Tragedy has ever been held to be more elevated than comedy and more worthy; and comedy has continually accepted the conditions appropriate to tragedy. Since the dignity of tragedy demanded a division into five acts, comedy was also subjected to the same rule; and this was done in spite of the fact that the plays of Plautus and Terence (composed long before Horace codified his advice to intending poets) were not divided into acts, if we may judge by the earliest of the surviving manuscripts. So it is that we find the scholarly authors of the two earliest of English comedies, 'Ralph Roister Doister' and 'Gammer Gurton's Needle,' knowing what was expected of them, and giving the five-act form to both of these amusing plays. But these two comedies, almost contemporary as they are with the academic and undramatic tragedy of 'Gorboduc,' are far superior to it in adaptability for actual performance. They are not intended only to be recited; they can be acted easily and profitably. As we analyze them we see that the structural complexity may be derived from the comic dramas of Plautus and Terence, but that the inner spirit is that of the English folk-theater, of the robust medieval farce-writers, of the unknown humorist who has left us the laughable and veracious scene of Mak and the Shepherds. Scholars as they were, the authors of these two comedies did not scorn the primitive plays of the plain people of their own time. They did not despise the unpretending folk-drama which was then pleasing the populace; in fact, they took stock of it, and found their profit in so doing. They saw that to be raised up to the level of literature it needed only to be chastened and stiffened. They accepted the living tradition of play-making as it came down to them, and in accord with this tradition they wrought their humorous fantasies, adding the higher polish and the more adroit plot which they had learned to appreciate in the Latin comic dramatists. They accepted the native play, bare as it was, and they enriched it by bestowing on it as much as it could carry of the finer art of the Romans. Thus it is that the authors of 'Ralph Roister Doister' and of 'Gammer Gurton's Needle' may have pointed out the path of progress to the author of the 'Comedy of Errors,' whereas the authors of 'Gorboduc,' contemptuously rejecting the folk-theater of their own day, and idly copying the classicist imitations of the Italians, thereby relinquished whatever direct influence they might have had upon the growth of tragedy in England.