As ‘literature’, the scripts of Elizabethan Protestant interludes make for fairly dull reading, but when studied as performance texts, or indeed observed in performance, they exhibit the complexity and appeal associated more frequently with major Renaissance drama. We need to imagine the stage inhabited not by mere personified abstractions but by merchants, landlords, courtiers, and their servants and tenants; they are often colourfully dressed, as when Money in All for Money appears wearing a coat sewn all over with glittering gold coins, or the devil figures and agents of retribution are shown in terrifying masks. Stage pictures, pageantry, processions, and action sequences involving fencing, wrestling, and comic buffoonery abound, as do musical set pieces, consisting mainly of‘impromptu’ songs delivered in multi-part harmony and probably with instrumental accompaniment. The interlude playwrights appear to have been, for the most part, skilled craftsmen with hands-on experience of the theatre. David Bevington has recently argued, for example, that Wager’s approach to casting and doubling of parts in Enough Is as Good as a Feast and The Longer Thou Livest is virtually flawless (Bevington 2007: 370).
In performance, the death scene in Enough is a tour de force. It develops with mounting intensity, the conscience-stricken and now debt-laden Worldly Man awaiting the arrival of his creditors, terrified by the voice of God’s Plague offstage, and mocked by the grotesque laughter of his former confidant, Covetous. Physician offers him no relief from the sickness with which he is suddenly afflicted, and Ghostly Ignorance, a corrupt and sinister popish priest, provides no spiritual comfort. Prostrate on stage, attempting to write his will, he dies alone, impenitent, and stricken with fear. Those of us who staged and witnessed the play in performance a few years ago were struck by how powerful the final sequence turned out to be, and appreciated how much Marlowe drew on the dramaturgy of his immediate predecessors when staging the final hour of Doctor Faustus. Wager uses a story of overreaching greed and exploitation to forge a tragedy of damnation.
These interludes are diverse in terms of dramaturgy and structure. The so-called ‘psychomachia’ plot of the medieval moral play, featuring Humanum Genus being alternately exhorted to goodness by personified virtues and tempted into evil by personified vices (in disguise as virtues), survives in many post-Reformation interludes. Among the economic interludes of the 1560s and 1570s, it is most fully developed in Enough Is as Good as a Feast. The hero of this play, Worldly Man, starts off boasting to the audience of his wealth and property but, through the influence of Enough and Contentation, converts to godliness. In typical morality play fashion, this spiritual about-face spurs the Vices into action, led by Covetous, the steward to Worldly Man’s estates, whose sumptuous gown, gold chain, and cap are the proverbial dress of the usurious moneylender. With Covetous disguised as Policy, and with his companions Inconsideration, Precipitation, and Temerity posing as Reason, Ready Wit, and Agility, the Vices win back Worldly Man by convincing him that his parsimonious lifestyle prevents him from being generous towards the poor and needy. Where Wager departs from the traditional morality play pattern, however, is in supplanting the old ‘comic’ conclusion of repentance and forgiveness on the hero’s part with a ‘tragic’ one of persisting impenitence and damnation. The Calvinist doctrine of predestination goes a long way towards explaining this modification of the old narrative sequence, as does the new theology’s emphasis on divine justice rather than mercy, and the homiletic notion that fear of divine judgement is an effective inducement to repentance (the ‘fire and brimstone’ approach to homiletics) contributed to modifications of this pattern. Moreover, Enough’s juxtaposition of Worldly Man with Heavenly Man, his ‘elect’ counterpart, illustrates a splitting of Humanum Genus into elect and reprobate heroes which Wager deploys in his other interlude, The Trial of Treasure, where the godly Just never seriously wavers into sin, while his reprobate counterpart, Lust, is in thrall to the Vice Natural Inclination throughout the action.
