'In the south suburbs', Antonio tells Sebastian in Twelfth Night, 'at the Elephant / Is best to lodge' (3.3. 39-40). Illyria may be a geographically remote and fictitious country. Its capital, where the comedy unfolds, often seems to shadow a more familiar city, and not just because there was, in fact, an Elizabethan inn called the Elephant in the High Street of Southwark, that London suburb south of the Thames in which Shakespeare's Globe playhouse stood. Like London, Illyria's capital is close to the sea, and also to wooded country in which its ruler can be urged to divert himself by hunting deer par force - on horseback, with hounds. According to Antonio, Orsino's city is renowned for its 'memorials and the things of fame' (23): churches, private monuments, and public buildings like those John Stow had described with loving care in his great Survey of London (1598/1603). It is a mercantile centre too, its foreign trade sufficiently important that the inhabitants of another state will even compensate for booty taken in war in order not to disrupt so beneficial a peacetime 'traffic'. In many streets, as Antonio alerts Sebastian when lending him his purse, pretty but unnecessary things are displayed for sale, 'idle' luxuries likely to attract a tourist's eye. Then, as Sebastian will soon (momentously) discover, there is the Countess Olivia's mansion, the equivalent of those great residences of the nobility (Somerset House, or Leicester House) which lined the Thames from London proper to Westminster, an abode endowed with gardens, a private chapel, and a large, well-staffed household. Orsino's court too, although ducal rather than royal, is similar to the one at Elizabeth's and then James's Whitehall in being a centre not only of fashion but of government.