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 and a few lines later (510) we get 'Here enter Lamphedon out of Phrygia'. Now it is to be noted that the episodes which follow these directions are not away from, but in the wood and Phrygia respectively; and the inference has been drawn that there were labelled doors, entrance through one of which warned the spectators that action was about to take place in the locality whose title the label bore. This theory obtains some plausibility from the use of the gates Homoloydes and Electrae in Jocasta; and perhaps also from the inscribed house of the ruffiana in Serlio's scena comica, from the early Terence engravings, and from certain examples of lettered mansions in French miracle-plays. But of course these analogies do not go the whole way in support of a practice of using differently lettered entrances to help out an imagined conversion of the same 'place' into different localities. More direct confirmation may perhaps be derived from Sidney's criticism of the contemporary drama in his Defence of Poesie (c. 1583). There are two passages to be cited. The first forms part of an argument that poets are not liars. Their feigning is a convention, and is accepted as such by their hearers. 'What Childe is there', says Sidney, 'that, comming to a Play, and seeing Thebes written in great letters vpon an olde doore, doth beleeue that it is Thebes?' Later on he deals more formally with the stage, as a classicist, writing after the unity of place had hardened into a doctrine. Even Gorboduc is no perfect tragedy.

'For it is faulty both in place and time, the two necessary companions of all corporall actions. For where the stage should alwaies represent but one place, and the vttermost time presupposed in it should be, both by Aristotles precept and common reason, but one day, there is both many dayes, and many places, inartificially imagined. But if it be so in Gorboduck, how much more in al the rest? where you shal haue Asia of the one side, and Affrick of the other, and so many other vnder-kingdoms, that the Player, when he commeth in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or els the tale wil not be conceiued. Now ye shal haue three ladies walke to gather flowers, and then we must beleeue the stage to be a Garden. By and by, we heare