Each company of the guild, say the Barbers or the Wax-chandlers, took a unit of the series. Each unit was short, corresponding to an _act_ of the modern drama. They were composed in a great variety of meters, from doggerel to complicated lyrical stanzas. Each company having selected and rehearsed its play, the entire apparatus was enclosed in a huge vehicle called the _pageant_. The body of the vehicle was enclosed, and served as the dressing-and property-room; the top was an open-air stage. On the day of the festival, which at York and Coventry was Corpus Christi, the whole contrivance was pulled about the town, and performances were given at certain fixed points, of which the abbey was the chief. In _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_ Shakespeare has caricatured many features of these artisans’ dramatic performances. (_f_) THE INTERLUDE. The last predecessor of the drama proper was the _interlude_, which flourished about the middle of the sixteenth century. It had several distinguishing points: it was a short play that introduced real characters, usually of humble rank, such as citizens and friars; there was an absence of allegorical figures; there was much broad farcical humor, often coarse; and there were set scenes, a new feature in the English drama. It will be observed that the interlude was a great advance upon the morality-play. =John Heywood=, who lived in the latter half of the sixteenth century, was the most gifted writer of the interlude. _The four P’s_ is one of his best. It is composed in doggerel verse, and describes a lying-match between a Pedlar, a Palmer, a Pardoner, and a Potycary. His _Johan Johan_ has much sharp wit and many clever sayings. (_g_) THE EARLIEST DRAMAS. Our earliest dramas began to appear about 1550. Their immediate cause was the renewed study of the classical drama, especially the plays of Seneca (3 B.C.-A.D. 65), whose mannerisms were easily imitated by dramatic apprentices. The classical drama gave English drama its five acts, its set scenes, and many other features. (1) _Tragedies._ The first tragedies had the Senecan stiffness of style, the conventional characters and plot, though in some cases they adopted the “dumb show,” an English feature. _Gorboduc_ (1562), afterward called _Ferrex and Porrex_, written by Norton and Lord Buckhurst, was probably the earliest, and was acted at the Christmas revels of the Inner Temple. The meter was a wooden type of regular blank verse. Other plays of a similar character were _Appius and Virginia_ (1563), of anonymous authorship; the _Historie of Horestes_ (1567), also anonymous; _Jocasta_ (1566); and Preston’s _Cambises, King of Percia_ (1570). Hughes’s _Misfortunes of King Arthur_ (1587) broke away from the classical theme, but, like the others, it was a servile imitation of classical models. Many of the plays, however, preserved a peculiarly English feature in the retention of the comic Vice.