There has been no theatre on Bankside these many years; there is nothing there or in that vicinity now that belongs to Shakespeare's age except some scattered, ancient, inglorious houses that he may or may not have known and the stately cathedral of St. Saviour. This holds still the span of ground that has belonged to it since before Chaucer's day. You may enter and see there the quaint effigy of Chaucer's contemporary, Gower, sleeping on his five-century-old tomb; and here and there about the aisles and in the nave are memorials of remembered or forgotten men and women who died while Shakespeare was living, and somewhere in it were buried men, too, who were intimate with him, though no evidence of their burial there remains except in the parish register. In the "monthly accounts" of St. Saviour's you come upon these entries concerning two of his contemporary dramatists:--
"1625. _August_ 29th, John Fletcher, a poet, in the church."
"1638. _March_ 18th, Philip Massinger, stranger, in the church."
the inference being that Fletcher had resided in the parish, and Massinger, the "stranger," had not. But earlier than either of these, it is on record that on the 31st December 1607, Shakespeare's youngest brother, Edmund, "a player," was buried here, and a fee of twenty shillings was paid by some one for "a forenoon knell of the great bell."
St. Saviour's, then, the sites of the Globe Theatre and the Mermaid, and that corner of Monkwell Street are London's chief Shakespearean shrines. The discovery of the Monkwell Street residence emphasises that before Ben Jonson founded his Apollo Club at the Devil Tavern by Temple Bar, Cheapside and not Fleet Street was the heart of literary London. Whilst Shakespeare made his home with the Mountjoys, Ben Jonson and Dekker were living near him in Cripplegate, in which district also resided Johnson the actor, Anthony Munday, and other of Shakespeare's intimates; nearer still, in Aldermanbury, lived Heminges and Condell, his brother actors, who first collected and published his plays after his death: and George Wilkins, at whose inn near St. Sepulchre's Stephen Bellott and his wife lodged after their quarrel with Mountjoy, was a minor dramatist who, besides collaborating with Rowley, collaborated with Shakespeare himself in the writing of _Pericles_. Coryat, the eccentric author of the _Crudities_, lived in Bow Lane; Donne, who was born in Wood Street, wrote his early poems there in the house of the good merchant, his father, and was a frequenter of the Mermaid.