[In the following excerpt, Dessen discusses Shakespeare's adaptation of allegorical figures to his “late moral plays,” particularly regarding Richard III, Antony and Cleopatra, and Troilus and Cressida.]

Close attention to the final movements of All's Well, Richard III, and 2 Henry IV demonstrates how a horizon of expectations linked to the late moral play figures … can shed light on problematic moments. Rather than pursuing other distant cousins of the public Vice and the two phased action (e.g., Pistol in Henry V, Lucio in Measure for Measure, Autolycus in The Winter's Tale), let me turn now to other features of the moral plays also of interest to interpreters of Shakespeare. First, in general terms, the moral drama provides an obvious example of how theme or thesis can take precedence over our sense of plot or character. Joanne Spencer Kantrowitz, for one, has argued forcefully for the special nature of allegorical characters and the primacy of theme over fable in such plays. The true action of a didactic work, she notes, “is not the surface events, but the action of the unfolding argument,” so that “anything can, and often does, happen,” not because the works are diffuse and undisciplined, but because “episodes are invented and ordered for the sake of the thesis.”¹ Similarly, John Weld argues that “the audiences for which Shakespeare and his contemporaries wrote had been trained to expect a unifying theme”; he notes that “unity of action is almost non-existent” in plays like All for Money and The Three Ladies of London, “but unity of theme is rigorously observed.” For Weld, “the point is not that all scenes in all morality plays were tightly bound in thematic unity, but that whatever unity the plays possessed was thematic.”² Both Kantrowitz and Weld therefore single out the presence in the moral drama of a different logic of presentation or organization, a logic geared to thesis, theme, or homiletic intent rather than to our notions of psychological realism or narrative credibility.

Such an allegorical or thematic logic is familiar to readers of The Faerie Queene or Book II of Paradise Lost. What has not been addressed, however, is the interpretative problems and anomalies that result from the presentation of allegorical figures, theses, and action on a stage as opposed to on a page. Thus, most scholars have accepted Bernard Spivack's formulation that, except for an occasional throwback, the period after 1590 “marks the dead end and dissolution of the allegorical drama, at least on the popular stage.”³ Such a conclusion, however, is based primarily upon reading rather than seeing the plays, a process that gives undue prominence to the speech prefixes in the printed texts. In contrast, Arnold Williams has noted that an audience watching a performance of Mankind would see not a parade of abstractions but “four small-time hoodlums, a priest, a real, live devil, who, however, is invisible to the actors on stage, and a good hearted but weak and somewhat dim-witted English peasant. We would hear a good bit of sermonizing by the priest and a good bit of underworld jargon from the vices.” According to Williams, the critic can easily be misled by “the names of the characters and the fact that the play has been labelled a morality.”⁴ Similarly, John Weld emphasizes that “the speech headings that loom so large in the italics of print are non-existent on the stage” (p. 38). For Weld, the failure to “see” the moral plays “accounts both for a serious misunderstanding of the way they work and for the critical disregard of the morality as genre ever since antiquarians began to reprint them.” Rather, “what the audience sees is not so many abstractions, but people—red-faced, tall, short, fat, greasy, grotesque, and sly; and they are not involved in interabstractional relationships; they hit each other, brawl, kiss, ring bells, and chase each other around the stage” (p. 14). Both Williams and Weld remind us that, in performance, the moral plays may have seemed less blatantly allegorical, a reminder that could narrow the gap that seems to separate them from the later “realistic” plays.

Consider, for example, some earlier and later figures that perform comparable functions. For a spectator as opposed to a reader, how much actually would separate Fellowship (Everyman) or Riot (The Interlude of Youth) from later good fellows or riotous companions with names like Pistol and Bardolph? How different are the unnamed murderers of Clarence in Richard III or Banquo in Macbeth from the villains who kill Smirdis in Cambises, even though the latter figures are called Murder and Cruelty? How large is the gap, again from the perspective of an audience in the theatre, between the Good Counsel figure of the moral plays, usually dressed as a clergyman, and the many friars or moral spokesmen in later plays, figures like the Old Man in Doctor Faustus or Friar Francis in Much Ado about Nothing? In The Castle of Perseverance Greed is dramatized in the person of Avaricia, one of the seven deadly sins, but in the 1570s Wapull displays this sin in The Tide Tarrieth No Man by means of a grasping usurer named Greediness who acts out the pernicious influence of the Vice. How different, then, would be a viewer's experience of an actor playing a merchant or usurer named Greediness, whose behavior is linked to the central thesis of the play, from that viewer's experience of an actor playing Corvino, the covetous merchant in Volpone, whose behavior is also linked to Jonson's satiric thesis about gold and human values? Especially in the late moral plays (as opposed to The Castle of Perseverance, Everyman, or Wit and Science), the names of various personae in the printed texts may cloak a similarity in kind between nominally allegorical figures and later characters like Corvino (or Parolles or Kent), a similarity easily missed by the reader when dealing with playscripts designed for a spectator.

My purpose here is not to allegorize Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare but rather to suggest how moral abstractions that leap out at us from printed speech prefixes can become considerably less abstract when conditioned by the realities of stage performance. When a human actor takes on an allegorical role, something immediately happens that distinguishes the event from The Romance of the Rose or The Faerie Queene, a distance that becomes even greater when the actor is playing not the concept itself (as with figures such as Goods or Good Deeds in Everyman) but a social type that acts out that concept (a greedy merchant, a pious clergyman, a conscienceless murderer, a riotous tavern companion). Consider too the corollary: that not only may the late moral plays have seemed less “allegorical” in the theatre but also that many supposedly “literal” or “real” dramatic characters and actions in the age of Shakespeare may have had more in common with Wager, Wapull, Lupton, and Wilson than with Ibsen and Henry James. The absence of clear allegorical signposts may not, in fact, denote “the triumph of realism,” especially in an age when Shakespeare could introduce such figures as Rumor (2 Henry IV) and Time (The Winter's Tale) and allegorical personae could appear in plays from the 1590s such as A Knack to Know a Knave, Old Fortunatus, A Warning for Fair Women, and Two Lamentable Tragedies.

