The tone of these plays was not reverent; reverence after all implies near at hand its opposite in unbelief.

But they were realistic and they contained within them the seeds of later drama in the aptitude with which they grafted into the sacred story pastoral and city manners taken straight from life.

The shepherds who watched by night at Bethlehem were real English shepherds furnished with boisterous and realistic comic relief.

Noah was a real shipwright.
"It shall be clinched each ilk and deal.
With nails that are both noble and new Thus shall I fix it to the keel, Take here a rivet and there a screw, With there bow there now, work I well, This work, I warrant, both good and true." Cain and Abel were English farmers just as truly as Bottom and his fellows were English craftsmen.

But then Julius Caesar has a doublet and in Dutch pictures the apostles wear broad-brimmed hats.