Besides pieces of the nature of the Singspiel, Patouillet tells us that there were ballets at the Court of Alexis Mikhaïlovich. School dramas were in vogue at the Ecclesiastical Academy (of Zaikonospasskaya), for which Simeon Polotsky, and later on Daniel Touptalo (afterwards canonised as Saint Dimitri of Rostov), wrote sacred plays. Polotsky, educated at the Academy of Kiev, joined the Ecclesiastical School of Moscow, in 1660, as professor of Latin. He adapted, or wrote, _St. Alexis_, _Nebuchadnezzar_, _The Golden Calf, and the Three Children who were not consumed in the Fiery Furnace_, and _The Prodigal Son_. The last-named play was undoubtedly performed before the Court, and was reprinted in 1685 with a number of plates showing the costumes of the actors and spectators. Dimitri of Rostov, who was also a student at Kiev, composed a series of Mystery Plays with rhymed verse. _The Prodigal Son_, by Simeon Polotsky, says Patouillet, "had interludes which have not been preserved, and in Dimitri of Rostov's _Nativity_, the scene of the Adoration of the Shepherds was long in favour on account of a certain naïve folk-style of diction" None of these plays can be claimed as literature, but they are interesting as marking the transition from sacred to secular drama, and in some of them there was a faint reflection of contemporary manners. But this was not a spontaneous or popular movement; it was merely a Court ordinance. The clerks and artisans who were trained as actors often took part in these spectacles against the wish of their parents, who were only partly reconciled by the Tsar's example to seeing their sons adopt what they had long been taught to regard as a disorderly and irreligious career. Because the movement had no roots in the life of the people it could not flourish healthily. When Alexis died in 1670, the "Chamber of Comedians" was closed, Matveiev was exiled, and there was a reaction in favour of asceticism. But the impetus had been given, and henceforth the drama was never to be entirely banished from Russian life. Some of the westernised Boyards now maintained private theatres--just as their ancestors had maintained the bards and the companies of _Skomorokhi_--in which were played pieces based upon current events or upon folk legends; while the School Drama long continued to be given within the walls of the Ecclesiastical Academy of Zaikonospasskaya. Thus the foundations of Russian dramatic art, including also the first steps towards the opera and the ballet, were laid before the last decade of the seventeenth century.