For some seventeenth-century evidence that suggests such similarity or continuity, consider two allusions cited earlier. First, in his collection of epigrams published in 1610, John Heath describes a foolish playgoer: “Now at the Globe with a judicious eye, / Into the Vice's action doth he pry.”⁵ Standing alone, this reference to a Vice at the Globe in the first decade of the seventeenth century sounds anomalous to our ears (and could be interpreted as a thrust at the satirized Momus, whose “judicious eye” sees not what is in front of him but instead conjures up a figure a generation out of date). But consider as well a passage some fifteen years later, the comments of Jonson's choric gossips in the second intermean of The Staple of News (1626):

mirth.

How like you the Vice i’ the Play?

expectation.

Which is he?

mirth.

Three or four: Old Covetousness, the sordid Pennyboy, the Money-bawd, who is a flesh-bawd too, they say.

tattle.

But here is never a Fiend to carry him away. Besides, he has never a wooden dagger! I’ld not give a rush for a Vice, that has not a wooden dagger to snap at everybody he meets.

mirth.

That was the old way, Gossip, when Iniquity came in like Hokos Pokos, in a Juggler's jerkin, with false skirts, like the Knave of Clubs! but now they are attir’d like men and women o’ the time, the Vices, male and female! Prodigality like a young heir, and his Mistress Money (whose favors he scatters like counters) prank’t up like a prime Lady, the Infanta of the Mines.

(ll. 5-20)

Here Jonson is glossing his own play to explain how moral play personae are being clothed in “modern” (1626) dress. The old-style Vice, who had snapped his wooden dagger at his victims until carried off by the Devil, now is “attir’d like men and women o’ the time.” In this formulation, “the old way” associated with figures like Covetousness, Iniquity, and Prodigality has been replaced by a new way that metamorphoses the old-style allegorical figure into a contemporary social type (a young heir, a usurer) whose function in society in some way is analogous. Such a formulation may or may not be relevant to Jonson's best-known comedies⁶ that lack either allegorical personae or choric exegesis and may, moreover, be distant from Shakespeare's practice. Nonetheless, one of the major writers of the period both remembers the distinctive features of the late moral plays and, even more revealing, finds a way to incorporate some of those features into his own satiric strategy (as he also incorporated the Vice's exit to Hell on the Devil's back as noted in chapter two).

Two isolated passages do not justify a total reassessment of all the potential Vice-like figures in Jacobean drama. Nonetheless, these allusions do indicate a continuing awareness of the Vice and late moral play practice in the context of ongoing dramatic activity in the seventeenth century, just as the allusions to the morall cited in chapter one also suggest some kind of generic continuity. Our notions about “character” or realism therefore may not be fully in tune with the horizon of expectations assumed by Shakespeare, his actors, and his audience. Remember, for roughly two hundred years the moral drama, in one form or another, ruled the English stage. Although neglected or scorned by subsequent devotees of “the triumph of realism” (many of them readers rather than spectators of plays), that drama clearly had developed considerable expertise or knowhow, especially for putting ideas into action on a stage. Many features of this moral drama were then superseded or rejected in the age of Shakespeare (and no one laments the passing of fourteener couplets as the poetic norm), but, as argued throughout this book, some features or paradigms were still available as models to be adapted for later use by Shakespeare and his contemporaries (e.g, Humanum Genus, dual protagonists, the public Vice and the two phased action). Particularly in the late moral drama of Shakespeare's boyhood, other resources also were available for solving various problems in theatrical presentation, problems that did not disappear in the 1590s. Admittedly, Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists could have found some of these devices in nondramatic poems like The Faerie Queene, but the less sophisticated moral plays had the advantage of offering allegorical techniques geared to the exigencies of the stage rather than the province of the page.⁷

My purpose in introducing such possibilities is not to mount a full-scale assault upon all modern interpretation of Shakespeare's characters but rather to expand the options available to the reader or theatrical professional. As noted elsewhere twentieth-century treatments of the Vice have been influenced by a preference for that figure's comedy over the homilies provided by the virtues and by a keener interest in the temptation of Man than in the allegorical display of the health of a kingdom. Similarly, when reading Shakespeare's plays we give privileged status to those features that do make sense in our terms, even when they are obvious nonrealistic conventions like the soliloquy, but inevitably we play down or screen out other devices that do not conform to our horizon of expectations. Here is where an awareness of the knowhow of the moral drama, particularly the late moral drama, can be useful.

Consider in particular one of the major assets of this kind of drama—its ability to break down a subject or entity into component parts. Thus, one of the earliest scholars to write at length about the moral drama notes that in The Castle of Perseverance “the subjective forces that in reality belong to man himself in the most personal sense were transformed by the poet into visible, external forces” so that, in effect, “the motives and impulses of man's own heart were taken from him, and, clothed in flesh and blood, given him again for companions.”⁸ In A. C. Bradley's terms, the moral dramatists deployed their stage figures “to decompose human nature into its constituent factors,”⁹ a process that gives external stage life to internal forces and thereby uses the special advantages of the theatre to provide psychological insights, moral lessons, and entertainment.

Unlike the soliloquy, this approach to the on-stage display of the workings of the mind is not readily compatible with the expectations of many modern readers or playgoers. Nonetheless, such a technique does have various assets, especially if the emphasis is upon the moral geography of the soul. Thus, in his discussion of the Good and Evil Angels in Doctor Faustus Wilbur Sanders argues that such a stage psychomachia is not “clumsily primitive” but rather “an immensely dramatic procedure.” As he describes a representative scene: “The first effect of the interruption is to arrest all action on the stage, and to focus attention on the protagonist, suspended in the act of choice. Not until he speks do we know to which voice he has been attending. It is the act of choice in slow motion, a dramatisation of his strained attention to the faint voices of unconscious judgment.”¹⁰ To some modern readers such an effect may seem a blemish in a complex psychological tragedy, but in the theatre such a suspension or slowing down of the process of choice can serve as a meaningful equivalent to a soliloquy or to a novelist's presentation of interior states of consciousness, especially for an audience attuned to such a technique.

