Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The World Tossed at Tennis has a nebulous reputation. As the printed book of 1620 indicates, the dramatic text was intended for a royal night, but there is no extant evidence to suggest that it ever was performed at the London Denmark House for King James I, his son Prince Charles, and others, as intended. Despite this unexplained cancellation, or perhaps as a result of it, the playwrights took their masque and transmuted it into something resembling a play, which was ostensibly performed at the Swan Theatre for public audiences. This later version likely omitted portions of the printed text. For instance, the induction scene in which the buildings St. James’s, Richmond, and Denmark House (three buildings bequeathed to Charles, and represented onstage by actors) converse among each other as a preamble to the masque, addressing and flattering their intended royal audience at the conclusion of this scene, would make little sense to the playgoers who actually witnessed the performance. As a result, this prolonged introduction of the dramatic action to the royal audience by an actor representing the space in which the masque was to be performed would have been removed. In its place Middleton and Rowley added other portions to satisfy the conventions of the theater, such as the prologue and epilogue (commonplace methods of preparing an audience for a play's content and requesting their applause to signal satisfaction with the events that had transpired), whereas other extant parts of the text as we have it adhere to the criteria of a printed book.