historians of the subject generally identify it as the "first custom-built theatre in the city," "the only pre-Restoration playhouse outside London," and the first Dublin theatre.
Establishment
The Werburgh Street Theatre was established by John Ogilby at least by 1637 and perhaps as early as 1634. It was a roofed and enclosed building, or what was then called a "private theatre" like the contemporaneous Cockpit Theatre or Salisbury Court Theatre in London. According to one report, the theatre "had a gallery and pit, but no boxes, except one on the stage for the then Lord Deputy of Ireland, the Earl of Strafford." Ogilby had come to Ireland in Strafford's entourage, and Strafford, who was fond of the theatre, gave him every encouragement. John Aubrey termed it "a pretty little theatre." No trace of it survives, but it was located on Werburgh Street near Dublin Castle.
Associations
The playhouse was closely associated, during its short lifetime, with James Shirley, the prominent London dramatist who spent the years 1637-40 in Dublin. Shirley wrote four plays for the theatre, The Royal Master, The Doubtful Heir, The Constant Maid, and St. Patrick for Ireland; the first of these plays premiered on January 1, 1638, the last was performed in the autumn of 1639. During the same period, the theatre also performed Jonson'sThe Alchemist, Middleton'sNo Wit, No Help Like a Woman's, two plays from the John Fletcher canon, and anonymous plays titled The General and The Toy — even a play by Ogilby, The London Merchant. The earliest published play by a native Irish author, Henry Burnell'sLandgartha, was acted at the theatre on March 17, 1640. Shirley wrote Prologues to all of these works. Shirley may also have brought some London actors with him to Dublin. Shirley had functioned as the house dramatist for Queen Henrietta's Men, but the plague crisis of 1636-37 had disrupted that company. Four veterans of the troupe — William Allen, Michael Bowyer, Hugh Clark, and William Robbins — disappeared from the London theatre scene for the time that Shirley was in Dublin; they reappeared at the end of the Dublin venture in 1640, when all four joined the King's Men. The years of the Werburgh fill the holes in the four actors' careers.
Closure
"The Theatre came to a sudden end with the outbreak of the rebellion in 1641. In October the Lords Justices prohibited playing there; and shortly after, we are told, the building was 'ruined and spoiled, and a cow-house made of the stage.'" Three and a half centuries later, the site of the former theatre was the yard of Kerfoot's Dining Rooms at 13 Werburgh St., Dublin.