At the centre of most economic interludes of the 1560s and 1570s is the Vice, operating as a kind of evil intelligence. The Vice provides some continuity with the medieval morality, but in other respects this figure is quite different dramaturgically. Plays such as Like Will to Like and The Tide Tarrieth No Man are less concerned with individual religious experience and its theological components than they are with the spiritual condition of the society as a whole. They therefore resort to a structure demanded by this subject matter, one presenting a series of episodes in which the Vice propels various social types into acts of treachery and deceit, and usually concluding with the punishment of that Vice in the final scene. The interlude All for Money is stylistically perhaps the most experimental of the interludes, showing little in common with the traditional Humanum Genus formula. Rather than presenting a continuous sequence of scenes, All for Money features six independent episodes, each with its own distinct set of characters and logic of presentation, which are interrelated by their thematic concern with money, its power, and its corrupting influence in a society devoid of spiritual values.
Jean-Paul Debax has recently argued that the Vice is not really a character at all, or at least not a mimetic one within the fictional world of the play. He points to a parish record from Bungay, Norfolk, where a payment is made ‘To Kelsay the vyce, for his pastime before the plaie, and after the playe’ (Debax 2007: 34; Galloway and Wasson 1980: 142). But the interlude owes its development at least as much to the households of the elite as to the popular tradition, as Debax himself observes, and the Vice’s role can be traced to the lord of misrule appointed to oversee revels during Christmas and Shrovetide. The Vice spends a good deal of his time on stage working the audience, charming and amusing them with his wit and physical comedy, taunting and surprising them with audacious questions and insults, rebuking them for the same sins and shortcomings observable in the play’s extortionists, bawds, and spendthrifts. The lord of misrule’s licensed anarchy is for entertainment only, but in the interlude Vice’s constant interaction with the audience has a homiletic end—it keeps them actively engaged with what’s happening on stage and it creates a greater sense of immediacy between the real world they occupy and the stage world of the play. That homiletic end, however, may not always be achieved. As with Nichol Newfangle in Like Will to Like, the Vice’s rhetorical dexterity and sophistication is potentially subversive (Hayes 2004: 45-56). He is above all a highly ambivalent character whose capacity for generating sympathetic laughter and directing audience response in other highly entertaining ways can interfere with the proselytizing intentions of the play’s author and organizers. The Vice’s dominance is no better illustrated than in The Tide Tarrieth No Man, where the action is largely structured by a series of soliloquys (eleven in all) delivered by the Vice, Courage, in which he becomes increasingly more intimate with the spectators. Courage spends his time during these soliloquys gloating over his success in cozening the dupes who appear before him on stage, assisted by his accomplices in the marketplace, Hurtful Help, Painted Profit, and Feigned Furtherance. The victims include the usurious merchant and landowner Greediness and the investor who covets his property, No-Good-Neighborhood, the courtier Willing-to-Win-Worship, who is driven into debt, a couple of young spendthrifts, Wantonness and Wastefulness, who end up in beggary, and Debtor, who is arrested and imprisoned.
Courage’s role as soliloquizing commentator is taken over about two-thirds of the way through the action by a pair of Virtues named Christianity and Faithful Few. They attempt to reverse the damage done by Courage, but only with limited success. Greediness is indifferent to their reasoning, and Wastefulness, in despair, dies in a state of damnation. However, they direct the audience’s response to the play’s central moral: spectators must abandon their pursuit of material pleasures and possessions and place their trust in God’s Word and the treasures that await the faithful in the next life. Moreover, the Virtues achieve this as much through pageantry as through preaching. The stage directions prescribe that Christianity ‘must enter with a sword, with a title of pollicy, but on the other syde of the tytle, must be written gods word, also a shield, wheron must be written riches, but on the other syde of the Shield must be Fayth’ (Wapull 1910: F3r). Thus, Christianity enters with the worldly labels visible: the sword of‘pollicy’ and the shield of‘riches’. In his opening speech to the audience, he says:
... I beare this deformed sword and shield,
Which I maybe ashamed to hold in my hand,
But the Lord deliver me from their thraldome and band,
For if the enemy assayle me, then am I in thrall:
Because I lack such Armoure, as is taught by S. Paule,
For in steade of Gods word, and the shield of fayth,
I am deformed with pollicy, and riches vayne. (F3r)
The rhetoric here is unmistakably Puritan and contains a lightly veiled attack on the infiltration of greed and corruption within the national Church as well as the public marketplace.
