ad pranks and mischief-making, liberally dashed
with a sort of tumultuous, swaggering fun. He was arrayed in fantastic
garb, with something of drollery in its appearance, so as to aid the
comic effect of his action, and armed with a dagger of lath, perhaps
as symbolical that his use of weapons was but to the end of provoking
his own defeat. Therewithal he was vastly given to cracking ribald and
saucy jokes with and upon the Devil, and treating him in a style of
coarse familiarity and mockery; and a part of his ordinary business
was to bestride the Devil, and beat him till he roared, and the
audience roared with him; the scene ending with his being carried off
to Hell on the Devil's back. Much of the old custom in these two
personages is amusingly set forth in Ben Jonson's _Staple of News_,
where, at the end of each Act, we have some imaginary spectators
commenting on the performance. At the end of the first Act, one of
them expressing a fear that the play has no Fool in it, as the Vice
was often called, Gossip Tattle delivers herself thus: "My husband,
Timothy Tattle, God rest his poor soul! was wont to say there was no
play without a Fool and a Devil in't; he was for the Devil still, God
bless him! The Devil for his money, he would say; I would fain see the
Devil." It being asked, "But was the Devil a proper man?" Gossip
Mirth replies, "As fine a gentleman of his inches as ever I saw
trusted to the stage or anywhere else; and loved the commonwealth as
well as ever a patriot of them all: he would carry away the Vice on
his back, quick, to Hell, wherever he came, and reform abuses." Again,
at the end of the second Act, the question being put, "How like you
the Vice in the play?" Widow Tattle complains, "But here is never a
fiend to carry him away. Besides, he has never a wooden dagger! I
would not give a rush for a Vice that has not a wooden dagger, to snap
at everybody he meets." Whereupon Mirth observes, "That was the old
way, gossip, when Iniquity came in, like Hocus-Pocus, in a juggler's
jerkin, with false skirts, like the knave of clubs."[3]

[3] Shakespeare has several allusions to this old stage custom.
See the author's Harvard Edition of Shakespeare, vol. v. page
222, note 17; also, vol ix. pages 202, 203, notes 8 and 9.

The most ancient specimen of a Moral-Play known to have survived dates
as far back as the reign of Henry VI., which closed in 1461. It is
entitled _The Castle of Perseverance_, and