In his young days Shakespeare must certainly have read "Gorboduc," with its five acts, its five dumb shows, and its chorus; he may, perhaps, have seen it revived at Greenwich Palace, or elsewhere, and have seen other plays of the kind which were written in five acts by academicians--amateurs who were anxious to air their learning before Queen Bess at the Universities or at the Inns of Court. Then there was Ben Jonson at hand to instruct his elder rival on the superiority of Latin comedy. Chapman, too, who was highly esteemed by clergy and scholars, was within call to point out to "artless Will" the merits of Senecan tragedy. In fact, the Bard of Avon had good reason to know why his playhouse dramas were despised by the learned, who, however, were not justified in presuming that he was ignorant of classical conventions simply because he chose to ignore them. No doubt it was possible in Shakespeare's time to write plays in five acts for the public stage. We know that at the Rose and Fortune theatres the action of the play was often suspended to allow of dancing and singing, though whether these intervals for interludes came after the termination of each act it is difficult to decide. But if the four choruses in "Henry V." were intended by Shakespeare to denote act divisions, they are not so marked in the first folio; while "The Tempest," which may have been divided into acts by Shakespeare, has stage-directions which suggest that it was not written originally for representation in the public theatre, but for the Court.