a longer stage than that of the Hôtel, and permitted of a less crude juxtaposition of the houses belonging to distinct localities than Mahelot offers us. Any use of perspective, for which there is some Elizabethan evidence, was presumably within the limits of one locality.[1]
The indications of the Revels Accounts, scanty as they are, are not inconsistent with those yielded by the plays.[2] If the Orestes of 1567-8, as may reasonably be supposed, was Pikeryng's, his 'howse' must have been the common structure used successively for Mycenae, Crete, and Athens. The 'Scotland and a gret Castell on thothere side' give us the familiar arrangement for two localities. I think that the 'city' of the later accounts may stand for a group of houses on one street or market-place, and a 'mountain' or 'wood' for a setting tout en pastoralle. There were tents for A Game of the Cards in 1582-3, as in Jacob and Esau, a prison for The Four Sons of Fabius in 1579-80, as in several extant plays. I cannot parallel from any early survival the senate house for the Quintus Fabius of 1573-4, but this became a common type of scene at a later date. These are recessed houses, and curtains, quite distinct from the front curtain, if any, were provided by the Revels officers to open and close them, as the needs of the action required. Smaller structures, to which the accounts refer, are also needed by the plays; a well by Endymion, a gibbet by Orestes, a tree by The Arraignment of Paris, and inferentially by all pastoral, and many other plays. The brief record of 1567-8 does not specify the battlement or gated wall, solid enough for Clytemnestra to speak 'ouer y^e wal', which was a feature in the siege episode of Orestes. Presumably it was part of the 'howse', which is mentioned, and indeed it would by itself furnish sufficient background for the scenes alike at Mycenae, Crete, and Athens. If it stood alone, it probably extended along the back of the stage, where it would interfere least with the arrays of Orestes and of Aegisthus. But in the accounts of 1579-85, the plays, of which there are many, with battlements also, as a rule, have cities, and here we must suppose some situation for the battlement which will not interfere with the city. If it stood for the gate and wall of some other city, it may have been reared at an opposite end of the stage. In Dido, where the gate of Troy seems to have been shown, although there is no action 'ouer' it, I can visualize it best as extending across the middle of the stage from back to front. With an unchanging setting it need not
