A Pleasant Comedy, called A Maidenhead Well Lost is a dark comedy set in Italy; it was written and published by Thomas Heywood in 1634 and performed at The Cockpit by Queen Henrietta's Men in that same year.
Until 2011 it was used as a training venue for the City of Westminster College's performing arts, theatre lighting, sound engineering and media students, along with regularly visiting students from Ball State University and young people from The Prince's Trust.
Both companies briefly performed in the theatrical spaces that had survived the interregnum and civil war (including the Cockpit and Salisbury Court), but scrambled to quickly acquire facilities that were more to current tastes.
Her play The Porter’s Daughter (a below stairs, women’s eye view of the events in Shakespeare’s Macbeth), was produced at the Cockpit Theatre, and on a UK and Germany tour, and she was commissioned by the Unity Theatre, Liverpool, to write and direct Random Oracle (2001).
Cockpit Theatre, a 17th-century theatre in London (also known as the Phoenix)
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The title page of the first edition states that the play debuted at the Cockpit Theatre in Drury Lane in 1641.
The actors left for the Cockpit Theatre in 1619, and the Hope was thereafter used for bear and bull baiting, prizefighting, fencing contests, and similar entertainments.
It was performed by Queen Henrietta's Men at the Cockpit Theatre in Drury Lane, in the final winter before the theatres suffered a long closure due to bubonic plague (May 1636 to October 1637) and Shirley himself left London for Dublin (1637).