Is this the only town with pubs named after plays?

In his weekly The Bar Man column, Jeff Hoyle discusses pub names…The latest day course organised by the WEA was presented by Kate. Last time she was here, her topic was The Golden Age of the Crime Novel, for which I blame for my obsessive reading of books by the likes of Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham and the odd obscure novel such as The Red House Mystery by A. A. Milne.This time she was going back in time a few decades earlier to explore how true crime became a subject for popular entertainment, and one of the earliest cases quoted was The Murder at the Red Barn, an 1827 crime in which Maria Marten was shot by her lover William Corder and which sparked a blizzard of broadsides, ballads, plays and songs with the site of the incident at Polstead in Suffolk becoming a tourist attraction and a wide range of souvenirs being sold.

Even today, the Moyse’s Hall Museum in Bury St Edmunds has a cast of the murderer’s head, and a book bound in his skin among the many exhibits pertaining to the case. One of the types of entertainment popularised by such incidents were melodramas. Not all were based on true crime, and one, The Red Rover, was based on a book by James Fennimore Cooper.If he is remembered at all, it is probably for The Last of The Mohicans, but the Red Rover was an immediate sensation. It was published in America in 1828 and 44 days later was the subject of a stage play. Within weeks another version was being performed in New York and during 1829 at least four versions had debuted in Britain.What piqued my interest was the fact that close to where we were sat at the Friend’s Meeting House was once a pub called the Red Rover. The address was 22 Coronation Square which I believe was demolished to make way for the Hillington Square development. The pub, certainly in existence by 1836, was not the only one. There was another Red Rover on Jews Lane, which is now Surrey Street. This was a beer house, a class of pub made possible by the 1830 Beer House Act which allowed anyone to open an establishment on payment of two guineas. It seems clear that these two pubs took their names from the popular plays based on Cooper’s book. Pubs named after a play. Surely that is unique. Well, no, not even in Lynn. On Littleport Street is the Hob in the Well, said to be in existence in 1796 and named after an 18th Century play in which a messenger boy, acting for a pair of lovers, is thrown into a well by a ‘wicked uncle’.I know of no other pubs anywhere in the country named after plays. Sure, there are pubs named after characters in books. Jude the Obscure in Oxford and the Sherlock Holmes close to Charing Cross in London come to mind. Authors have proved an inspiration as well, with The Edgar Wallace off the Strand providing a welcome relief from the wealth of Shakespeare-related names all over the country. The Michael Balcon in Ealing pays homage to a producer and the Lily Langtree in Nottingham to an actress, but of plays, no trace.Sweeney and Todd’s wine bar in Reading comes close and is probably inspired by the Penny Dreadful and resulting dramas, but I contend that the only pubs in the country directly named after plays were in Lynn. I have no real evidence other than extensive personal experience, but I challenge you to prove me wrong.