The first written evidence of an English dramatic tradition can be found in the fourteenth century, when the Interludium de Clerico et Puella (ca. 1300-1325) was written.

Doubtless there were different and multiform kinds of dramatic presentation, such as liturgical drama, Robin Hood plays or folk drama, but the three main types of the period were the mystery plays, the morality plays and the interludes.

Since Aristotle's Poetics was little known in Medieval England, the main generic distinction was not the comedy-tragedy opposition we are used to today, but a distinction according to two kinds of time:

• historical time, in which the fall and redemption of mankind takes place, as in the mystery plays
• the lifetime of the individual, in which he too falls and may be redeemed, as in the morality plays

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