In the earlier and more familiar moral dramas, this breaking down of the entity Man served as a strategy to organize an entire play. When the later moral dramatists turned to other strategies or paradigms, they still found use for such a device to display at length a significant decision in an individual scene. Perhaps the most revealing example is to be found in R. B.'s Apius and Virginia where after Apius agrees to the Vice's plan (that will wrest Virginia from her family), the stage direction reads: “Here let him make as though he went out and let Conscience and Justice come out of him, and let Conscience hold in his hand a lamp burning and let Justice have a sword and hold it before Apius’ breast” (l. 500). Although Conscience and Justice have no lines while Apius is onstage, the judge himself supplies their half of the argument:

But out I am wounded, how am I divided?
Two states of my life, from me are now glided,
For Conscience he pricketh me contemned,
And Justice saith, judgment would have me condemned:
Conscience saith cruelty sure will detest me:
And Justice saith, death in the end will molest me,
And both in one sudden me thinks they do cry,
That fire eternal, my soul shall destroy.

(ll. 501-8)

Haphazard the Vice, however, mocks Conscience and Justice (“these are but thoughts”—l. 510) and argues instead: “Then care not for Conscience the worth of a fable, / Justice is no man, nor nought to do able” (ll. 521-22). After Apius agrees to forgo his scruples (“let Conscience grope, and judgment crave …”), Conscience and Justice are left alone on-stage to lament his decision in psychological terms (e.g., Conscience complains: “I spotted am by willful will, / By lawless love and lust / By dreadful danger of the life. / By faith that is unjust”—ll. 538-41).

To act out the central decision in his play, R. B. has not resorted to a soliloquy or even to straightforward temptation by the Vice but has chosen to break down Apius's choice into its component parts. Somehow, at the moment when the judge is leaving the stage under the influence of the Vice and his own lust, Conscience and Justice are to “come out of” Apius (or “glide” from him, according to the dialogue), whether from behind his cloak or through some stage device (as in the genealogy of sin sequence in All for Money). The theatrically emphatic presence of these two figures (with their striking entrance, their emblems, and their gestures) is then linked verbally to Apius's own conscience and sense of justice. Apius's subsequent exit with the Vice acts out his choice and spells out how he has abandoned his conscience and sense of justice in favor of his lust. Both the stage direction that indicates that Conscience and Justice are to “come out of” Apius and the Vice's insistence that “these are but thoughts” underscore how the inner workings of the protagonist's mind have been orchestrated in a fashion particularly suited to on-stage presentation.

As I have argued elsewhere,¹¹ the late moral dramatists regularly used such stage psychomachias to display at length pivotal decisions, whether the choice of Faith over Despair (The Tide Tarrieth No Man) or the effect of Knowledge of Sin upon Infidelity (The Life and Repentance of Mary Magdalene) or the choice of Covetous over Enough (Enough Is as Good as a Feast). The technique survives in the 1590s, as witnessed by the Good and Evil Angels of Doctor Faustus and one or more angels who flank a despairing figure in A Looking Glass for London and England. Consider in particular A Warning for Fair Women (1599), where a pivotal event, the seduction of Mistress Sanders, is presented not through dialogue among the characters but by means of a dumb-show:

next comes Lust before Brown, leading Mistress Sanders covered with a black veil: Chastity all in white, pulling her back softly by the arm: then Drury, thrusting away Chastity, Roger following: they march about, and then sit to the table: the Furies fill wine, Lust drinks to Brown, he to Mistress Sanders, she pledgeth him: Lust embraceth her, she thrusteth Chastity from her, Chastity wrings her hands, and departs: Drury and Roger embrace one another: the Furies leap and embrace one another. (dir)

To underscore the effect, Tragedy as presenter explicates this dumb-show for the spectator (e.g., “Now blood and Lust, doth conquer and subdue, / And Chastity is quite abandoned”). Clearly, the anonymous dramatist has not opted for the temptation scene expected by a modern reader but instead has provided a breaking down of the event into components that include both “real” figures (wife, seducer, bawds) and allegorical forces (Chastity, Lust, the Furies). In place of a soliloquy or a speech of acquiescence for the protagonist, the dramatist provides as major signals the thrusting away of Chastity and the embracing of Lust. Like R. B., Wapull, and Wager (or Marlowe with his two angels), this dramatist felt that such an orchestration of component parts was a workable method of putting on theatrical display at an important moment the mind of his protagonist.

Such a breaking down into component parts could be used for other entities as well. For example, some moral plays that scholars have criticized as shapeless seem so because they present not a Humanum Genus protagonist but rather a wide range of figures that, especially for a spectator, add up to a cross section of society. In such plays the entity being broken down for theatrical analysis is not Mankind but England or the kingdom, often by means of a cross section of “estates” figures who, taken together (often as victims of the Vice), represent a larger whole (the title page describes The Three Ladies of London as “A Perfect Pattern for All Estates to look into”—p. 246). Several of the plays cited in chapter two (e.g., Like Will to Like, The Tide Tarrieth No Man, The Three Ladies of London) employ such a thesis-and-demonstration structure in which the thesis is linked to the Vice (and often to the proverbial title as well) and the demonstration is provided by some set of components of the kingdom, whether “estates” figures (e.g., a farmer, a clergyman, a courtier, a scholar, a soldier) or some other configuration (Wealth, Health, and Liberty; the three ladies—Love, Conscience, and Lucre).

As with the psychomachia, such a breaking down of the kingdom into component parts for exploration on-stage could be adapted to an individual scene as well as to an entire play (although here the limited personnel available to perform many of these scripts provided obvious constraints). The best example is to be seen in one of the major scenes in Thomas Lupton's All for Money (1577) where a series of petitioners (presumably played by only two actors) parade before the magistrate, All for Money, who has instructions to grant only those suits approved by Money. The audience watches as this corrupt magistrate favors an admitted thief and ruffian, a woman who has murdered her child, a bigamist who seeks to replace his legal wife with a younger one, a foolish priest, a litigious landowner who exploits his poor neighbor, and an old crone who buys false witnesses to spare a young husband. The only figure refused by All for Money (who is flanked by Sin the Vice) is Moneyless-and-Friendless, a hapless figure too poor to provide a bribe. In a play with the announced goal of “plainly representing the manners of men and fashion of the world nowadays” (p. 145), Lupton has used a corrupt magistrate, a Vice, and a group of social types or “estates” to act out in one extensive scene how venality in various parts of society can undermine justice. As with Apius's decision, the key to the technique lies in the breaking down of an entity into component parts suitable for a theatrical presentation that can fully develop the dramatist's thesis or point of view.

