VICE, THE

Vice, The: translation

The Vice is the generic name for a stock character in late medieval MORALITY PLAYS. Composed mainly as ALLEGORIES, these plays often presented a kind of psychomachia in which personified abstractions, representing aspects of the human mind, engaged in a battle for the soul of the play’s hero, often called Mankind or Everyman, a character representative of all humankind. Sometimes this plot took the form of a battle between personified Virtues and Vices. The play might have a chief Vice, called something like Myscheff (Mischief), as in the playMANKIND, or Sensuality in the playMary Magdalene. Later writers referred to the character simply as the Vice.

The Vice was typically a sinister but often comic tempter in the service of the Devil.He was a boisterous mischief-maker whose part, as the morality play developed as a genre, became chiefly farcical. He might be dressed as a fool, and ride upon the Devil’s back. Typically, he engaged in puns and practical jokes, playing them on everyone in the play, even the Devil himself, in whose service he was nominally engaged.He had a tendency to introduce himself to the viewers and announce baldly that he was a villain, to make side comments to the audience, and to comment on the action.He might disguise himself as a Virtue, and so might have an enigmatic name such as Ambidextrous. But he engaged in a good deal of slapstick comedy, and he was, therefore, a very popular figure—one that audiences enjoyed seeing well into the 16th century. It seems likely that certain characters in Elizabethan drama—the ironic and cynical villains like Iago and Richard III who consistently address the audience— are later developments of the Vice figure from medieval drama. Very likely the same is true for Shakespeare’s Falstaff, the comical corrupter of young Prince Hal, who is even called “that reverend vice” at one point (1 Henry IV.2.3.458).

■ Chambers, E. K.The Mediaeval Stage. London: Oxford University Press, 1903.

■ Cushman, L.W.The Devil and the Vice in the English Dramatic Literature Before Shakespeare. New York: Humanities Press, 1970.