After "King Cole", Masefield turned away from long poems and back to novels. Between 1924 and 1939 he published 12 novels, which vary from stories of the sea ("The Bird of Dawning", "Victorious Troy") to social novels about modern England ("The Hawbucks", "The Square Peg"), and from tales of an imaginary land in Central America ("Sard Harker", "Odtaa") to fantasies for children ("The Midnight Folk", "The Box of Delights"). In this same period he wrote a large number of dramatic pieces. Most of these were based on Christian themes, and Masefield, to his amazement, encountered a ban on the performance of plays on biblical subjects that went back to the Reformation and had been revived a generation earlier to prevent production of Oscar Wilde's Salome. However, a compromise was reached and in 1928 his "The Coming of Christ" was the first play to be performed in an English cathedral since the Middle Ages.