Shakespeare, however, does not incorporate into his plays anything as obvious as the Conscience and Justice who come out of Apius or the Good and Evil Angels who flank Doctor Faustus, nor does he resort to a clear “estates” formulation, although a moment such as 3 Henry VI, II.v (in which Henry VI laments the horrors of civil war along with a son who has killed his father and a father who has killed his son) comes close. Still, the principle of breaking down an entity or a decision into component parts for fuller display in the theatre was certainly not unknown to him, as witnessed by Launcelot Gobbo's parody of the stage psychomachia where the decision whether or not to leave Shylock is orchestrated in terms of the voices of Conscience and the Devil (The Merchant of Venice, II.ii.1-29). Let me turn then to a few representative scenes to demonstrate … how an expanded horizon of expectations in tune with late moral play practice can aid the modern interpreter.

First, consider … Richard III where Shakespeare repeatedly calls to our attention both the workings of the protagonist's mind and the health of the kingdom. Thus, at the climax of the play Richard's reaction to the eleven ghosts (“O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!”—V.iii.180) sets up a sense of internal division (in which self is pitted against self) in a fashion much more amenable to the modern interpreter than R. B.'s presentation of Apius's internal strife (“But out I am wounded, how am I divided? / Two states of my life, from me are now glided”):

What do I fear? Myself? There's none else by.
Richard loves Richard: that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am:
Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why—
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O no! Alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself.
I am a villain. Yet I lie, I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well. Fool, do not flatter.
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.

(ll. 183-96)

Although the sense of internal division and even some of the specific terms (especially the emphasis upon Conscience) are similar to R. B.'s formulation, clearly Shakespeare's soliloquy sets forth Richard's state of mind without recourse to on-stage personae equivalent to Haphazard, Conscience, and Justice. The moral dramatist's breakdown of a major decision into visible component parts therefore seems distant from this climactic speech couched in terms in tune with our sense of psychological realism.

But this orchestration of a division within Richard linked to the voice of conscience is the culmination of a series of choices made by a wide range of figures who are not realized this fully (or granted introspective soliloquies). Of particular interest is the interchange between the two murderers of Clarence both before and after the murder. In his brief interview with these two figures, Richard had praised the absence of pity in their faces (“Your eyes drop millstones when fools’ eyes fall tears”), while the first murderer had assured his employer that “we will not stand to prate” with Clarence, for “talkers are no good doers.” Rather, he assures Richard: “We go to use our hands, and not our tongues” (I.iii. 349-52). The reader or spectator may then be surprised at the amount of talking provided by these two figures in the next scene (roughly two hundred lines) along with the actual “doing,” with a substantial part of that talking not linked to Clarence's plea for his life. By modern standards, the length of the discussion between the two murderers before Clarence awakes may seem out of proportion to the scene or the play as a whole, for few interpreters today value highly this display of qualms of conscience by minor figures who will not reappear. But if that interpreter has in mind the options available in the moral plays, this sequence makes excellent sense and, like R. B.'s configuration, spells out (albeit without overt allegory) the forces at work behind other more significant but less fully orchestrated decisions to follow.

First, before the murderers even begin their debate, Brackenbury accepts their commission and announces: “I will not reason what is meant hereby, / Because I will be guiltless from the meaning” (I.iv.93-94). Like many figures to follow (e.g., the Mayor, the scrivener, various figures of religion, Stanley in III.iv), this chooser opts for willful blindness over dangerous knowledge, so that conscience or principle is superseded by profit or self-preservation. The fifty lines that follow then orchestrate at length the forces at work behind such decisions (forces much in evidence thereafter, building to Richard's soliloquy in V.iii). Initially, it is “the urging of that word ‘judgment’” that breeds “a kind of remorse” in the second murderer, not a fear of killing Clarence (“having a warrant” to do so) but a fear of being “damned for killing him, from the which no warrant can defend me” (ll. 106-11). The earthly sense of “warrant” linked to Richard's power and plotting is here played off against a higher sense of “warrant” or Justice (an opposition that prefigures the superseding of Richard by Richmond in Act V). When the first murderer threatens to inform their employer of such backsliding, the second murderer holds him back in the hope that “this passionate humor of mine will change,” for “it was wont to hold me but while one tells twenty.” Any “dregs of conscience” that remain “yet within” are then expelled when this wavering figure is reminded of the payment awaiting him (“Zounds, he dies! I had forgot the reward”—ll. 112-23).

The subsequent lines more than any other passage in the play italicize the role of Conscience (and prepare us for Richard's “coward conscience” soliloquy in V.iii as well as the dilemmas faced by Hastings, Buckingham, Stanley, and others):

1 Murderer.

Where's thy conscience now?

2 Murderer.

O, in the Duke of Gloucester's purse.

1 Murderer.

When he opens his purse to give us our reward, thy conscience flies out.

2 Murderer.

’Tis no matter; let it go. There's few or none will entertain it.

1 Murderer.

What if it come to thee again?

2 Murderer.

I’ll not meddle with it; it makes a man a coward. A man cannot steal, but it accuseth him; a man cannot swear, but it checks him; a man cannot lie with his neighbor's wife, but it detects him. ’Tis a blushing shame-faced spirit that mutinies in a man's bosom. It fills a man full of obstacles. It made me once restore a purse of gold that (by chance) I found. It beggars any man that keeps it. It is turned out of towns and cities for a dangerous thing, and every man that means to live well endeavors to trust to himself and live without it.

1 Murderer.

Zounds, ’tis even now at my elbow, persuading me not to kill the duke.

2 Murderer.

Take the devil in thy mind, and believe him not. He would insinuate with thee but to make thee sigh.

1 Murderer.

I am strong-framed; he cannot prevail with me.

