This fabulous scene the fluid economy of the bare Elizabethan stage and the range and complexity of Queen’s Men’s dramaturgy and commitment to variety, containing ribald comedy, touching vows of love, a prince’s anger, and a maiden’s fear, but central to the scene is the Friar’s magic which is achieved through the simple magic of theatre and specifically of the Elizabethan stage. Each time the bare Elizabethan stage is cleared, the playwrights and actors rely on the fact that the audience will follow their linguistic and mimetic cues and re-imagine a new time and place for the subsequent action to occur. In this scene, swords are fixed in scabbards because of the mimetic power of the actors, the audience to imagine weapons frozen in place. The prince sits in the Friar’s study and Lacy woos Margaret miles away in Fressingfield because the audience is perfectly capable of imagining the stage to be simultaneously two places at once. The real prospective glass is theater itself which allows us to re-frame and re-imagine the world in which we live. The scene begins with social inversion as the fool plays the prince in the tradition of misrule and ultimately works to challenge the limits of a prince’s power as Lacy chooses to protect Margaret’s virtue rather than obey his future ruler and friend. The riotous surface of the action covers a politically subversive undercurrent.