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“Vice” and “Parasite.” A Note on the Evolution of the Elizabethan Villain
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Buffoonery and rascality—the two outstanding qualities of the morality play “Vice”—led, under differing influences, to the Elizabethan clown and villain. In early Tudor times, “witty slave” and “parasite” came from the classical drama to an English stage which already knew a figure combining certain of their characteristics, and to an audience who recognized in them certain familiar features. The “Vice” was originally the agent or servant of the Seven Deadly Sins, and sought to entrap “Mankind”—by whatever name he was known—into the power of evil. In a sense, he was a kind of “parasite,” too, his reward depending on the success of his service, and he was the dynamic character in the old plays. Incidentally, he was also the source of much (if not all) the humor in the moralities, and was one of the first figures to reflect the life of the times in a drama which dealt chiefly with personified virtues and vices. He had, for obvious reasons, no virtue in his composition; but he was human, and his vitality gave him an attraction which has descended to some of the later representatives of this type.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1934
References
1 “The Male-Friendship Cult in Thomas Heywood's Plays,” MLN, xlii, 510–514.
2 Two recent anthologies (Hazelton Spencer's Elizabethan Plays and Tucker Brooke and N. B. Paradise's English Drama, 1580–1642) echo President Neilson's interpretation of this line (Chief Elizabethan Dramatists, p. 506); “Acquired these languages perfectly.” I recognize that a knowledge of foreign languages might help Wendoll's advancement at Court, but is it not possible to interpret this line: “Got people to speak well of me”? It is true that “those” seems to refer to France, Germany, and Italy; but could it not equally well refer to “those perfect tongues [which I need]?”—an idiom comparable to our modern “to get a good press.” It would seem more logical (dramatically, if not linguistically) to suppose that Wendoll would recover more quickly when the rumors abate, when his absence has made people forget his villainy, than when he could converse in three languages without making a mistake.
3 Robert A. Law, “Structural Unity in the Two Parts of Henry the Fourth,” in Studies in Philology, April, 1927; cf. esp. pp. 240 and 241. He cites Quiller-Couch, Shakespeare's Workmanship, p. 127. Cf. also my paper on “The Development of the ‘Vice,‘” in Essays in Memory of Barrett Wendell (1926), esp. pp. 166 and 167.