ABSTRACT
What people know – or think they know – of theatrical scenography in the Middle Ages has been largely shaped by two fifteenth-century images: a scene plan for an English morality play, The Castle of Perseveranceand Jean Fouquet's miniature, The Martyrdom of St Apollonia, depicted as a scene being performed in a French mystere. Since the turn of the twentieth century, several generations of historians have studied these images primarily for what they might tell people about medieval theatre architecture. Plays were predominantly performed in circular theatres; actors and audience members shared the available performance space; and theatrical spaces were defined by multiple, fixed locations. Only the last is true, but the first two propositions have badly skewed our ideas about medieval scenography. The Castle's circular design specifically appropriates the familiar iconography of a medieval mappa mundi.
