exercised very little general effect. Juan Perez' (Petreius') posthumous Latin comedies were mainly versions of Ariosto.[47] Lope de Rueda and his followers. Classical dramas. Thus the foundation of the Spanish national theatre was reserved for a man of the people. Cervantes has vividly sketched the humble resources which were at the command of Lope de Rueda, a mechanic of Seville, who with his friend the bookseller Timoneda, and two brother authors and actors in his strolling company, succeeded in bringing dramatic entertainments out of the churches and palaces into the public places of the towns, where they were produced on temporary scaffolds. The manager carried about his properties in a corn-sack; and the "comedies" were still only "dialogues, and a species of eclogues between two or three shepherds and a shepherdess," enlivened at times by intermezzos of favourite comic figures, such as the negress or the Biscayan, "played with inconceivable talent and truthfulness by Lope." One of his plays at least,[48] and one of Timoneda's,[49] seem to have been taken from an Italian source; others mingled modern themes with classical apparitions,[50] one of Timoneda's was (perhaps again through the Italian) from Plautus.[51] Others of a slighter description were called _pasos_,--a species afterwards termed _entremeses_ and resembling the modern French _proverbes_. With these popular efforts of Lope de Rueda and his friends a considerable dramatic activity began in the years 1560-1590 in several Spanish cities, and before the close of this period permanent theatres began to be fitted up at Madrid. Yet Spanish dramatic literature might still have been led to follow Italian into an imitation of classical models. Two plays by G. Bermudez (1577), called by their learned author "the first Spanish tragedies," treating the national subject of Inez de Castro, but divided into five acts, composed in various metres, and introducing a chorus; a _Dido_ (c. 1580) by C. de Virues (who claimed to have first divided dramas into three _jornadas_); and the tragedies of L. L. de Argensola (acted 1585, and praised in _Don Quixote_) alike represent this tendency. Cervantes.