The Vice and the Folk-Drama

Abstract

THE Vice, in its most developed form, owed its success to a number of factors which combined most effectively after about 1560, and made the Vice one of the salient features in the development of the Elizabethan drama. The factor to be examined here is the relationship between the Vice and the folk-drama. We can be reasonably sure now, after perhaps fifty years during which evidence has been accumulating, that some kind of folk-drama did exist before and during the time when the development of the Vice was taking place. We still do not know what form the folk-plays took in the sixteenth century, since no text has been preserved.' Our main evidence about form comes from texts recorded in the eighteenth century and later, and from sundry other considerations in the period concerned. The lack of surviving texts from the sixteenth century will not surprise us if we recollect that the folk-drama was essentially an oral tradition, and that it was that activity of a peasant class which was largely illiterate. These two considerations also make the existence of the folk-play at an earlier date more probable, because they both encourage its preservation in a fairly stable form. Indeed, one cannot but be impressed by the striking similarities of the later forms, which seem to indicate that what we have is of some antiquity. It is not very likely that the similarity I have mentioned points to one original text. The probability is that the folk-play is the pale survival of a primitive rite whose purpose was to create some kind of alliance between the participants and the forces which governed their lives and food supply. The core of this rite would probably be mimetic imitation and dancing. This would account for the modern survival of both a play and a dance. Indeed the words may have been added when the real 'meaning' of the ritual had almost