Though there are comic scenes of some excellence in the later Chester and so-called Coventry plays, they add little to the variety of the Wakefield. I would, however, call attention to a few other comparatively modern, but, generally speaking, contemporaneous, characteristics of these and the remaining cycles: the foreshadowing of the chivalrous-romantic in the Joseph and Mary plays of York, Wakefield, and especially Coventry; of the melodramatic in the wonder and mediæval magic of the York and Chester cycles, and again especially in the Coventry; of the allegorical in the Coventry, and of the burlesque in all cycles when Pride rides for a fall or Cunning is caught in his own snare. In respect of the sensational, the older cycles are surpassed by the surviving plays of Newcastle and Digby; so also in the increasing complexity of motive and interest. These Digby plays were acted, probably one by one in some midland village from year to year during the latter half of the fifteenth century, and maybe somewhat earlier. They are of interest, not only because they emphasize the sensational element, but because they stand half-way, if not in time, at any rate in spirit and method, between the miracles that we have so far discussed and the moral plays of which we shall presently treat. The Digby _Killing of the Children of Israel_ lends a decided impetus to the progress of the comic and secular tendencies of the drama. The Herod brags as usual, but he is artistically surpassed in his _metier_ by a certain _miles gloriosus_, the descendant of Bumbommachides and Sir Launscler Depe, and himself the forerunner of Thersites and Roister Doister, and countless aspirants for knighthood, whose valour "begynnes to fayle and waxeth feynt" under the distaff of an angry wife. Such is the Watkyn of this Digby play. Both here and in the _Conversion of St. Paul_, the joyous element has been enhanced, as Dr. Furnivall points out, by the introduction of dancing and music. In the _Conversion_ the charm supplied by the ammoniac Billingsgate of Saul's servant and the ostler adds thrills galore. Saul, "goodly besene in the best wyse, like an aunterous knyth," the thunder and lightning, the persecutor felled to earth, "godhed speking from hevyn," the Holy Ghost, the "dyvel with thunder and fyre" sitting cool upon a "chayre in hell, another devyll with a fyeryng, cryeng and roryng,"--the warning angel, Saul's escape,--there is sign enough of invention here. To be sure, these seductions are counterbalanced by a didactic on the Seven Deadly Sins, worthy of a preceding or contemporary moral drama; but that was part of the bargain. The spectacular plays of this group, especially the _Mary Magdalene_, comic and didactic by turns, denote a further advance in a still different direction. They portray character in process of formation: the rejection of former habits and motives, and the adoption of new, the resulting change of conduct, and the growth of personality.