In the early sixteenth-century interlude Nice Wanton, a brother and sister make the not unreasonable decision to skip school. Though cautioned against such behaviour by their pious elder brother, the truant siblings give in to frivolity and spend their day off on childish indulgences. They get up to the usual mischief: they listen to music, hang out with disreputable friends, and get into a bit of gambling. These are decisions they will come to regret. By the end of the play, the sister has died of syphilis and the brother has been hanged for thieving. Such are fitting punishments for prodigal youths in the early 1500s.

To a modern audience, these consequences seem rather extreme for such mild infractions. But Nice Wanton is a Tudor education drama and part of a familiar tradition in which youths transgress, fall from grace, and are then horribly punished or reform (sometimes both). The story of these truant siblings is a loose adaptation of the parable of the prodigal son, or Luke 15.11–32, and was one of more than fifty plays between 1500 and 1642 to adapt this narrative. But the meaning of ‘prodigal’ in sixteenthcentury England is not merely a reference to the Lukan son. To be prodigal is to engage in financial excess and misuse; the ‘prodigal son’ came to be so called for wasting his father's patrimony. In Luke, the son's filial disobedience is encoded in his financial waste, and this became one of the most popular tropes in early modern drama. This is why, when the siblings of Nice Wanton disobey their elders and stray from the schoolroom, they engage in financially immoral behaviours: gambling, stealing to finance gambling, and sex work. Nice Wanton is an early example of this genre; by the mid-seventeenth century, prodigal youths will not only be gambling and stealing, but also borrowing money on false credit, taking mortgages, selling their employers’ wares, purchasing elaborate outfits, consorting with usurers, and falsifying wills, among a colourful variety of other prodigal acts.