Chessel's Court & the Old Playhouse: Brodie's Last Job and a Scandalous Tragedy
Why is it significant?
Step through the archway into Chessel's Court, a quiet courtyard behind the Canongate, closed in by a tall eighteenth-century block of flats. In 1788 part of it housed the General Excise Office for Scotland, the tax office, and one March night it became the scene of Deacon Brodie's last burglary.
Key Facts
| Place | Chessel's Court & the Old Playhouse: Brodie's Last Job and a Scandalous Tragedy |
|---|---|
| Address | Chessel's Court, 240 Canongate, Edinburgh EH8 8AD, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.95040, -3.18270 |
| Part of Walk | Ink, Ballads and Double Lives: Edinburgh's Literary Old Town |
| Generated | Generated |
Step through the archway into Chessel's Court, a quiet courtyard behind the Canongate, closed in by a tall eighteenth-century block of flats. In 1788 part of it housed the General Excise Office for Scotland, the tax office, and one March night it became the scene of Deacon Brodie's last burglary.
Brodie and his gang let themselves in with copied keys, expecting a fortune in tax money. Instead they found a pathetically small sum, and while they searched, an official came back unexpectedly for some papers. The lookout panicked, everyone fled, and within days one of the gang went to the authorities. The respectable deacon's double life ended here, in a courtyard you could easily walk past.
Now walk a few steps further down the Canongate to the next story, in Old Playhouse Close. There, in December 1756, the Canongate theatre staged a new tragedy called Douglas, written by John Home, who happened to be a minister of the Church of Scotland. A clergyman writing for the stage! The Kirk was outraged, ministers who had gone to see it were disciplined, and Home eventually gave up his parish.
The audience, though, went wild. The story goes that on the first night, someone in the pit leapt up and shouted in broad Scots: Whaur's yer Wullie Shakespeare noo? Home's friend and kinsman David Hume praised the play to the skies, and it went on to triumph in London too. Few people read Douglas today, but that shout from the pit has become one of the most quoted lines in Scottish literary history.
A few years later Edinburgh finally got a properly licensed Theatre Royal, and the battle between the Kirk and the stage, which began with Allan Ramsay in Carrubber's Close, was over. Now carry on down the Canongate and turn right into Crichton's Close, to a house built for poems.