Morality Plays

Contemplation, Perseverance, Imagination, and Free Will, from the morality play Hickscorner.

Late medieval morality plays used allegory to dramatize the struggles between good and evil that Christianity believed went on in each person. The morality play was usually presented on religious festival days to a wide audience, and indulged in a fair amount of humor. The various devils of the old morality plays became a single, usually comical character named "Vice." Vice was a comedic character, whose goal was to corrupt the Mankind or Everyman figure. In order to do so, he would take the audience into his confidence in order to illustrate his plans.

The influence of the vice character is demonstrated in Shakespeare's plays, including Richard III, Othello (Iago), and King Lear. Though the villains in these plays are presented as having legitimate material motivations for their evil acts, they also have a sense of "motiveless malignity" (Coleridge) that is taken from the morality plays of the late medieval period.