Dramatic performances in France began in the manner usual in all Catholic countries, namely, with representations of religious events, biblical or legendary, such as the Passion of Christ or the miracles of the saints. The “Mysteries” drawn from the scriptures, and the “Miracles” drawn from the lives of the saints, were in turn followed by the “Moralities,” or representations of the contests of abstract virtues and vices, which formed a pronounced step in the secularization of the drama and in the encouragement of original plot. Into all these there was imported a liberal amount of comedy, frequently of astounding coarseness. The actors, from being churchmen, came to be the members of the guilds of trade. Next, a corporation of the law-students of the Palais de Justice, which had been established and vested with privileges at the beginning of the fourteenth century under the name of _La Basoche_, took up the moralities and developed them still more in the direction of comedies with ingenious plot and literary dialogue. To the Basoche is probably to be attributed the famous piece (of about the year 1470) called _Lawyer Patelin_, from which at least one reiterated phrase has secured immortality in the shape of _Revenons à nos moutons_. From the Basoche the drama of Paris passed to the “Enfants sans Souci,” whose particular vein lay in the so-called _Soties_, a bold species of satirical and farcical modification of the Moralities. So bold, indeed, were these pieces, that it became necessary for Francis I to suppress them. By this date (which is near the middle of the sixteenth century) the revived study of antiquity begins to act directly upon the drama also, and members of the _Pléiade_ turn first to the translation and then to the imitation of the drama of Greece. The latter was the course taken by Jodelle, whose _Cléopâtre_ marks the epoch at which the serious drama of France definitely bound itself in the chains of the “three unities,” accepted Seneca for its model of style, and adopted the Alexandrine couplet for its orthodox vehicle of dialogue. Comedy meanwhile enjoyed more freedom, though taking its patterns, directly and avowedly from Italy. Between Jodelle and the great age of the drama of Corneille, the stage, like so much besides in France, passed under the domination, partly of Spain, partly of Italy. The chosen models were the Spaniards, Lope de Vega and Calderon, or the Italian Trissino, of whom something is said in their proper places. It remained for the literary reformation of Malherbe to find the consummation for drama also in the work of Corneille.