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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
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