[60] Mediaeval Stage, ii. 257; Lawrence (i. 123), Early French Players in England. It is only a guess of Mr. Lawrence’s that these visitors played Maistre Pierre Patelin, a farce which requires a background with more than one domus. Karl Young, in M. P. ii. 97, traces some influence of French farces on the work of John Heywood. There had been ‘Fransche-men that playt’ at Dundee in 1490, and ‘mynstrells of Fraunce’, not necessarily actors, played before Henry VII at Abingdon in 1507.
[61] Halle, i. 176.
[62] Halle, ii. 86.
[63] Mediaeval Stage, ii. 196; cf. ch. xii (Paul’s). Spinelli’s letter is preserved in Marino Sanuto, Diarii, xlvi. 595, ‘La sala dove disnamo et si rapresentò la comedia haveva nella fronte una grande zoglia di bosso, che di mezzo conteneva in lettere d’oro: Terentii Formio. Da l’un di canti poi vi era in lettere antique in carta: cedant arma togae. Da l’altro: Foedus pacis non movebitur. Sotto poi la zoglia si vide: honori et laudi pacifici.... Per li altri canti de la sala vi erano sparsi de li altri moti pertinenti alla pace’.
[64] V. P. iv. 115 translates ‘zoglia di bosso’ as ‘a garland of box’, but Florio gives ‘soglia’ as ‘the threshold or hanse of a doore; also the transome or lintle over a dore’.
[65] Murray, ii. 168; cf. ch. xii (Westminster).
[66] Halle, ii. 109.
[67] Cf. ch. viii.
[68] The memorandum on the reform of the Revels office in 1573, which I attribute to Edward Buggin, tells us (Tudor Revels, 37; cf. ch. iii) that ‘The connynge of the office resteth in skill of devise, in vnderstandinge of historyes, in iudgement of comedies tragedyes and showes, in sight of perspective and architecture, some smacke of geometrye and other thynges’. If Sir George Buck, however, in 1612, thought that a knowledge of perspective was required by the Art of Revels, he veiled it under the expression ‘other arts’ (cf. ch. iii).
[69] Mundus et Infans, Hickscorner, Youth, Johan Evangelist, Magnificence, Four Elements, Calisto and Melibaea, Nature, Love, Weather, Johan Johan, Pardoner and Friar, Four PP., Gentleness and Nobility, Witty and Witless, Kinge Johan, Godly Queen Hester, Wit and Science, Thersites, with the fragmentary Albion Knight. To these must now be added Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres (N.D., but 1500 <), formerly only known by a fragment (cf. Mediaeval Stage, ii. 458), but recently found in the Mostyn collection, described by F. S. Boas and A. W. Reed in T. L. S. (20 Feb. and 3 April 1919), and reprinted by S. de Ricci (1920).