Webster was not the first English Renaissance playwright to dramatize the story of Appius Claudius Crassus and Verginia; another play with the same title and subject matter had been published in 1576, as the work of "R. B.," probably a Richard Bower.
When James Burbage and his brother-in-law John Brayne built The Theatre, the first successful commercial public theatre in England, in 1576, Leicester's was the company that occupied its stage when performances began in the autumn of that year.
The explosion of popular drama that began when James Burbage built the first fixed and permanent venue for drama, The Theatre, in 1576 was the one great step away from the medieval organizational model and toward the commercial theatre; but that evolution was, at best, a "work in progress" throughout the English Renaissance.
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