Much in the same way, nothing could have been more natural and in accordance with the previous sluggish evolution of the English drama than that a gradual transition, however complete in the end, should have been effected from the moralities to comedy. It was not, however, John Heywood himself who was to accomplish any such transition; possibly, he was himself the author of the morality _Genus humanum_ performed at the coronation feast of Queen Mary, whose council speedily forbade the performance of interludes without the queen's licence. Nor are we able to conjecture the nature of the pieces bearing this name composed by Richard Farrant, afterwards the master of the Children of St George's at Windsor, or of William Hunnis, master under Queen Elizabeth of the Children of the Chapel Royal. But the process of transition is visible in productions, also called interludes, but charged with serious purpose, such as T. Ingeland's noteworthy _Disobedient Child_ (before 1560), and plays in which the element of abstractions is perceptibly yielding to that of real personages, or in which the characters are for the most part historical or the main element in the action belongs to the sphere of romantic narrative.[156] The demonstration would, however, be alien to the purpose of indicating the main conditions of the growth of the English drama. The immediate origin of the earliest extant English comedy must, like that of the first English tragedy, be sought, not in the development of any popular literary or theatrical antecedents, but in the imitation, more or less direct, of classical models. This cardinal fact, unmistakable though it is, has frequently been ignored or obscured by writers intent upon investigating the _origines_ of our drama, and to this day remains without adequate acknowledgment in most of the literary histories accessible to the great body of students.