Specifically the "Quem quaeritis?", explicitly involved the portrayal of characters by the priest and the acolyte. With this as a starting point, medieval theatre makers began crafting other plays detailing the religious narratives of Christianity. Plays about saints, especially local saints, were particularly popular in England. These plays conformed to the goals of contemporary historians, often closely paralleling "Lives of the Saints" books. They are generally not included in the modern understanding of history plays, however, because they differ significantly from the modern understanding of history by unquestioningly including supernatural phenomena as key elements. The final step in the origin of the modern history play, therefore, would require, as a prerequisit, the evolution of the modern understanding of history. Early modern origins The history play first took its modern form in Tudor England. Literary scholar Irving Ribner, in his influential study of the genre, connects the emergence of the history play with "a new birth of historical writing in England" during the sixteenth century, which included new books of English history written by Polydore Vergil (1534), Edward Hall (1543), and Raphael Holinshed (1577), among others. While this trend of increasing historical literature has its roots in late Medieval England, it reached a new level of intensity after the ascension of Henry VII with the perceived need to show the justification of the Tudor's position in the monarchy. The motivations of renaissance playwrights generally coincided with those of renaissance historians, so, although England produced many historical works during the Middle Ages, these works were almost completely ignored in favor of more recent historical narratives. In a more recent scholarly work, Ralph Hertel links the performative nature of the history play with a growing sense of English national identity under the early Tudors. "Englishness," in his words, is “considered as something brought forth by the spectators who participate in the theatre event by becoming eye witnesess of sorts of the events staged and who engage in the Englishness displayed theatrically." Early examples of Tudor history plays include John Skelton's Magnyfycence (1519). In this work, characters are named in the traditional fashion of a medieval morality play, with the lead named "Magnificance" and primary adversaries bearing names such as "Folly". Through the plot line and the characters' relationships with each other, however, Skelton assures that his contemporaries in the audience will easily recognize the identities of Henry VII in the title character and