The suspension--not, indeed, of activity but of growth--in literature which marks the first years of the queen’s reign was as marked in drama as in pure poetry. Udall, Still, and Sir T. Sackville had no following to speak of, and it was not until a new generation had grown up that the first signs of the real Elizabethan drama became visible. The production of pieces for the theatre did not cease, but they belong to the past not to the coming time. The taste for shows was strong, and it was served. But the pieces of this interval are the descendants of the morality, not the ancestors of Shakespeare’s drama. We can leave them aside, for they had no following. There is no _Auto Sacramental_ in English literature. Before that could come it was first necessary to have a theatre, in the sense of a place of public amusement, managed by professional actors, and not only an occasional stage on which corporations and societies performed from time to time. The formation of the theatre in the material sense was the work of these earlier years; but this, which is, moreover, very obscure, does not belong properly to the history of literature. It is enough to note that a body of men working together did here what Lope de Rueda did in Spain. A class of actors was formed. Like him, they often wrote themselves. In both countries the theatre was thoroughly popular, which was not, it may be, altogether an advantage. At least the fact that the same man might be manager of a theatre and keeper of a bear-garden--as Alleyn was--points to the existence of influences which did not visibly work for the production of good literature in the theatre. In England, as in Spain, much was inevitably written to please what may be called the bear-garden element of the audience. In Spain this tended to separate itself into the _pasos_, _mojigangas_, _entremeses_, dances, and so forth, which were given between the three _jornadas_ of the _comedia_. With us all was thrown into the five acts of the play, and this difference in mechanical arrangement was not without its influence on literary form.