(ll. 124-46)

This extended acting out of a decision (to murder or not to murder Clarence) may seem far removed from Apius's choice or even Launcelot Gobbo's comic version of the psychomachia (where the two voices also were labeled Conscience and the Devil). Readers today, moreover, impatient to get back to scenes involving Richard, may encounter here more than they want to know about such negligible “characters” (e.g., that one of them once restored a purse of gold found by chance). But if we remember how in the moral plays thesis regularly supersedes “character” or “realism,” this extended debate makes excellent sense, not as an investigation of these two figures (or even of Clarence) but rather as an orchestration of a debate or conflict at work within a sequence of major and minor figures (Lady Anne, Clarence, Hastings, the Mayor, the Cardinal, Buckingham) building to Richard's soliloquy in V.iii that clearly echoes this passage. Particularly through the qualms of the second murderer, Shakespeare is adapting the breakdown technique of the late moral plays in order to spell out in some detail the moral coordinates behind a series of choices central to this play.

The brief coda to this scene again underscores the two voices or alternatives. Apparently (as Richard had predicted), Clarence's pleas have had some effect, for he says to the second murderer: “My friend, I spy some pity in thy looks” (l. 258). The resolute first murderer, however, kills Clarence and exits with the body (“I’ll drown you in the malmsey butt within”), leaving his cohort on-stage to lament this “bloody deed” so “desperately dispatched” and to wish that he, Pilate-like, could “wash my hands / Of this most grievous murder!” (ll. 265-68). Upon his return, the first murderer berates the second, who, in turn, renounces his “fee,” adding: “For I repent me that the duke is slain” (l. 273). “So do I not,” concludes the murderer, who labels his colleague (who has just exited) a “coward” (a clear prefiguration of Richard's “coward conscience” in V.iii). The exit with the body by the first murderer (who has chosen Profit, as epitomized by Richard's purse, over Conscience) leaves the second figure, identified with Conscience, alone on-stage to lament what has happened. In this instance, the appetite for the gold in Richard's purse overrides Conscience, which then is left behind, powerless. With the return of the first murderer, the spokesman for Conscience or Repentance (“For I repent me …”) has one more speech, but his choice to forgo the fee comes too late to avert the murder, so that the scene's final speech is given to the figure who has chosen “meed” (l. 277) or profit over Conscience or principle. These two figures may not stand out as memorable “characters” in this rich and densely populated play, but the alternatives they body forth are central to the entire action. The subject here is no one figure but a way of thinking, a set of moral coordinates, for Shakespeare is adapting the resources of his theatre, including his legacy from the moral plays, to exhibit and develop the internal voices at work within more significant figures, including eventually Richard himself.

A subtler yet analogous effect is to be found in another preparatory moment, the galley scene of Antony and Cleopatra. Modern productions often provide a party so raucous that the dialogue is buried under sounds of bacchanalian revelry, but Shakespeare has gone to some lengths to set up a series of options or voices that, like the interchange between the two murderers, orchestrates issues central to what is to follow, especially key decisions by Mark Antony. As with Richard III, I.iv, moreover, the reader or spectator anxious to move forward to Antony's return to Cleopatra, the battle of Actium, and the tragic events that follow may grow impatient at the amount of dramatic time here devoted to apparently negligible figures soon to be eclipsed (Lepidus, Pompey, Menas). But, again, our sense of dramatic economy or mainstream event may block us off from Shakespear's use of such figures, in a manner in keeping with his legacy from the moral plays, to explore more fully Antony's situation, especially the reasons for his vulnerability to Octavius Caesar and Cleopatra. Close attention to the choices and values of Lepidus and Pompey reveals (at least for the reader or spectator in tune with such a technique) how Shakespeare is displaying essential elements in Antony's “character” without recourse to overt allegory (or even to the kind of quasi-allegorical speeches about Conscience provided by the murderers of Clarence).

The scene starts with comments from two servants that sum up the plight of Lepidus, who has been tricked into drinking more than his share (“They have made him drink alms-drink”) to the extent that a “greater war” has been raised “between him and his discretion” (II.vii.5, 9-10). As the Pelican editor notes, the two speakers view the drunken and out of control Lepidus as “a little man in a part too big for him” (p. 1187). With the entrance of the revelers, the focus remains upon Lepidus, who continues to respond to toasts until he passes out, while various observers provide shrewd comments (Antony remarks: “These quicksands, Lepidus, / Keep off them, for you sink”—ll. 58-59). While Menas tries to pull Pompey aside, the bulk of the dialogue is devoted to Antony's account of Egypt for the benefit of the increasingly drunken Lepidus, an account that climaxes with a witty tautological description of the crocodile:

lepidus.

What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?

antony.

It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth; it is just so high as it is, and moves with it own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates.

lepidus.

What color is it of?

antony.

Of it own color too.

lepidus.

’Tis a strange serpent.

antony.

’Tis so, and the tears of it are wet.

caesar.

Will this description satisfy him?

antony.

With the health that Pompey gives him; else he is a very epicure.

(ll. 40-51)

“’Tis a strange serpent” is Lepidus's last line in this scene and his next-to-last speech in the play (see III.ii.65-66), for when Pompey pledges this hapless figure once again, Antony responds: “Bear him ashore. I’ll pledge it for him, Pompey” (ll. 83-84). The disposition of this drunken triumvir is spelled out by Enobarbus's quip to Menas that the servant who bears off Lepidus is “a strong fellow” because he “bears the third part of the world” (ll. 87-90). Lepidus's abject position is then described at length at the beginning of III.ii by Enobarbus and Agrippa, who emphasize his fulsome expressions of love and praise for both Antony and Octavius. A few scenes later, the downfalls of both Lepidus and Pompey are quickly summed up by Eros (III.v.4-18).

Few interpreters of this tragedy have troubled to focus upon the fall of Lepidus. But note that the dominant image of the galley scene as a whole and of Lepidus's part in it is drinking and revelry, an image associated throughout the play not with Lepidus but with Antony (and it is Antony in line 84 who assumes the burden of the last toast directed at Lepidus and thereby takes on the role of this fallen figure). Similarly, except for the toasting calculated to get him drunk, the dialogue involving Lepidus is devoted to Egypt, the Nile (ll. 17-23), “strange serpents” (l. 24), the pyramids, and, in the lines cited above, the crocodile—again, features linked not to Lepidus but to Antony (soon to return to his “serpent of the Nile,” Cleopatra—an epithet hovering around the edges of Antony's description of Egypt).

