are frequently to be met with in the old plays.  Of the poverty of the early stage, in the matter of scenic decorations, there is abundant evidence.  Fleckno, in his “Short Discourse of the Stage,” 1664, by which time movable scenery had been introduced, writes:  “Now for the difference between our theatres and those of former times; they were but plain and simple, with no other scenes nor decorations of the stages but only old tapestry, and the stage strewed with rushes.”

The simple expedient of writing up the names of the different places, where the scene was laid in the progress of a play, or affixing a placard to that effect upon the tapestry at the back of the stage, sufficed to convey to the spectators the intentions of the author.  “What child is there,” asks Sir Philip Sidney, “that, coming to a play and seeing Thebes written in great letters on an old door, doth believe that it is Thebes?” Oftentimes, too, opportunity was found in the play itself, or in its prologue, to inform the audience of the place in which the action of the story is supposed to be laid.  “Our scene is Rhodes,” says old Hieronymo in Kyd’s “Spanish Tragedy,” 1588.  And the title of the play was also exhibited in the same way, so that the audience did not lack instruction as to the purport of the entertainment set before them.

The introduction of movable scenes upon the stage has been usually attributed to Sir William Davenant, who, in 1658, evading the ordinance of 1647, by which the theatres were peremptorily closed, produced, at the Cockpit in Drury Lane, an entertainment rather than a play, entitled “The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, expressed by vocal and instrumental music, and by art of perspective in scenes:”  an exhibition which Cromwell is generally supposed to have permitted, more from his hatred of the Spaniards than by reason of his tolerance of dramatic performances.  The author of “Historia Histrionica,” a tract written in 1699, also expressly states that “after the Restoration, the king’s players acted publicly at the Red Bull for some time, and then removed to a new-built playhouse in Vere Street, by Clare Market; there they continued for a year or two, and then removed to the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, where they first made use of scenes, which had been a little before introduced upon the public stage by Sir William Davenant.”  It is to be observed, however, that inasmuch as the masques, such as the court of Charles I. had so favoured, were sometimes produced at the public theatres, and could hardly have been presented there, shorn of the mechanical appliances and changes which constituted a main portion of their attractiveness, movable scenery, or stage artifices that might fairly be so described, could not be entirely new to a large portion of the public.  Thus the masque of “Love’s Mistress, or the Queen’s Masque,” by Thomas Heywood, 1640, was “three times presented before their Majesties at the Phoenix in Drury Lane;” Heywood expressly acknowledging his obligation to Inigo Jones, who “changed the stage to every act, and almost to every scene.”