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 play MANKIND, or Sensuality in the play
Mary 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).
Bibliography
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.