The extremely various theatres of late medieval and early modern England situate the figure of the actor in a great many different settings and configurations. The place of performance may be public, or owned by a patron or by the actors themselves; it may be candle-lit or open to the sky; it may be a communal space for action or the illusionistic location of the fiction; and that fictional world, in turn, may be unitary or else divisively assigned to angels and devils, kings and clowns, speakers and singers. It is possible to grasp this diversity as an historical narrative (from the medieval pageant to the professional stage, from the Elizabethan amphitheatre to the Restoration playhouse with movable scenery), but it was also, often, a synchronic range of possible spaces, each with its distinctive cultural affiliation, each corresponding to, and making visible, its distinctive conceptions of the human, the social and the sacred. The course will explore these spaces by looking not only or even mainly at the theatre history, but at the scripts that record and suggest their meanings.