Towards the end of Henry VIII’s reign, the course of the developing interlude was further diverted by a fresh wave of humanist influence. This came from the wing of the movement which had occupied itself, not only with erudition, but also with the spiritual stirrings that issued in the Reformation. It must be borne in mind that the attitude of mere negation which the English Puritans, no doubt with their justification in ‘antiquity,’ came to adopt towards the stage, was by no means characteristic of the earlier Protestantism. The Lutheran reformers were humanists as well as theologians, and it was natural to them to shape a literary weapon to their own purposes, rather than to cast it aside as unfit for furbishing. About 1530 a new school of neo-Latin drama arose in Holland, which stood in much closer relations to mediaevalism than that which had had its origin in Italy. It aimed at applying the structure and the style of Terence to an edifying subject-matter drawn from the tradition of the religious drama. The English _Everyman_ belongs to a group of related plays, both in Latin and in the vernaculars, on its moral theme. The _Acolastus_ (1530, acted 1529) of William Gnaphaeus and the _Asotus_ (1537, written †1507) of George Macropedius began a cycle of ‘Prodigal Son’ plays which had many branches. The movement began uncontroversially, but developed Protestant tendencies. It spread to Basle, where Sixt Birck, who called himself Xystus Betuleius, wrote a _Susanna_ (1537), an _Eva_ (1539), a _Judith_ (1540), and to France, where the Scotchman George Buchanan added to the ‘Christian Terence’ a ‘Christian Seneca’ in the _Jephthes_ (1554) and _Baptistes_ (1564) performed, between 1540 and 1543, by his students at Bordeaux. In these, which are but a few out of many similar plays produced at this period, the humanists drew in the main upon such scriptural subjects, many of them apocryphal or parabolic, as were calculated, while no doubt making for edification, at the same time to afford scope for a free portrayal of human life. This on the whole, in spite of the treatment of such episodes as the Magdalen _in gaudio_, was a departure from the normal mediaeval usage[649].