The period of experimentation or transition, which may be said to extend from 1520 to 1553, is characterized especially by the gradual abandonment of allegorical machinery and abstract material. The forward movement is, of course, primarily due to the change from the mediæval attitude of mind to that of the renaissance, from artificial thought whose medium, the symbol, succeeded in concealing more than it expressed, to experience. Of the social and political conditions which prepared the way for the transition so far as English comedy is concerned or that shaped comedy once on its way, I cannot here speak, but the following would appear among purely literary antecedents: First, the French _sotties_ and _farces_, the technical and satirical qualities of which were a stimulus to invention, not only in England, but in Italy and Germany; second, the _disputations_ and _debats_, veritable whetstones of wit and a polish of words _ad unguem;_ third, the collateral development of a farce interlude in England, composed in Latin and English, probably also in Norman French, but generally spontaneous, and wholly unforced; fourth, the adaptation to dramatic and satirical purposes of _contes_, _fabliaux_, _novelle_, and their English translations and congeners,--more especially the Chaucerian episode with its concrete characters and contemporary manners; fifth, the movement of native romance urged during the fifteenth and earlier sixteenth centuries by contact with Spanish and Italian ideals and their fictions of character, adventure, and intrigue; sixth, the discipline of Plautine and Terentian models, and of the Latin and vernacular comedies which imitated them, as well as of the Latin school plays which flourished in Holland and Germany during the latter half of the fifteenth century; and seventh, the examples set by Kirchmayer and other German controversialists in the attempted adaptation of the moral play to historical or quasi-historical conditions with a view to satirical ends.