Vice (character)
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Vice is a
Over time, the morality plays began to include many lesser vices on stage and one chief vice figure, a tempter above all the others, who was called simply the Vice. Originally, the Vice was a serious role, but over time his part became largely comical. Scholar F.P. Wilson notes, “Whatever else the Vice may be, he is always the chief comic character”; this comic portrayal is explained thus: "In theory there is no reason why vice should not be put upon the stage with the same seriousness and sobriety as virtue: in practice, however, dramatists, and many a preacher, knew that men and women will not listen for long to unrelieved gravity”.
Characteristics
The Vice can be an allegoric representation of one of the Seven Vices or a more general portrayal of evil as the tempter of man. Vice often takes the audience into complicity by revealing its evil plans, often through soliloquies or monologues.[2] Its enacting is frequently comic or absurd.
Origins
The word "vice" is derived from Latin vitium "defect, offence, blemish, imperfection", in both physical and verbal senses. The character of the Vice developed from that of the domestic fool or jester some tincture in the later plays supplied from the mischief-making servants in Plautus and Terence.
Other ancestors of the vice are the devils and the vices in earlier moralities, from the comic characters in the folk play—the ancestors of the Morris fool, the fool of the Mummer's play, the clown of the Swordplay; from the medieval sermon, not merely from its 'characters' of the seven deadly sins and their representatives in contemporary life but from its jests and satirical bent; from the plotting servants of Terence and Plautus; from the creative zest of the actors speaking more than was set down for them.
Later developments
The Vice character developed into the
- "Thus like the formal Vice, Iniquity, / I moralize two meanings in one word" (III.i.82–83)
Other examples of the Vice in Renaissance theatre include Iago (who plays up the more villainous aspects of the Vice) from Othello and Sir John Falstaff (who plays up the more comic aspects of the vice) from Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 and The Merry Wives of Windsor.
References
- ^ Wilson, F.P (1969). The English Drama: 1485-1585. Oxford: Clarendon Press. p. 59. Retrieved 8 August 2014.
- ^ Rycroft, Eleanor. "The Vice and The Fool". Staging the Henrician Court. Retrieved 8 August 2014.