In spite of the close adherence to the Senecan model, there is little direct borrowing from Seneca, and medieval elements are not lacking. The debates between the good and bad counselors are very like those of the moralities, and the structure is essentially that of a chronicle of a whole story rather than that of a classical tragedy. The first two acts are occupied by the interminable debates, and the last three by the catastrophe, or rather the succession of catastrophes, though the final scene of the fifth act is a sort of epilogue after Senecan fashion. The play has little literary value, though Marcella's recital is not without power and the disquisitions on discord and disloyalty in the state have the merit of earnestness; but it is clearly the beginning of a new species. It abandons current dramatic forms, and endeavors to depict the fall of English princes in accordance with the models of classical tragedy. "Jocasta," by Gascoigne and Kinwelmarsh, acted 1566 by the Gentlemen of Gray's Inn, demands little attention. It is a translation in blank verse of Lodovico Dolce's "Giocasta," itself an adaptation of the "Phoenissæ" of Euripides. It thus furnishes additional evidence of the influence of Italian tragedy on English. The chorus numbers four, as in "Gorboduc," and the dumb shows, apparently of Gascoigne's invention, are notably elaborate and spectacular.[2] "Tancred and Gismunda," acted before the queen at the Inner Temple in 1568, under the title "Gismond of Salerne," was written in rhymed quatrains by five gentlemen of the Temple, and afterwards revised and put into blank verse by the author of the fifth act, Robert Wilmot, and first published in 1591.[3] In both versions Cupid appears before the first and third acts as the director of the action, and Magæra comes on before the fourth act to superintend the revenge and murder. The play is based on Painter's version of Boccaccio's _novella_, which is followed closely, but the base-born lover becomes a count according to the prevailing theory of tragedy. The story itself has an obvious dramatic power and a certain dramatic structure which it imposes on the play. Gismunda's passion for the Count Palurin runs counter to her father's wishes; at the end of the third act love is triumphant, but in the fourth is defeated, and the gruesome catastrophe follows, Tancred and Gismunda dying on the stage. This is the earliest extant English play based on an Italian _novella_, and the first tragedy to adopt a romantic love story and to make the passion of love its central motive; and the authors accomplished their experiment with evident enthusiasm and some gracefulness and force of diction. They were, however, very conscious of their models. Seneca's "Thyestes," and "Phædra," itself presenting a story of passionate love, were perhaps their chief inspirations; but Buchanan's "Jephthes" and Beza's "Abraham," translated into English in 1577, are mentioned in Wilmot's dedication, and, together