ok
these secular pageants as an important factor in the development of
dramatic art.

Footnote 128: Miracles were acted on the Continent earlier than this. The
Normans undoubtedly brought religious plays with them, but it is probable
that they began in England before the Conquest (1066). See Manly,
_Specimens of the Pre-Shaksperean Drama_, I, xix.

Footnote 129: See Jusserand, _A Literary History of the English People_,
I, iii, vi. For our earliest plays and their authors see Gayley, _Plays of
Our Forefathers_.

Footnote 130: These three periods are not historically accurate. The
author uses them to emphasize three different views of our earliest plays
rather than to suggest that there was any orderly or chronological
development from Miracle to Morality and thence to the Interludes. The
latter is a prevalent opinion, but it seems hardly warranted by the facts.
Thus, though the Miracles precede the Moralities by two centuries (the
first known Morality, "The Play of the Lord's Prayer," mentioned by Wyclif,
was given probably about 1375), some of the best known Moralities, like
"Pride of Life," precede many of the later York Miracles. And the term
Interlude, which is often used as symbolical of the transition from the
moral to the artistic period of the drama, was occasionally used in England
(fourteenth century) as synonymous with Miracle and again (sixteenth
century) as synonymous with Comedy. That the drama had these three stages
seems reasonably certain; but it is impossible to fix the limits of any one
of them, and all three are sometimes seen together in one of the later
Miracles of the Wakefield cycle.

Footnote 131: In fact, Heywood "cribbed" from Chaucer's _Tales_ in
another Interlude called "The Pardoner and the Frere."

Footnote 132: Schelling, _Elizabethan Drama_, I, 86.

Footnote 133: That these gallants were an unmitigated nuisance, and had
frequently to be silenced by the common people who came to enjoy the play,
seems certain. Dekker's _Gull's Hornbook_ (1609) has an interesting chapter
on "How a Gallant should behave Himself in a Playhouse."

Footnote 134: The first actors were classed with thieves and vagabonds;
but they speedily raised their profession to an art and won a reputation
which extended far abroad. Thus a contemporary, Fynes Moryson, writes in
his _Itinerary:_ "So I remember that when some of our cast despised stage
players came ... into Germany and played at Franckford .