Part 6

A general view of his history shows, then, that the Vice is neither an ethical nor dramatic derivative of the Devil; nor is he a pendant to that personage, as foil or ironical decoy, or even antagonist. The Devil of the early drama is a mythical character, a fallen archangel, the anthropomorphic Adversary. The Vice, on the other hand, is allegorical,--typical of the moral frailty of mankind. Proceeding from the concept of the Deadly Sins, ultimately focussing them, he dramatizes the evil that springs from within. Though at first directed by God's Adversary, who assails man with temptations from without, the Vice is the younger contemporary of the Devil rather than his agent. As he acquires personality, he assumes characteristics and functions unknown to the Adversary, scriptural or dramatic. The functions were gradually assimilated with those of mischief-maker, jester, and counterfeit-crank; the characteristics, more and more affected by the Fool-literature of Wireker, Lydgate, Brandt and Barclay, Skelton, and the rest (which included vice in Folly, and by the Fool connoted vicious characters in all variety), were insensibly identified with social rather than abstract ethical qualities, and so came to be distributed as tendencies or "humours" among the persons of the drama,--who themselves are no longer allegorical, but representative of the concrete individuals of everyday life. Though the conduct of the interlude Vice may be anything but dignified, his function was, accordingly, at first serious. It was only gradually, and as the conflict between good and evil was supplanted by less didactic materials,--in other words, as the moral became more of a play,--that the Vice grew to be farcical, a mischief-maker, and ultimately jester. So long as he acts the seducer in disguise, and the marplot, he remains dramatically supreme. When he, however, assumes the rôle of parasite, counterfeit-crank, or simple, he enhances the variety of his fascination at the expense of his distinctive quality; and when he once has identified himself with the Will Summer, the actor, wag, or buffoon by profession, he plays below the function and level of his pristine quality. The Vice proper should, therefore, not be confounded with the Shakespearean fool, nor with the country clown. The country clown or booby he in reality never is; indeed, in some earlier manifestations[54] the clown exists contemporaneously with the Vice, and is his natural though not always complaisant quarry. Though the Vice, however, did not turn clown, the clown imperceptibly usurped qualities of the vanishing Vice.

In connection with the misconception concerning the derivation of the Vice from the domestic fool, of course incompatible with his descent from the Deadly Sins, there lingers a report that he was ordinarily dressed in a fool's habit. Such is the opinion of Klein[55] and Douce; and Morley[56] writes, "The Vice, when not in disguise, wore--as Brandt or Barclay would have thought most fitting--the dress of a fool." The dress of some typical fool of everyday life, some social "crank,"--yes; but not until the latter third of the sixteenth century, when the Vice was in his dotage, did he lose himself in the habit of the domestic fool. The Vice "shaking his wooden dagger," of whom Ben Jonson gives us a glimpse in _The Devil is an Ass_ and _The Staple of News_, is without doubt the domestic fool in the characteristic long coat, or in the juggler's jerkin with false skirts. But we must remember that Ben Jonson was writing some sixty or seventy years after the Vice properly so called was in his prime. From 1450 to 1570 and later, the distinctive Vice of the moralities was accoutred in the costume of his rôle, first of a Deadly Sin or little "dylfe"; then of some social class, trade, or type: messenger, herald, beggar, rat-catcher, priest, pharisee, gallant, dandy, or 'cit.' Occasionally he assumed a succession of costumes according to this dramatic necessity. He was indeed frequently equipped, in addition, with horn spectacles and wooden dagger, and sometimes with a burlesque of ceremonious attire,[57] or he was furnished with squibs and other fireworks,[58] or with hangman's rope or bridle. Professor Cushman surmises that he was, even, sometimes made up like Punch, for instance, in _Horestes_ and _Cambyses_. I don't know about that, but of this we may be sure, that as a Vice he was not distinguished by the traditional costume of the domestic fool. That character, soon to play an important part in comedy, appropriated certain tricks and aspects of the Vice, but the distinctive figure of the moral drama did not proceed from or ape the domestic fool of contemporary life.

