Carrubber's Close: Allan Ramsay's Forbidden Theatre
Why is it significant?
Find the entrance to Carrubber's Close on the north side of the High Street, a narrow passage dropping steeply towards the railway. It looks like a hundred other closes. But in 1736 a wigmaker poet opened a theatre in here, and some of the city's ministers never quite forgave him.
Key Facts
| Place | Carrubber's Close: Allan Ramsay's Forbidden Theatre |
|---|---|
| Address | Carrubber's Close, High Street, Edinburgh EH1, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.95090, -3.18720 |
| Part of Walk | Ink, Ballads and Double Lives: Edinburgh's Literary Old Town |
| Generated | Generated |
Find the entrance to Carrubber's Close on the north side of the High Street, a narrow passage dropping steeply towards the railway. It looks like a hundred other closes. But in 1736 a wigmaker poet opened a theatre in here, and some of the city's ministers never quite forgave him.
His name was Allan Ramsay. He came to Edinburgh as a boy from Leadhills, a lead-mining village in the hills of Lanarkshire, to learn the trade of wigmaker. Powdered curls paid the bills, but in the evenings he wrote verse in Scots, the everyday tongue that many educated Scots of his time were busily trying to forget. His pastoral comedy The Gentle Shepherd, published in 1725, was reprinted again and again for more than a century.
Then he did something radical. In his bookshop beside St Giles' he began lending books for a small fee, and that shop is often called the first circulating library in Britain. Some ministers of the kirk were horrified: ordinary people taking home plays and romances, with nobody checking what they read. A theatre was the obvious next step, and here, in Carrubber's Close, Ramsay built one.
It did not last. In 1737 Parliament in London passed a Licensing Act that allowed plays only in theatres holding a royal licence, and Ramsay had none. Within a year his theatre was shut, and he lost a great deal of money. For decades afterwards, Edinburgh's actors had to dodge the law, advertising concerts with a play performed free in the interval.
Ramsay retired to an eight-sided house below the castle, which the town nicknamed the Goose Pie, and his son, also Allan, became portrait painter to King George the Third... so the wigmaker's boy ended up painting kings. Now walk on down the High Street, across the brass outline of the old Netherbow gate in the road, and into the Canongate. A little way down on the right, look for the arch of Chessel's Court, where the story of the Edinburgh stage picks up again.