plots, often complicated, and the range of incident, so extraordinarily wide, which we find in Elizabethan drama? No subject in literary history has been more often or more minutely discussed, during the quarter of a century since the Swan drawing was discovered, and much valuable spade-*work has been done, not merely in the collecting and marshalling of external evidence, but also in the interpretation of this in the light of an analysis of the action of plays and of the stage-directions by which these are accompanied.[1] Some points have emerged clearly enough; and if on others there is still room for controversy, this may be partly due to the fact that external and internal evidence, when put together, have proved inadequate, and partly also to certain defects of method into which some of the researchers have fallen. To start from the assumption of a 'typical Shakespearian stage' is not perhaps the best way of approaching an investigation which covers the practices of thirty or forty playing companies, in a score of theatres, over a period of not much less than a century. It is true that, in view of the constant shifting of companies and their plays from one theatre to another, some 'standardization of effects', in Mr. Archer's phrase, may at any one date be taken for granted.[2] But analogous effects can be produced by very different arrangements, and even apart from the obvious probability that the structural divergences between public and private theatres led to corresponding divergences in the systems of setting adopted, it is hardly safe to neglect the possibility of a considerable evolution in the capacities of stage management between 1558 and 1642, or even between 1576 and 1616. At any rate a historical treatment will be well advised to follow the historical method. The scope of the inquiry, moreover, must be wide enough to cover performances at Court, as well as those on the regular stage, since the plays used for both purposes were undoubtedly the same. Nor can Elizabethan Court performances, in their turn, be properly considered, except in the perspective afforded by a short preliminary survey of the earlier developments of the art of scenic representation at other Renaissance Courts.
The story begins with the study of Vitruvius in the latter part of the fifteenth century by the architect Alberti and others, which led scholars to realize that the tragedies of the pseudo-Seneca and the comedies of Terence and the recently discovered Plautus had been not merely recited, but acted much in the fashion already familiar in contemporary ludi of