Consider then, with the moral play breakdown into component parts as an analogue, how Lepidus functions here as one window into the more important figure, Antony. Thus, the first ninety lines of this scene present in effect two plays-within-the larger play (with the Pompey-Menas interchange in counterpoint to the Lepidus story). The prologue with the servants establishes Lepidus as vulnerable to drink and to the machinations of his comrades and so, as a result, ill-equipped to function in the “huge sphere” (l. 14) of world politics. An increasingly drunken and thereby vulnerable figure is then entranced by things Egyptian, as epitomized by his credulous acceptance of the nonsensical description of the crocodile, while summary comments are provided by Antony's “these quicksands, Lepidus, / Keep off them, for you sink” and Caesar's incredulous “will this description satisfy him?” The scene has displayed the literal and metaphoric fall of a figure who has failed to recognize the quicksands on which he stands, here associated both with drink and with manipulation by those around him. Indeed, Lepidus-Antony is vulnerable both to things Egyptian (the accounts of the Nile, serpents, pyramids, and crocodiles) and things Roman (alms-drink, the code implicit in the toasts), and therefore can be manipulated in a variety of ways. For Antony in scenes to come, the equivalent to the toasting and alms-drink is the “dare” to fight at sea rather than on land at Actium, as opposed to Caesar's refusal of the challenge to single combat, a refusal Antony can never understand (see IV.ii. 1-2). The later and far more significant equivalent to a drunken Lepidus's being “satisfied” with the description of the crocodile is Antony's accepting Cleopatra's various defenses of her actions. In particular, after his long tirade based upon her reception of Thidias, Antony acquiesces yet again to the protestations of his serpent of the Nile with the response: “I am satisfied” (III.xiii. 167) and ends the scene with a call for “one other gaudy night” in which he and his followers will “fill our bowls once more” and make “the wine peep through their scars” (ll. 183-84, 191). This Lepidus-like moment, moreover, tips the scales for the wavering Enobarbus, who concludes this scene with the announcement: “I will seek / Some way to leave him.” Eventually, the Antony who has made these Lepidus choices about wine, Egypt, and being “satisfied” is also carried off the stage, not drunk but mortally wounded.

The fall of Lepidus, however, is only one facet of the galley scene, for Shakespeare presents in counterpoint the equally telling choices made by Pompey (an episode, unlike the drunken collapse of Lepidus, drawn from North's Plutarch). While Pompey plays host (and, more specifically, the pledger of toasts to Lepidus), Menas seeks (at first unsuccessfully) to draw his master aside. Menas's repeated question (“Wilt thou be lord of all the world?”) immediately follows Antony's reference to “these quicksands” and finally gets Pompey's attention (“How should that be?”—ll. 60-62). In keeping with the predominant image of the scene, Pompey's initial reaction is that Menas must be drunk (“Hast thou drunk well?”), but the latter's response reveals that at least one figure has avoided those quicksands (“No, Pompey, I have kept me from the cup”—l. 65). The promise to make Pompey “the earthly Jove” who will control “whate’er the ocean pales, or sky inclips” arouses more interest (“Show me which way”) and sets up another revealing exchange:

menas.
These three world-sharers, these competitors,
Are in thy vessel. Let me cut the cable;
And when we are put off, fall to their throats.
All there is thine.
pompey.
Ah, this thou shouldst have done,
And not have spoke on’t. In me ’tis villainy,
In thee’t had been good service. Thou must know,
’Tis not my profit that does lead mine honor;
Mine honor, it. Repent that e’er thy tongue
Hath so betrayed thine act. Being done unknown,
I should have found it afterwards well done,
But must condemn it now. Desist, and drink.
menas.
[aside] For this,
I’ll never follow thy palled fortunes more.
Who seeks, and will not take when once ’tis offered,
Shall never find it more.
pompey.
This health to Lepidus!

(ll. 69-83)

Here the final collapse of Lepidus is juxtaposed with Pompey's failure to take the offered opportunity (and Menas's verdict on Pompey clearly anticipates Enobarbus's conclusions about Antony late in Act III). This potential Jove figure, it should be noted, does not totally reject the proposition, for “being done unknown, / I should have found it afterwards well done,” but since Menas has “spoke on’t” rather than done the deed without advance consultation, this chooser “must condemn it now.” The reasoning here may strike us as suspect, but for this figure Honor (however murkily defined) takes precedence over Profit (one thinks of Hotspur or Hector). Menas's summary can then serve as Pompey's epitaph: “Who seeks, and will not take when once ’tis offered, / Shall never find it more” (and one need only conjecture how Octavius would have reacted given the same choice). “Desist, and drink” brings us back to the quicksands of Lepidus, the world of the senses and immediate gratification, the world so much enjoyed by Antony.

Like Lepidus, Pompey is a figure of some significance in Act II and negligible thereafter, but, also like Lepidus, he functions in this scene as a window into a far more important chooser, Antony. However muddled his reasoning may be, Pompey, like Antony, does operate by a code of Honor that takes precedence over personal profit or advantage. Like Lepidus with the toasts or alms-drink, such a figure is vulnerable to others who do not share that code but can recognize and manipulate it. Like Antony, moreover, Pompey inspires strong loyalties based upon personal appeal and military prowess, but that appeal can be lost or undercut (with a Menas or an Enobarbus) when the leader fails (or seems to fail) to grasp a golden opportunity.

