The contribution from the Middle Ages came largely from the religious drama. The folk games and plays and the performances of entertainers of various sorts contributed to the development of the drama principally on the side of comedy, and only incidentally to tragedy. Nor need the early centuries of the religious drama detain us. Its origin in the church service, its early liturgical forms, its growth and service in the hands of the church, and its gradual secularization are of importance for us only as leading to its culmination in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; in England notably in the great cycles of vernacular plays performed by the guilds. It should be remembered, however, that the miracle plays never felt the least influence from the drama of the Greeks and Romans. Knowledge of the classic drama was long confined mainly to the plays of Terence, and suggested even to the most learned no idea of relationship to the familiar miracle plays; and, on the other hand, the medieval stage gave no clue to a conception of the classical theatre. As late as Erasmus the curious notion survived that the classic plays were read by the author or a "recitator" from a pulpit above, while below the actors illustrated his lines by pantomime. Almost to the middle of the fifteenth century the miracle plays comprised all that was known of stage presentation in connection with serious drama. They were still performed through the sixteenth century; the boy Shakespeare may have been a spectator at a performance by the guilds; his father and grandfather and remoter forebears had seen them or perchance taken part in them. It was this abundant dramatic practice and ancient dramatic tradition that gave to Elizabethan England its fondness for play-acting, its recourse to the theatre for both amusement and edification, and the acceptance of the drama as an important factor in its daily life. A glance at some of the most notable differences of the miracles from classical plays reveals traits that remained potent in later drama. The miracles took their material from the Bible or from some saint's life, and their purpose was to make this material significant and impressive. They were, in fact, essentially translations of prose narratives into dramatic dialogue. Renaissance drama sought different material, but it found classical authority for basing tragedies on history, and so gave support to the medieval method of translation. In the Elizabethan period, dramatists rarely attempted the invention of their plots, but adopted and adhered to narrative sources. While they never suffered from the narrow conventionality imposed upon the authors of the miracles by the authority of the holy writ, yet something of the medieval subjection to sources was long manifest both in form and content. It is necessary to view the dramas of Shakespeare and all his predecessors as translations into dramatic form of stories already told in verse or prose.