Oddly enough it has lately been asserted that this character had no part in the 'morality' proper. An implication to the same effect is to be found in Halliwell-Phillipps's notes to _Witt and Wisdome_ as early as 1846, where he says that "the Vice is the buffoon of the old moral plays which _succeeded_ the Reformation." The fact is that the Vice takes part in all the plays under consideration, whether called morals proper or moral interludes, from 1400 to 1578, except only _Wisdom_ of the pre-Reformation series and the _Disobedient Child_ of the post-Reformation. Two other of the thirty-odd morals and moral interludes, namely, the _Pride of Life_ and _Everyman_, resort to a substitute. They distribute the rôle among minor representatives of the World, Flesh, and Devil, but they do not dispense with the idea of the Vice.[59] From him proceeds most of the human interest of these earlier comedies. Like the inclinations that he personifies, he is first sinful, then venial, then amusing; and to his tradition the comedy of a later age owes more than we are wont to suspect. It owes to him the development of certain spiritual characteristics, a cynical but rollicking superiority to sham, a freedom from the thrall of social and religious externality, a reckless joy of living, but an aloofness, withal, and a humour requisite to the exercise of satire. It is, indeed, as satirist sometimes virulent, but usually jocose, that the Vice is most to be esteemed. In so far as the genial character of the domestic fool of Green, Lodge, or Shakespeare reflected his irony and shrewd wit, some memory of him survived; and the clown-Vice of _Friar Bacon_ renews a passage or two of his later career, but not every usurper of his comic appanage, his mimicry, puns, irrelevance, and horse-play can lay claim to be descended from the Vice.

The dramatic importance of this figure can therefore not be overrated. He forms the _callida junctura_ between religious and secular, didactic and artistic, ideal and tangible, in our early comedy. He found a house of correction and he left a stage. Garcios, Pilates, Doomsday demons, and Maks precede, or flit beside him; but he, with his ancestral Sins, dependent Follies, and succeeding Ironies and Humours, occupies the central and the foremost place. Even while representing the superfluity of naughtiness with an eye to its reprobation, he is the life of the 'moral,'--its apology for artistic existence, its appeal to human interest. But when he steals a further march and rounds up for ridicule the very components of the allegorical drama that are most removed from laughter, and most liable thereto,--the long-faced abstractions that regard the comic spirit as sinful and are impervious to a joke,--he fulfils his destiny. He is the dramatic salt and solvent of the moral play. At first it couldn't thrive without him; at last it couldn't thrive with him. For, what _raison d'être_ could a moral have that no longer regarded the comic as immoral, knew a joke at sight, perhaps adventured one on its own account? Step by step with the development of a popular æsthetic interest in the affairs of common men the playwright asserted his superiority to social and allegorical make-believes, and the Vice proved his utility as a dramatic reagent. Once the Vice had gathered all sins in himself, his career was from 'inclination' to 'humour,' from abstract to concrete, from the moral to the typical, the one to the many, and so from the service of allegory to that of interlude, moral and pithy, but merry, all in preparation for farce, and social and romantic comedy.

=6. The Relation between Miracle, Moral, and Interlude=

An unfortunate misapprehension has obtained currency to the effect that there was a deliberate transition, chronological and logical, from the miracle cycle to the "morality," and thence to a something entirely different, called the interlude; and it is supposed that definite advances in the development of comedy were made _pari passu_ with this transition. It is even said, by one of the most genial and learned of English scholars, who of course was not intending anything by way of scientific accuracy, at the time, that "in the progress of the drama, Moralities followed Mysteries, and were succeeded by Interludes. When folk tired of Religion on the Stage they took to the inculcation of morality and prudence; and when this bored them they set up Fun."[60] But the moral play[61] was rather a younger contemporary and complement of the miracle than a follower, or a substitute for it. Moreover, allegory in the acted drama commanded the attention of the public contemporaneously with the scriptural plays of the later fourteenth century; in literature it had occupied attention long before. People, therefore, did not wait until they were tired of religion upon the stage, before taking to the inculcation of morality; nor could they have hoped to escape religion by any such substitute. Moral plays, like plays which were originally liturgical, aimed at religious instruction. But as the scriptural-liturgical illustrated the forms of the church service and its narrative content, the moral illustrated the sermon and the creed. The former dealt with history and ritual, the latter with doctrine; the former made the religious truth concrete in scriptural figures and events, the latter brought it home to the individual by allegorical means. The historical course of the drama was not from the scriptural play to the allegorical, but from the collective miracle and collective moral, practically contemporary, to the individual miracle and individual moral. The dramatic quality of the moral was, as we shall presently remark, not the same as that of the miracle, but it neither supplanted nor fully supplemented that of the miracle.

