ABSTRACT
The growth of drama varied little from country to country. Europe was more uniform in its plays than in its poetry. The new drama, the 'mystery', was the creation of the Church itself, and its avowed purpose was 'the strengthening of faith in the unlearned vulgar and in neophytes'. The supreme master in the intermediate dramatic form, and the most important poet to concern himself with the stage before Shakespeare's time was the Portuguese, Gil Vicente. The intermediate drama of the Peninsula is, in all European literature, the truest link between the middle ages, whose dramatic and poetic inheritance Gil Vicente, in particular, used to the full, and the new writing of the Renaissance. The great development of the drama took some three centuries to be complete, and it was not till the fifteenth century that the fraternities, reinforced by the craft guilds, presented their cycles in all their perfection.
