Lord Oxford’s men were playing in Southwark at the very hour of the dirge for Henry in the church of St. Saviour’s[669]. Almost immediately ‘the Poope in play’ and ‘prests in play’ make their appearance once more[670]. Edward himself wrote his comedy _De Meretrice Babylonica_. In 1551 the English comedies ‘in demonstration of contempt for the Pope’ were reported by the Venetian ambassador to his government[671]. But the players were not to have quite a free hand. It was now the Catholic interludes that needed suppression. A proclamation of August 6, 1549, inhibited performances until the following November in view of some ‘tendyng to sedicion[672].’ The _Act of Uniformity_ of the same year forbade interludes ‘depraving and despising’ the _Book of Common Prayer_[673]. A more effective measure came later in a proclamation of 1551, requiring either for the printing or the acting of plays a licence by the king or the privy council[674]. Mary, at whose own marriage with Philip in 1554 there were Catholic interludes and pageants[675], issued a similar regulation in 1553, though naturally with a different intention[676]. But this was not wholly effectual, and further orders and much vigilance by the Privy Council in the oversight of players were required in the course of the reign[677]. Only a few texts from this long period of controversial drama have come down to us. On the Catholic side there is but one, the play of _Respublica_ (1553). In this, and in the Protestant fragment of _Somebody, Avarice and Minister_, the ruling literary influence is that of Lyndsay’s _Satyre of the Thre Estaitis_. Of the remaining Protestant plays, _Nice Wanton_ (1560) and Thomas Ingelend’s _The Disobedient Child_ (n.d.) derive from the Dutch school of Latin drama and its offshoots. _Nice Wanton_ is an adaptation of the _Rebelles_ (1535) of Macropedius. _The Disobedient Child_ has its relations, not only to the play of Ravisius Textor already mentioned, but also to the _Studentes_ (1549) of Christopher Stymmelius. More distinctly combative in tendency is the _Lusty Juventus_ (n.d.) of R. Wever, who may be reckoned as a disciple of John Bale. The activity of Bale himself can be somewhat obscurely discerned as the strongest impelling force on the Protestant side. He had his debts both to Lyndsay and to Kirchmayer, whose _Pammachius_, if not his other plays, he translated. But he is very largely original, and he is set apart from the other great figures of the Lutheran drama by the fact that all his plays were written _in idiomate materno_. Moreover, though not without classical elements, they were probably intended for popular performance, and approach more closely to the mediaeval structure than to that of the contemporary interlude. In his _Scriptores_ he enumerates, under twenty-two titles, some forty-six of them. The five extant ones were probably all ‘compiled’ about 1538 while he was vicar of Thorndon in Suffolk. But some of them were acted at the