Salisbury Court Theatre

The Salisbury Court Theatre was a theatre in 17th-century London. It was in the neighbourhood of Salisbury Court, which was formerly the London residence of the Bishops of Salisbury. Salisbury Court was acquired by Richard Sackville in 1564; when Thomas Sackville was created Earl of Dorset in 1604, the building was renamed Dorset House. (His descendant, Edward Sackville, 4th Earl of Dorset, was Queen Henrietta Maria's Lord Chamberlain in the 1630s, and was a prime mover in theatre and drama in London in that era, including the force behind the founding of the Salisbury Court Theatre.)

According to contemporary chronicler Edmund Howes, "a new faire Play-house" was erected in 1629, just to the west of the medieval walls of the City of London, between Fleet Street and the River Thames, in a building converted from a barn or granary in the grounds of Dorset House. An enclosed "private" venue like the Blackfriars Theatre, it was a successor to the earlier Whitefriars Theatre (which had been just on the other side of Water Lane) and the short-lived Porter's Hall Theatre, and catered to an upscale and elite audience—in contrast to the open-air theatres like the Globe, Fortune, and Red Bull theatres that served a mass audience (especially in the latter two cases).

Little is known about the actual form and shape of the Salisbury Court Theatre. Yet since it was on a plot of land 42 feet (13 meters) wide, it may have resembled, to some greater or lesser degree, the plan for a small theatre drawn by Inigo Jones in the later Jacobean or Caroline era, which adheres to a very similar scale.

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