market-cross of Kilkenny in 1553, and the others show signs of revision under Edward VI or even Elizabeth. In _God’s Promises_, _John Baptist_, and _The Temptation_, Bale was simply adapting and Protestantizing the miracle-play. The first is practically a _Prophetae_, and they are all ‘actes,’ or as the Middle Ages would have said ‘processes’ or ‘pageants,’ from a scriptural cycle. Of similar character were probably a series of eleven plays extending from Christ in the Temple to the Resurrection. A _Vita D. Joannis Baptistae_ in fourteen _libri_ perhaps treated this favourite sixteenth-century theme in freer style. The polemics are more marked in _Three Laws_, which is a morality; and in _King John_, which is a morality varied by the introduction of the king himself as a champion against the Pope and of certain other historical figures. It thus marks an important step in the advance of the drama towards the treatment of individualities. With the _Three Laws_ and _King John_ may be grouped another set of lost plays whose Latinized titles point unmistakably to controversy. An _Amoris Imago_ might be merely edifying; but it would be difficult to avoid meddling in matters of doctrine with such themes to handle as _De Sectis Papisticis_, _Erga Momos et Zoilos_, _Perditiones Papistarum_, _Contra Adulterantes Dei Verbum_, _De Imposturis Thomae Becketi_. A pair of plays _Super utroque Regis Coniugio_, must have been, if they were ever acted, a climax of audacity even for John Bale. What then, in sum, was the heritage which the early Elizabethan writers and players of interludes received from their immediate predecessors? For the writers there were the stimulus of classical method and a widened range both of intention and of material. Their claim was established to dispute, to edify, or merely to amuse. They stood on the verge of more than one field of enterprise which had been barely entered upon and justly appeared inexhaustible. ‘Tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral’; they possessed at least the keys to them all. Their own work is a heterogeneous welter of all the dramatic elements of the past and the future. Belated morals and miracle-plays jostle with adaptations of Seneca and Plautus. The _dramatis personae_ of a single play will afford the abstractions of the allegory and the types of the farce side by side with real living individualities; and the latter are drawn indifferently from contemporary society, from romance, from classical and from national history. These are precisely the dry bones which one day, beneath the breath of genius, should spring up into the wanton life of the Shakespearean drama. The players had made good their footing both in courts and amongst the folk. But their meddlings with controversy had brought upon them the hand of authority, which was not to be lightly shaken off. Elizabeth, like her brother, signalized the