On the holy days which, as the etymology shows, were also holidays from the point of view of the crowd, drama was vigorously purveyed which made the primitive appeals of pathos, melodrama, farce and comedy. The actors became secular, but for long they must have been inspired with a sense of moral obligation in their work; a beautiful survival of which is to be seen at Oberammergau to-day. And the play itself remained religious in content and intention for generations after it had walked out of the church door. The church took alarm at last, aware that an instrument of mighty potency had been taken out of its hands. It is not surprising to find various popes passing edicts against this new and growingly influential form of public entertainment. It seemed to be on the way to become a rival. This may well have had its effect in the rapid taking over of the drama by the guilds, as later it was adopted by still more worldly organizations. It was not from the people that the change to complete secularization of subject-matter and treatment came; but from higher cultural sources: from the schools and universities, touched by renaissance influences; as where Bishop Still produced _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ for school use, the first English comedy; or from court folk, as when Lord Buckhurst with his associate, Sackville, wrote the frigid _Gorbudoc_ based on the Senecan model and honorable historically because it is the first English tragedy. The play of Plautian derivation, _Ralph Roister Doister_, our first comedy of intrigue, is another example of cultural influences which came in to modify the main stream of development from the folk plays. This was in the sixteenth century, but for over two centuries the genuine English play had been forming itself in the religious nursery, as we saw. Now these other exotic and literary influences began to blend with the native, and the story of the drama becomes therefore more complex. The school and the court, classic literature and that of mediaeval Europe, which represented the humanism it begot, fast qualified the product. But the straightest, most natural issue from the naive morality and miracle genre is the robustious melodrama illustrated by such plays as Kyd's _Spanish Tragedy_ and Marlowe's _Edward II_; which in turn lead directly on to Shakespeare's _Titus Andronicus_, _Hamlet_ and chronicle history drama like _Richard III_; and on the side of farce, _Gammer Gurton's Needle_, so broadly English in its fun, is in the line of descent. And in proportion as the popular elements of rhetoric, show and moralizing were retained, was the appeal to the general audience made, and the drama genuinely English.