The distinction between 'morality' and 'interlude' has likewise been unduly and illogically emphasized. The former term may properly be said to indicate the content and aim of a drama; the latter, its garb and occasion; but the essential characters of the moral play, the human hero and the representatives of good and evil contending for his soul, may be common to interlude and 'morality' alike, and both terms may with justice refer to the same drama. After 1500 the rôle of hero is, to be sure, sometimes filled by an historical character, or by one or mere concrete personages representative of a type; but it must not be supposed that the play possessing such a hero is therefore to be called an interlude, for similar heroes are to be found in the morals before 1500. Nor should the statement be accepted that morals are distinguished from interludes by the presence in the former of both Devil and Vice; for several interludes of a later date have both Devil and Vice, while some of the earlier morals, written before 1500, have but one or the other of these characters, or neither.[62] The attempt to characterize the moral by its professed didactic intent, and the interlude by the lack thereof or the profession of mirth, is equally unavailing; for that manifest moral, the _Pride of Life_, one of the earliest extant, makes explicit promise in its prologue "of mirth and eke of kare" from "this our game"; while _Mankynd_, a moral of 1461 to 1485, which advertises no amusement, is as full of it as any late interlude. On the other hand, several plays written after 1568, calling themselves "comedies or enterludes," and promising brevity and mirth, are tedious. But, for the advertisement, sub-title, or specification of the play we must of course hold the publisher, and not the author, generally responsible. The common belief that 'moralities' were succeeded by 'interludes' is probably due in large part to the fact that 'interlude' has been used in England at different periods for entirely different kinds of entertainment, some of which, notably that to which Collier in 1831 restricted the term,--the play after the style of Heywood,--were of later production than the moral. But other kinds of 'interlude' date back to 1300, and precede the first mention of the moral play; while later kinds include the moral, and finally are synonymous with any humorous and popular performance. Collier's restriction of the term was, therefore, unfortunate. It interpreted a _genus_ as a species; for, although the interlude was originally any short entertainment, occupying the pauses between graver negotiations of the palate or intellect, it had, in the course of its history, acquired a significance almost as broad as 'drama' itself. The interlude was of various form and content and covered many species. As farce, the interlude anticipated moral plays; as allegorical drama, it absorbed them; and as comedy, it is their younger contemporary. It is not merely the play after the style of John Heywood. It is long or short; religious, moral, pedagogic, political, or doctrinal; scriptural, allegorical, or profane; classical or native; imaginative or reproductive of the commonplace; stupid or humorous; satirical or purely comic. It seems to me, therefore, unwise to perpetuate a distinction between moral plays and interludes which was not recognized by those who wrote and heard the plays in question.

The reduction of the number of actors, the abbreviation of the play, the concentration of the plot, wherever these exist in the later morals or moral interludes, are not evidence of a change of kind, but merely of a natural evolution through a period of some two hundred years. When ten Brink says that the interlude was the species best adapted to further the development of dramatic art, we must understand by interlude the individual, as opposed to the collective drama,--or the occasional performance by professionals for the delectation, and sometimes at the order, of private persons or parties, as opposed to expository or perfunctory plays, plays manipulated by crafts, or associated with times, places, and ends external to art. The improvement in scope and elasticity which marks the individual play is due to various causes: to patronage, which prefers amusement to instruction, and the work of artists to that of journeymen; to the development accordingly of a bread-and-butter profession of acting, with its accompanying _stimuli_ of necessity and opportunity. Poetic invention, dramatic constructiveness and style, are sometimes spurred by hunger; they are always responsive to the appreciation of the cultivated, and maybe to the reward.

=7. The Older Morals in their Relation to Comedy=

The remaining dramas within the compass of this survey may be considered in the following order: first, the older morals and moral interludes, between the years 1400 and 1520; second, various experiments of native and foreign, classical and romantic, origin which distinguish a period of transition extending approximately from 1520 to 1553; and, third, some nine or ten plays of prime importance which succeed these and unite, in one way or another, qualities of structure and aim hitherto distinctive of separate dramatic kinds. The period during which these plays, which I shall venture to call polytypic, were produced, roughly coincides with the years 1545 to 1566, and among these plays are the first English comedies really worthy of the name. We must then notice a group of rudimentary survivals, some of which, falling between 1550 and 1570, illustrate simply an artificial adaptation of the 'moral' species, while other few, appearing between 1553 and 1580, are a persistent flowering of the decadent stock, fruitless in kind but genuine in comic quality. We shall finally pass in brief review the crude romantic plays of morals or intrigue or popular tradition written between 1570 and 1590. And if it were not for lack of space, we should also glance at the satirical comedies which appeared when Shakespeare was beginning and Greene was ceasing; but, so far as possible, I must omit all subjects to which any consideration has elsewhere been accorded in this volume.

A sympathetic examination of the older morals--those that were produced before 1520--will reveal, even though the period is comparatively early, a twofold character of composition. We find, on the one hand, plays interpretative of ideals of life, constructive in character, relying upon the fundamentally allegorical, and making principally for a didactic end. We find, on the other hand, plays that deal with the actual have a critical aim, reproduce appearances and manners, and tend toward the amusing and satirical.

