Though the scene, rather than the act, was the unit in popular drama, it had almost no structural value. A play was really a continuous performance, the actors coming and going, a battle intervening, and now and then a withdrawal of all the actors and the appearance of a new group presaging a marked change of place or the beginning of an entirely different action. In the arrangement of scenes, however, some attention to parallel, contrast, and climax soon became manifest; and some integration of the confused material from the chronicles, particularly in the separation from scenes abounding in action of those purely narrative or expository and those purely lyrical, chiefly lamentations. In spite of such beginnings of system, the early chronicle plays, "The Famous Victories of Henry V," "Jack Straw," "Leir," "Edward I," and "The Troublesome Reign" are less coherent in structure, more incongruous in material, and less regardful of any clear fable, tragic or comic, than are other contemporary plays. To determine criteria to define these plays and their successors as a class is by no means easy. They were usually based on the chronicles, but the method of composition just described was applied to legend or poem with similar results, and there were also plays based on chronicles of contemporary events. They had for their main purpose the presentation of history, but this was shared by plays on French and Roman as well as English history, and there were historical plays that had no marks of the chronicle method of structure. The English chronicle plays usually show a pronounced patriotic temper, but this is often subsidiary and neglected in the desire for farce or sensation. The spectacular features are a characteristic element, a battle-scene being perhaps the most indispensable element or ingredient of a chronicle play, but this again fails to supply even more than a superficial criterion. In the popularity of the presentations of historical facts, all kinds of stories were worked over into a likeness to "true chronicle history," and the genuine historical, legendary, and biographical plays are hardly distinguishable from the pretenders. An illuminating illustration of the characteristics of the national drama about 1590 can be found in a comparison of two dramatic versions of a romance in Cinthio's "Hecatommithi," one by Cinthio himself, the other by Robert Greene. The Italian play is a tragicomedy in strict Senecan form, in which Arrenopia (Greene's Dorothea) appears as a declamatory queen confiding her troubles to the attendant nurse. Greene took the romantic comedy, added some pseudo-historical events, patriotic sentiments, and a pitched field for the finale, and called the whole "The Scottish Historie of James IV, slaine at Flodden." For our purpose the chronicle plays are to be regarded less as a distinct type than as representing a set of practices in vogue at this period and widely influential on the drama's development.