h, founded by the actor Edward Alleyn.

Among the notes left by the old pawnbroker and theatrical manager,
Henslowe, and the various papers, letters, parts, accounts, etc., of his
son-in-law, the famous and very wealthy actor Alleyn, among these rare
documents, to which we owe a great part of our knowledge of the
Shakespearean stage, Malone found four remarkable card-board tables, on
which the plots of as many plays were put down, together with the names
of the persons represented, their entrances and exits, cues for music,
sonnets, etc.

According to Collier's description, these tables--one of which only is
preserved, the three others having disappeared through the carelessness
and disorder which at that time prevailed in the Dulwich treasury--were
about fifteen inches in length and nine in breadth. They were divided
into two columns, and between these, toward the top of the table, there
was a square hole for hanging it up on a hook or some such thing. They
bore the following titles:

1. The Plotte of the Deade Man's Fortune.
2. The Plotte of the First Parte of Tamar Cain.
3. The Plotte of Frederick and Basilea.
4. The Plotte of the Second Parte of the Seven Deadlie Sinns.

The last-mentioned play is known for certain to have been composed by
the excellent comic actor, Richard Tarlton. Gabriel Harvey, the
astrologist, and the implacable antagonist of Thomas Nash, tells us in
his letters how Tarlton himself in Oxford invited him to see his
celebrated play on _The Seven Deadly Sins_; Harvey asked him which
of the seven was his own deadly sin, and he instantly replied, "By
G----, the sinne of other gentlemen, lechery."

Tarlton died in the year 1588, and some of the other plays, especially
_The Dead Man's Fortune_, are considered to be a good deal older than
his. They belong, therefore, to an early period of the English
Renaissance stage.

These four tables caused considerable trouble to Malone and his
contemporary Steevens, as well as to later investigators, as they are
without equals in the archaeology of the English stage. If these men had
known that such tables, containing the plot of the piece which was acted
at the time, were always hung upon the stage of the Italian commedia
dell' arte in order to assist the memory of the improvising actors, they
would have seen instantly that their essential historical importance to
us consists in their showing by documentary evidence how the early
Elizabet