An attempt of my own to fill the gap has grown into these two volumes, which have, I fear, been unduly swelled by the inclusion of new interests as, from time to time, they took hold upon me; an interest, for example, in the light-hearted and coloured life of those _poverelli_ of letters, the minstrel folk; a very deep interest in the track across the ages of certain customs and symbols of rural gaiety which bear with them the inheritance of a remote and ancestral heathenism. I can only hope that this disproportionate treatment of parts has not wholly destroyed the unity of purpose at which, after all, I aimed. If I may venture to define for myself the formula of my work, I would say that it endeavours to state and explain the pre-existing conditions which, by the latter half of the sixteenth century, made the great Shakespearean stage possible. The story is one of a sudden dissolution and a slow upbuilding. I have arranged the material in four Books. The First Book shows how the organization of the Graeco-Roman theatre broke down before the onslaught of Christianity and the indifference of barbarism, and how the actors became wandering minstrels, merging with the gleemen of their Teutonic conquerors, entertaining all classes of mediaeval society with _spectacula_ in which the dramatic element was of the slightest, and in the end, after long endurance, coming to a practical compromise with the hostility of the Church. In the Second Book I pass to _spectacula_ of another type, which also had to struggle against ecclesiastical disfavour, and which also made their ultimate peace with all but the most austere forms of the dominant religion. These are the _ludi_ of the village feasts, bearing witness, not only to their origin in heathen ritual, but also, by their constant tendency to break out into primitive forms of drama, to the deep-rooted mimetic instinct of the folk. The Third Book is a study of the process by which the Church itself, through the introduction of dramatic elements into its liturgy, came to make its own appeal to this same mimetic instinct; and of that by which, from such beginnings, grew up the great popular religious drama of the miracle-plays, with its offshoots in the moralities and the dramatic pageants. The Fourth and final Book deals summarily with the transformation of the mediaeval stage, on the literary side under the influence of humanism, on the social and economic side by the emergence from amongst the ruins of minstrelsy of a new class of professional players, in whose hands the theatre was destined to recover a stable organization upon lines which had been departed from since the days of Tertullian.