Redford's _Wyt and Science_, composed probably between 1541 and 1547, is, in form and intent, like _Lusty Juventus_ and other survivals of the moral interlude. It differs, however, in company with the _Four Elements_ and other Wit plays, in substituting a scientific for a religious purpose; and it adds a feature not to be found in earlier kinds of moral, a chivalrous ideal of love and adventure, academic, to be sure, but unmistakable. This appears in the wooing of Lady Science by Wyt, and his encounter with the tyrant or fiend Tediousness "for my dere hartes sake to wynne my spurres;" in the hero's inconstancy, defeat, and subsequent success, and in the dramatic employment of romantic instruments and tokens, such as the magic glass and the sword of comfort; also in the love songs. All of these and similar features of which the sources are not entirely continental make for the development of a romantic and humanistic drama. It may be worth noticing, moreover, that the fiend of the play is neither Vice nor Devil. He seems to be a cross between the Devil of the miracles and a monster of native as well as scriptural ancestry (an early draft of Giant Despair), who figures in a modernization of this play, _The Marriage of Witte and Science_. In chronological sequence the next of the Wit plays is the _Contract of a Marrige betweene Wit and Wisdome_ (not _Wit and Science_, as Professor Brandl has it). This was probably written about the same time as the _Lusty Juventus_. The mention of the King's most "royal majestie" and the appearance of the Vice Idleness as a priest would point to a date earlier than 1553, while the resemblance to Redford's play, though by no means close, indicates posteriority to that much cruder production. The division into acts and scenes is, on the other hand, less elaborate than that obtaining in the latest play of this series, _The Marriage of Witte and Science_. The _Contract_ is altogether the most meritorious of those academic predecessors of the drama of the Prodigal Son which introduce the indulgent mother as a motive force. While the conception is formal and didactic, the action avails itself, like Redford's play, of the romantic element involved in the perilous adventure for love. The _Contract_, moreover, startles the sober atmosphere of the moral interlude by a rapidity of movement, a combination of plots major and minor, a diversity of subordinate characters and incidents altogether unprecedented. The racy and natural wit, the equivoque, the actual, even if vulgar, humanity of the scenes from low life, and the skill with which the Mother Bees, the Dols and Lobs, Snatches and Catches, the Constable, and the thoroughly rustic Vice with his actual resemblance to Diccon the Bedlem, are dovetailed into the action,--these properties make this a very commendable predecessor, not only of _Gammer Gurton_, but of certain plays of Dekker and Jonson where similar features obtain. With the _Contract_,