Philip Henslowe's Artificial Cow

All scholars of early modern theatre history know Philip Henslowe's "Enventary tacken of all the properties for my Lord Admeralles men, the 10 of Marche 1598". This wonderfully evocative and much-discussed list of stage properties includes several objects which are linked to Thomas Dekker's lost play "Phaethon", and one which sounds particularly strange: "Item, j hecfor for the playe of Faeton, the limes dead". The entry is a long-standing puzzle in theatre history, which has been variously called "mysterious", "unexplained", and even "inexplicable". This paper is narrowly focussed on that single entry: it reopens the question of what this property was, and reconsiders what it was for.