it is a church; in Johan Johan it is Johan's house. Whether interior or exterior, a door is often referred to as the means of entrance and exit for the characters.[1] In Johan Johan a door is supposed to lead to the priest's chamber, and there is a long colloquy at the 'chamber dore'. In exterior plays some kind of a house may be suggested in close proximity to the 'place'. In Youth and in Four Elements the characters come and go to a tavern. The 'place' of Apius and Virginia is before the gate of Apius. There is no obvious necessity why these houses should have been represented by anything but a door. The properties used in the action are few and simple; a throne or other seat, a table or banquet (Johan Johan, Godly Queen Hester, King Darius), a hearth (Nature, Johan Johan), a pulpit (Johan the Evangelist), a pail (Johan Johan), a dice-board (Nice Wanton). My inference is that the setting of the interludes was nothing but the hall in which performances were given, with for properties the plenishing of that hall or such movables as could be readily carried in. Direct hints are not lacking to confirm this view. A stage direction in Four Elements tells us that at a certain point 'the daunsers without the hall syng'. In Impatient Poverty (242) Abundance comes in with the greeting, 'Joye and solace be in this hall!' All for Money (1019) uses 'this hall', where we should expect 'this place'. And I think that, apart from interludes woven into the pageantry of Henry VIII's disguising chambers, the hall contemplated was at first just the ordinary everyday hall, after dinner or supper, with the sovereigns or lords still on the dais, the tables and benches below pushed aside, and a free space left for the performers on the floor, with the screen and its convenient doors as a background and the hearth ready to hand if it was wanted to figure in the action. If I am right, the staged dais, with the sovereign on a high state in the middle of the hall, was a later development, or a method reserved for very formal entertainments.[2] The actors of the more homely interlude would have had to rub shoulders all the time with the inferior members of their audience. And so they did. In Youth (39) the principal character enters, for all the world like the St. George of a village mummers' play, with an
A backe, felowes, and gyve me roume
Or I shall make you to auoyde sone.[3]