Stage pictures and pageants are staple features of the homiletic method in the economic interludes. The central stage image of The Trial of Treasure is a horse’s bridle. The elect hero, Just, struggles to shackle the Vice Natural Inclination, and only succeeds with the assistance of his old counsellor, Sapience. After Just and
Sapience depart the stage and Inclination delivers a long soliloquy explaining the significance of the bridle, Lust enters to free him. In the concluding scene, Just manages to bridle the Vice a second time. When Natural Inclination neighs like a horse, Just’s response drives home the moral: ‘Even so may all men learn of me again, | Thy beastly desires to bridle and restrain.’ Another remarkable instance of an argument being conveyed by a series of stage pictures occurs in scene 2 of All for Money, where the playwright’s purpose is to show how love of money leads eventually to damnation. To achieve this, he gives dramatic expression to a familiar literary trope: the genealogy of evil. The action centres around a chair and begins with the seated Money ‘giving birth’ to Pleasure, who in turn sits down to deliver Sin into the world; Sin then engages in the same stage business to bring forth Damnation. The stage directions make clear that in each incident the ‘newborn’ is to appear from beneath the chair by means of ‘some fine conveyaunce’. This need not call for a trap door, but probably only required the seated actor to be dressed in a long skirted gown, with the ‘child’ emerging from between his legs and through the skirt (Southern 1973: 473).
A variation of this same device is to introduce a series of figures, one after another in pageant-like fashion, to dramatize a spiritual process, as in the concluding scene of Like Will to Like, where Virtuous Life leads in Honour, who are then accompanied by Good Fame in the final prayer and chorus. In some plays the spiritual process, whether it be a conversion to grace or a backsliding into unregeneracy, is dramatized by having figures represent the conflicting impulses, desires, beliefs, in the acting space, usually with them standing behind or on one side or another of the central character as he undergoes change. In Enough Is as Good as a Feast, Worldly Man’s conversion is visualized by his embracing Enough and Contentation, with whom he leaves the stage walking hand in hand. Another feature that gave the stage an advantage over the press and the pulpit as an instrument of propaganda was its manipulation of the relationship between word and image. In Enough, for example, Covetous’s appearance before Worldly Man wearing the cloak of office and a gold chain gave him an air of respectability that concealed his covetousness, although it is worth noting that the fur-trimmed robe and gold chain later came to be identified with the usurious moneylender. The same device is deployed in All for Money, where Money shows up as a Judge. Since the days of John Bale, Protestant playwrights were adept at using drama to expose the deception of appearances, the most frequent instance of this being the outward sanctity conveyed through the Catholic clergy’s vestments.
To a modern audience raised on naturalistic theatre, the disjuncture between actor as expositor commenting on and critically detached from the action and actor as the impersonator of a ‘character’ (whether social type or distinct individual) may be unsettling, although it is a common feature of some modern stagecraft, in Brecht for example. To Tudor spectators, however, rooted in the notion of drama as ‘game’ imparting ‘earnest’, the shifting modes of presentation are accepted as a convention. The disjuncture, however, is perhaps not as pronounced as might be thought initially, for frequently a character will demonstrate through his actions the quality he represents. On the level of psychological allegory, for example, the Vice Covetous in Enough Is as Good as a Feast is a outward projection of Worldly Man’s acquisitive nature, but as the steward of his estate who at times engages in realistic conversation with him, he also stands for the type of companion who both practises covetousness and encourages such behaviour in an individual who struggles with his good and evil impulses. This brings up one last point about characters in the economic interludes indicated earlier but worth emphasizing. In most instances, the audiences would have clearly recognized themselves and other familiar persons represented in the acting space. Popish priests, Genevan evangelists, courtiers, merchants, landlords, lawyers, city apprentices, prostitutes, common labourers, and servants, fill the dramatis personae of these plays and enable the playwright to add an additional layer of topical meaning. This topical dimension is also helpful in locating the play’s action within particular time and place.
World History
