later miracle-plays[607]. At Bungay in 1566 he ‘made pastime’ before and after the play, as Tarleton or Kempe were in time to do with their ‘jigs’ upon the London boards. And probably this was his normal function on such occasions. From the moral the interlude drew abstractions; from the farce social types. The possibility of vital drama lay in an advance to the portraiture of individualities. The natural way to attain to this was by the introduction of historical, mythical, or romantic personages. The miracle-play had, of course, afforded these; but there is little to show that the miracle-play, during the first half of the sixteenth century, had much influence on the interlude[608]. The local players brought it to court, but, for the present, it was _démodé_. It was, however, to have its brief revival. The quarry of romantic narrative had hardly been opened by the Middle Ages. An old theme of Robert of Sicily, once used at Lincoln, was now remembered at Chester. Robin Hood had yielded dramatic May-games, and his revels were popular at Henry VIII’s court[609]. New motives, however, now begin to assert themselves. Some at least of these were suggested by the study of Chaucer. Ralph Radclif’s school plays at Hitchin included one on _Griselda_ and one on _Meliboeus_[610]. Nicholas Grimald wrote one on _Troilus_, and another had been acted by the Chapel at court in 1516[611]. Radclif was also responsible for a _Titus and Gisippus_, while the king’s players, shaking off their devotion to the moral, prepared in 1552 ‘a play of _Aesop’s Crow_, wherein the most part of the actors were birds[612].’ An extant piece on ‘the beauty and good properties of women’ and ‘their vices and evil conditions’ is really a version through the Italian of the Spanish _Celestina_, one of the first of many English dramatic borrowings from South European sources. So far I have written only of developments which were at least latent in mediaevalism. But the interlude had its rise in the very midst of the great intellectual and spiritual movement throughout Europe which is known as humanism; and hardly any branch of human activities was destined to be more completely transformed by the new forces than the drama. The history of this transformation is not, however, a simple one. Between humanism and mediaevalism there is no rigid barrier. As at all periods of transition, a constant action and reaction established themselves between the old and new order of ideas. Moreover, humanism itself held elements in solution that were not wholly reconcilable with each other. Many things, and perhaps particularly the drama, presented themselves in very different lights, according as they were viewed from the literary or the religious side of the great movement. Some brief indication of the in-and-out play of the forces of humanism as they affected the history of the interlude during the first half of the sixteenth century is, therefore, desirable.