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Abstract: The "performance-as-mirror" was a popular metaphor of the early modern period, and occasionally mirrors were also used as theatrical props. This article examines three plays which incorporated a physical mirror in their staging: Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1589), Anthony Munday's John a Kent and John a Cumber (c. 1590), and the "lost" play The Dead Man's Fortune (c. 1591). I argue that the props in these plays were scrying, or divination, mirrors, and I consider what these mirrors looked like and how they were used. I suggest that close attention to the material qualities of these scrying mirrors refines how the performance-as-mirror metaphor functions in these three plays. Finally, I extend the metaphor to performance documentation, suggesting that the documents in which these plays are preserved might also be interpreted as functioning like early modern scrying mirrors.
Anouska Lester (2024) studied this question.