their characters unnaturally good or bad, mere
puppets who do not develop along the line of their own emotional
prompting, but are moved by machinery in the author's hands.

[Illustration: LATH DAGGER. Stage properties of the Vice and Fool.]

A new character, the Vice, was added as an adjunct to the Devil, to
increase the interest of the audience in the Morality play. The Vice
represented the leading spirit of evil in any particular play,
sometimes Fraud, Covetousness, Pride, Iniquity, or Hypocrisy. It was
the business of the Vice to annoy the Virtues and to be constantly
playing pranks. The Vice was the predecessor of the clown and the fool
upon the stage. The Vice also amused the audience by tormenting the
Devil, belaboring him with a sword of lath, sticking thorns into him,
and making him roar with pain. Sometimes the Devil would be kicked
down Hell Mouth by the offended Virtues; but he would soon reappear
with saucily curled tail, and at the end of the play he would delight
the spectators by plunging into Hell Mouth with the Vice on his back.

[Illustration: FOOL OF THE OLD PLAY.]

Court Plays.--In the first part of the sixteenth century, the court
and the nobility especially encouraged the production of plays whose
main object was to entertain. The influence of the court in shaping
the drama became much more powerful than that of the church. Wallace
says of the new materials which his researches have disclosed in the
twentieth century:--

"They throw into the lime-light a brilliant development of this new
drama through the Chapel Royal, a development that took place
primarily under the direction of the great musicians who served as
masters of the children of the Chapel and as court entertainers, the
first true poets-laureate, through the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward
VI., Mary, and Elizabeth."[11]

In 1509 Henry VIII. appointed William Cornish (died 1523) to be Master
of the Children of the Chapel Royal. This court institution with its
choral body of men and boys not only ministered "by song to the
spiritual well-being of the sovereign and his household," but also
gave them "temporal" enjoyment in dances, pageants, and plays. We must
not forget, however, that the Chapel Royal was originally, as its name
implies, a religious body. Cornish was a capable dramatist, as well as
a musician and a poet; and he, unlike the author of _Everyman_, wrote
plays simply to amuse the court and its guests. He has