Of the half-dozen morals that made for the development of constructive or interpretative comedy, one of the earliest (about 1400) and most important was the _Castell of Perseverance_. In the quality of its dramatic devices it sustains a close relation to the Digby _Magdalene_,--the siege of the Castell by the Seven Deadly Sins, and their repulse under the roses which the Virtues have discharged. It also makes use of characters already prominent in the eleventh Coventry play, the _Pax_ and _Misericordia_, who there, as here, intercede for mankind. Collier calls this a well-constructed and much varied allegory, and says with good reason that its completeness indicates predecessors in the same kind. It is itself an early treatment of a fruitful theme, variously handled in later plays like Marlowe's _Doctor Faustus_, and in narratives like _The Holy War_. Though the abstractions are not of a highly dramatic character, still one or two of them,--for instance _Detractio_, the Vice, who is a cousin of the Coventry Backbiter, and of _Invidia_, "who dwellyth in Abbeys ofte," foreshadow the comedy of manners and satire, that is to say, the comedy of criticism. Other morals or moral interludes of the constructive kind, which I must forbear to describe, even though they contributed in one way or another to the improvement of dramatic consciousness or skill, are the _Pride of Life_, of antiquity perhaps as high as the preceding; the _Wisdom that is Christ_, 1480-1490, a comedy in the mediæval sense, insomuch as it portrays the ultimate triumph of a hero in his contest with temptation; _Mundus et Infans_, printed 1522, but written perhaps by the beginning of the century, which, beside giving us a vivid satirical picture of low life, makes a twofold contribution to the technique of comedy,--an iteration of crises in plot, and a sequence of changes in the character of the hero; Skelton's _Magnyfycence_, 1515-1523, significant for "vigour and vivacity of diction," and his _Nigromansir_, written somewhat earlier, which, though now lost, appears by Warton's account to have contributed, by its attack upon ecclesiastical abuses, to the beginnings of satirical comedy; the _Moralle Play of the Somonynge of Everyman_, printed before 1531, but of uncertain date of composition,--a tragedy to be sure, but "one of the most perfect allegories ever formed." All these, even when not purposively comic or even entertaining, assist the dramatic presentation of an imaginative ideal; occasionally also, though less directly, they contribute to dramatic satire and the portrayal of manners.

Of moral plays written before 1520 that contributed to the comedy of real life and critical intent we still have three or four. _Mankynd_--somewhere between 1461 and 1485--is of prime importance to the comedy of the actual, for practically its only claim to consideration as an allegorical or didactic production is that it maintains the plan and purpose of the moral play. Its dramatic tendency is altogether away from the abstract. In spite of its stereotyped Mercie and Myscheff, its minor Vices, and its Devil, it is a somewhat coarse but amusing portrayal of the manners of contemporary ne'er-do-weels. Attach no more meaning to the names Newgyse, Nowadays, and Nowte than the chuckling audience did, or change them to Huntyngton of Sanston, Thuolay of Hanston, and Pycharde of Trumpyngton, and you perceive at once that the individuality, conversation, and behaviour of these characters, and even of the hero, when he is not "holyer than ever was ony of his kyn," are hardly less natural and concrete than those of Englishmen immortalized by Heywood, Udall, and William Stevenson. The plot, to be sure, is dramatically futile, the incidents farcical, the merriment anything but refined; but there are few merrier successors of the Wakefield Tutivillus than his namesake here, who, coming "invysybull," cometh for all that "with his legges under him" and "no lede on his helys" to inform the sanctimonious hero that "a schorte preyere thyrlyth hewyn" and the audience that "the Devil is dead." Like the devil-judge of the _Nigromansir_ and the devil-sailor of the _Shipwrights' Play_, he has shaken off his biblical conventions (if he ever had any), he associates familiarly with characters of all kinds, and is marked by his grotesque devices as a wilful worker of confusion, the marplot of the play. The dog-Latin of the Vice Myscheff stands half-way between that of the Wakefield plays and that of _Roister Doister_ and _Thersytes_; and the Sam Wellerisms of Newgyse are a fine advance in the reproduction of the vulgar. His "Beware! quod the goode-wyff, when sche smot of here husbondes hede," and his "Quod the Devill to the frerys," and other gayeties perilous to quote--there is something Rabelaisian in all this. So Nowte and Nowadays, with their racy idioms, their variegated oaths, and "allectuose ways," are to the manner born, neither new nor old; they are of the picaresque drama that finds a welcome in every age and land. It is worth while to notice also the parallelism of crudity and progress in the technical devices of the action: on the one hand, the exchange of garments by which a change of motive is symbolized, a ruse that only gradually yields to the manifestation of character by means of action; and on the other hand, the legitimate and dramatic parody of a scene in court.