Both Lepidus and Pompey thus act out significant facets of Antony's tragic situation. No Haphazard, Conscience, and Justice (or Despair and Faith) are needed here, for, even more than the anonymous murderers of Clarence, these two “historical” Romans are “characters” in their own right who earn their part in the story. Nonetheless, the interpreter aware of the moral play technique of breaking down entities into components can appreciate how these two subordinate actions are not ends in themselves (or material Shakespeare was obliged to include) but rather function as his way of exploring in depth key values or ways of thinking to be displayed in subsequent scenes by the tragic hero. Individually, Lepidus and Pompey provide various revealing analogies to Antony. Taken together they act out his key weaknesses or vulnerabilities in a fashion not possible in a soliloquy or choric commentary. Like Pompey, Antony is not ruthless enough to counter Caesar; like Lepidus, he is vulnerable to the serpent of the Nile, to drink and the life of the senses, and to manipulation by a shrewd opponent who understands his weaknesses and can exploit them. Antony too is easily “satisfied” by Egyptian stories and is therefore vulnerable to quicksands and to the loss of his equivalents to Menas (especially after Actium). And, by way of coda to this sequence, we discover that Caesar, although he grudgingly complies with the drinking code and “the conquering wine” (l. 106), still maintains his distance and composure (“our graver business / Frowns at this levity”—ll. 119-20), in the process setting himself off from Antony and the other revelers, just as later he stands aloof from Antony's code and choices. If Lepidus and Pompey give us facets of Antony, Caesar (and, for a time, Menas) give us an alternative.

For a third example of Shakespeare's skillful adaptation of the moral play approach to component parts, consider the Trojan council scene of Troilus and Cressida. Unlike my previous two examples, this scene has received its fair share of commentary, for most interpreters would agree that Shakespeare here sets forth the values that characterize this society and eventually lead to its deterioration and ultimate demise (as signaled in Act V by the death of Hector and the disillusionment of Troilus). Less attention has been paid, however, to the way in which the individual contributions of Priam, Cassandra, and the four debaters (Hector, Helenus, Troilus, and Paris) add up to the display of a larger entity—this time not a single figure like Antony but rather a composite view of Troy or the kingdom as embodied in the Trojan mind or way of thinking.

As a point of departure, consider the on-stage configuration presented to the spectator for most of this scene. Priam, who introduces the topic for discussion (II.ii. 1-7), is presumably either on his throne or in some centrally located position—an old, revered king (in modern productions, often physically decrepit) who as king-father-aged figure should be the symbol of order and control in Troy. But with the exception of a brief comment to Paris later in the scene (ll. 142-45), Priam says nothing thereafter but leaves the fate of Helen (and Troy) to his sons. He could be listening intently, following the alternating speakers with his head; he could be frozen in place; he could even nap (as does Revenge during Act III of The Spanish Tragedy). Regardless, as king-order-reason figure he remains on-stage (as does Helenus the priest) not as an active force but as a representative of qualities or faculties that carry little weight in this society.

In contrast to Priam's passivity, the spectator sees, on one side, two young men, Troilus and Paris, who argue vigorously for keeping Helen and, on the other side, Hector and, briefly, Helenus, who counter such arguments. The positions espoused by these four figures cannot be labeled as neatly as those articulated by the two murderers of Clarence. Nonetheless, Paris (for obvious reasons) is closely linked to Appetite; Helenus as priest (presumably in some distinctive costume) introduces through his brief remarks and his continuing presence larger considerations that, for the most part, are ignored; Troilus serves as spokesman for Will and for the siren call of Honor; and Hector, for much of the scene, speaks for Reason. The first movement (before the entrance of Cassandra) pits the “fears and reasons” (l. 32) of first Helenus and then Hector against Troilus's emphasis upon “the worth and honor of a king” and “the past proportion of his infinite,” a conflict that climaxes in the disagreement between Hector and Troilus over the source of Value. For Hector, “value dwells not in particular will”; rather, Helen or any object holds its “estimate and dignity” to the degree “’tis precious of itself.” In contrast, Troilus invests Helen with value, emphasizes “the conduct of my will,” and, in a long speech, uses various analogies to stress the Honor that will be lost if Helen is returned under coercion (“O theft most base, / That we have stol’n what we do fear to keep!”). Clearly, Troilus is the spokesman not only for Trojan Honor but also for the Trojan Will, that drive for the Infinite that will not be bounded by Reason, limit, or sordid reality. As he later tells Cressida: “the will is infinite and the execution confined; … the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit” (III.ii. 75-77).

Cassandra's startling appearance breaks the scene in half. Her “prophetic tears” and vision of the future climax in her dire warning: “Troy burns, or else let Helen go” (l. 112). But, as in V.iii, the prophetess is doomed not to be believed, for what Hector describes as “these high strains / Of divination in our sister” that should appeal to “discourse of reason” are instead seen by Troilus only as “brainsick raptures” that cannot “deject the courage of our minds” or “distaste the goodness of a quarrel / Which hath our several honors all engaged / To make it gracious.” For the spectator who knows the outcome of the Trojan story, Cassandra's appearance has a special poignancy, for it calls to mind the momentous nature of the decision being made here and therefore should make us particularly attentive to the forces at work.

After Cassandra's departure and Paris's defense of himself and Helen, this elaborate display of the Trojan mind at work reaches its climax in Hector's long speech (ll. 163-93). In keeping with his posture throughout the scene, this voice of Reason and reasonableness links his two youthful adversaries “to the hot passion of distemp’red blood” and invokes in opposition “this law / Of nature,” “a law in each well-ordered nation / To curb those raging appetites that are / Most disobedient and refractory,” and “these moral laws / Of nature and of nations.” In answer to the argument advanced by Troilus and Paris about the “disgrace” in returning Helen “on terms of base compulsion” (ll. 150-53), Hector notes: “Thus to persist / In doing wrong extenuates not wrong, / But makes it much more heavy.” Here, more than any other place in the scene (or the play), the voice of Reason and Law appears to prevail.

What then follows (to the surprise of many interpreters) is the pivotal moment in the scene (and perhaps in the play):

Hector's opinion
Is this in way of truth; yet ne’ertheless,
My spritely brethren, I propend to you
In resolution to keep Helen still;
For ’tis a cause that hath no mean dependence
Upon our joint and several dignities.

