Francis Langley

Francis Langley (1548–1602) was a theatre builder and theatrical producer in Elizabethan era London. After James Burbage and Philip Henslowe, Langley was the third significant entrepreneurial figure active at the height of the development of English Renaissance theatre.

Langley was a goldsmith by profession, and also held the office of "Alnager and Searcher of Cloth" – he was an official quality inspector of fabric. His brother-in-law was a clerk for the Privy Council; Langley had been appointed to his Alnager's post through a recommendation from Sir Francis Walsingham. Langley became involved in theatre in the mid-1590s, and operated much as Henslowe did, contracting individual actors and troupes to work exclusively for him, and serving as their reliable creditor. Langley, however, did not leave the relatively abundant documentary record that Henslowe did; his affairs are much more mysterious and difficult to untangle.

Langley's central achievement in Elizabethan drama was the building of the Swan Theatre in Southwark, on the south shore of the River Thames across from the City of London, in 1595–96. The Swan was the fourth large public playhouse in London, after Burbage's The Theatre (1576), Lanman's Curtain (1577) and Henslowe's Rose (1587) – though the Swan was in its time the most well-appointed and visually striking of the four. Langley had purchased the Manor of Paris Garden as early as May 1589, for the sum of £850. (Paris Garden was a "liberty," at the extreme western end of the Bankside district of Southwark. The Manor in question had been part of the monastery of Bermondsey, which, like all such establishments in England, had passed into private hands after Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries. In November 1594, the Lord Mayor of London complained to Lord Burghley about Langley's plans to build another theatre on the Bankside. The Rose and the Beargarden, the bear-baiting ring, were already located there.

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