ama, arose from the fact that the plaintiff in
the case, John Rastell, besides being a lawyer and (it is believed) a
writer of interludes, was also a printer, details of any kind that can
be gleaned about the lives of early printers being always welcome to
bookish antiquaries. But these particular details about Rastell's stage
in his garden, the classes from which actors were drawn, the value of
the dresses they wore, the practice of hiring the dresses out, and the
rather puzzling distinction made between stage-plays and interludes,[6]
are all of considerable interest for our period of the drama, and it
seemed a good deed to give them wider publicity.

We pass now from a survey of its poetry, both non-dramatic and dramatic,
to the work done in the fifteenth century for the development of English
prose. Until quite towards the close of the fourteenth century England
can hardly be said to have possessed any prose literature not avowedly
or practically of a didactic character. To save some one's soul or to
improve some one's morals were seemingly the only motives which could
suffice to persuade an Englishman to write his native language except in
verse. The impulse towards prose-writing may perhaps be dated from about
1380, the date of the first Wyclifite translation of the Bible. Of this
the books of the Old Testament, as far as Daniel, are stated on
contemporary authority to have been rendered by Nicholas Hereford; while
historians, after salving their conscience by confessing that there is
substantially no evidence for attributing the rest of the work to
Wyclif, wherever they have afterwards to mention it, invariably connect
it with his name. A revised edition, usually assigned to Wyclif's
friend, John Purvey, was completed a few years later. It was about 1380
that Chaucer was engaged in translating Boethius's _De Consolatione
Philosophiae_, and not long afterwards Usk wrote his _Testament of Love_.
The first really secular English book of any importance, the translation
of Mandeville's _Travels_, which has come down to us in a Cotton
manuscript, was probably made about the end of the century, and was
quickly succeeded by two variant versions. John of Trevisa, an Oxford
scholar, was the first to English an important historical work, and a
book of popular science, the _Polychronicon_ of Higden and the _De
Proprietatibus Rerum_ of Bartholomew.

It was necessarily by the free use of translation that an English
secular pro