Regardless of what has gone before, here and in his speech that ends the scene (ll. 206-13) Hector's values cannot be distinguished from those of his “spritely brethren” (a category that, presumably, does not include Helenus). If the focus of the scene were solely upon Hector's train of thought as a pivotal “character,” this moment would indeed be puzzling, for Shakespeare provides little or no evidence for the switch from the “way of truth” to the way of Honor (what Troilus describes a moment later as the “rich advantage of a promised glory”—l. 204). But the interpreter aware of late moral play technique can recognize that the focus here is not upon the mind of Hector but upon the mind of Troy. Like Priam's passivity or the quick putdown of Helenus, this figure's about-face is not an end in itself, a display of “character” in twentieth-century terms, but rather a means to a larger end—in particular, a demonstration of the vulnerability of Reason, Law, and Truth to the siren call of Honor in Troy and Trojan thinking. In my imagined staging, during one of his final speeches Hector would cross the stage to join Troilus and Paris, thereby breaking the configuration of Reason standing off Will and Appetite. Similarly, the Exeunt that ends the scene cloaks many potentially striking effects. For example, Troilus, Paris, and Hector could stride off-stage, arm in arm, while an aged, decrepit Priam is slowly helped off by an ashen-faced, tight-lipped Helenus. As with the two murderers in Richard III (or with Apius, Conscience, and Justice), figures who exit and figures who remain behind can, for an audience in the theatre, act out the relative power of competing forces or principles.

With or without my conjectured staging, the reader or spectator should recognize that the protagonist in this rich scene has been no one character but Troy itself. For more than two hundred lines the most fateful decision in the play has been slowed down and physically acted out so that a viewer can witness and fully grasp the larger mind at work (with Cassandra's prophecy italicizing the implications). The behavior of the individual participants, especially Hector and Troilus, is not inconsistent with their “characters” in the rest of the play, but, at least for this sequence, such individual personae are in the service of a larger design or rationale. If Hector's about-face surprises us, that impression is central to Shakespeare's strategy, for, whether in this scene or elsewhere in the play, the stance of Reason within Troy or individual Trojans is shaky and can easily be undermined by Will, Appetite, or the call to Honor. Hector's sudden shift may appear inconsistent (or “unreasonable”) by the yardstick of psychological realism, but the interpreter aware of the moral play approach to components can recognize how the collapse of Reason (or the failure of the way of Truth) climaxes a meaningful display of a larger entity that supersedes any single figure.

In a suggestive passage, Bernard Beckerman notes that once we recognize a device as a dramatic convention (his example is Shakespeare's eavesdropping or concealed observation scene), we become conscious how a dramatist could “select dramatic activity from artistic tradition, thereby gaining readily accepted dramatic tools.” Such a convention, he goes on to argue, builds upon “theatrical practice not life activity,” for “the observation scene is an artificial formulation, obeying its own rules, following its own forms, and judged according to its own context.”¹² Not all such conventions, however, are as easily recognized today as the observation scene, the soliloquy, and the aside, especially those conventions at odds with twentieth-century assumptions about psychological realism and dramatic economy (as with the function of seemingly peripheral figures such as the two murderers, Lepidus, and Pompey). The modern interpreter therefore has little difficulty grasping the meaning and function of a soliloquy by Richard III, Antony, or Troilus or commentary by choric spokesmen (e.g., the three citizens in Richard III, II. iii; the two lords in All's Well, IV. iii). But, as noted throughout this book, those conventions or techniques linked (in Beckerman's terms) to the “theatrical practice” of another age and divorced from “life activity” as we understand it today can easily be ignored or missed completely.

My purpose in this essay has been to expand our horizon of expectations so to encompass techniques available to an Elizabethan or Jacobean dramatist but easily missed by the modern reader. Even though the critic who prizes irony, subtlety, and realism finds little merit in the late moral drama, these plays did bequeath to the age of Shakespeare solutions to various presentational problems, solutions geared to the practical assets and liabilities of Elizabethan stages and staging. In particular, what a modern interpreter expects to infer about “character” (e.g., in a novel, a film, or a naturalistic play) could be spelled out or orchestrated, both in the moral plays and in Shakespeare, in a manner that interpreter may not recognize. Indeed, where is it written down that the on-stage display of the workings of the mind must be limited to the soliloquy and the aside? Few readers today expect Shakespeare to body forth on his stage the interaction of Ego, Superego, and Id (to cite but one set of modern coordinates), but why should we not expect him to display, by whatever method, the interaction of Conscience, Will, Appetite, and Reason—terms well developed in his dialogue and familiar to his audience through many avenues outside of his plays? To recognize available tools or conventions in the late moral plays is not to pluck out the heart of Hamlet's mystery but nonetheless to move a step closer to a sense of what was shared among dramatists, actors, and spectators in the age that gave birth to this impressive body of drama.

Notes

1. “Dramatic Allegory; or, Exploring the Moral Play,” Comparative Drama, 7 (1973), 71-73. See also Kantrowitz's Dramatic Allegory: Lindsay's “Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis” (Lincoln, Neb., 1975), pp. 134-35.

2. Meaning in Comedy: Studies in Elizabethan Romantic Comedy (Albany, 1975), pp. 22-24. Weld's first three chapters on the “dramatic tradition” contain many astute comments on form, technique, and meaning in the moral plays.

3. Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (New York and London, 1958), p. 252.

4. “The English Moral Play Before 1500,” Annuale Mediaevale, 4 (1963), 18.

5. Two Centuries of Epigrammes (London, 1610), E3v.

6. For an argument linking this passage to Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, see Alan C. Dessen, Jonson's Moral Comedy (Evanston, 1971).

7. For a very useful account of late moral play dramaturgy, with an emphasis upon the techniques necessitated by the limited personnel and facilities, see David Bevington, From “Mankind” to Marlowe (Cambridge, Mass., 1962). See also T. W. Craik, The Tudor Interlude: Stage, Costume, and Acting (Leicester, 1962).

8. E. N. S. Thompson, “The English Moral Plays,” Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 14 (1910), 315.

9. Shakespearean Tragedy (London, 1904), p. 264.

10. The Dramatist and the Received Idea (Cambridge, 1968), p. 217.

11. For a fuller discussion of the stage psychomachia, see chapter six of my Elizabethan Drama and the Viewer's Eye (Chapel Hill, 1977).

12. Dynamics of Drama (New York, 1970), p. 26.