can be traced on the books of the royal household through the reigns of Edward the Sixth and Mary, and well into that of Elizabeth[543]. The new conditions under which plays were now given naturally reacted upon the structure of the plays themselves. The many scenes of the long cyclical miracles, with their multitudinous performers, must be replaced by something more easy of representation. The typical interlude deals with a short episode in about a thousand lines, and could be handled in the hour or so which the lord might reasonably be expected to spare from his horse and his hounds[544]. Economy in travelling and the inconvenience of crowding the hall both went to put a limit on the number of actors. Four men and a boy, probably in apprenticeship to one of them, for the women’s parts, may be taken as a normal troupe. In many of the extant interludes the list of _dramatis personae_ is accompanied by an indication as to how, by the doubling of parts, the caste may be brought within reasonable compass[545]. The simplest of scenic apparatus and a few boards on trestles for a stage had of course to suffice. But some sort of a stage there probably was, as a rule, although doubtless the players were prepared, if necessary, to perform, like masquers, on the floor in front of the screen, or at best upon the dais where the lord sat at meals[546]. The pleasure-loving monks of Durham seem as far back as 1465 to have built at their cell of Finchale a special player-chamber for the purposes of such entertainments[547]. Henry the Eighth, too, in 1527 had a ‘banket-house’ or ‘place of plesyer,’ called the ‘Long house,’ built in the tiltyard at Greenwich, and decorated by none other than Hans Holbein[548]. But this was designed rather for a special type of disguising, half masque half interlude, and set out with the elaborate pageants which the king loved, than for ordinary plays. A similar banqueting-house ‘like a theatre’ had been set up at Calais in 1520, but unfortunately burnt down before it could be used[549]. Another characteristic of the interlude is the prayer for the sovereign and sometimes the estates of the realm with which it concludes, and which often helps to fix the date of representation of the extant texts[550].