Scenery

Upon each of the stages, whether it was moving or fixed, there were two different and basic places, the scenic unit, or the mansion, and the acting area, or the platea. On each cart, there was usually only one mansion, though if made much larger, multiple could have been on a single cart. Fixed stages are a completely different story, able to have many different mansions on it at once, and able to change them out as the play went along. Brockett also brings up an interesting question, on page 89, that in the play presented at Lucerne (as an example) in 1583, that there were about seventy different locations indicated within the text, and yet there was only thirty-two mansions. This could very well be that they would reuse a single mansion for multiple locales, only name it differently when brought up onstage. That was my thought on it, but Brockett also considers that the identity of a number of the locations might have been clear to the audience without a mansion.