354 Elbert N. S. Thompson 
as well as common people. Even this warning is wasted, for the 
king calls the bishop a babbler, and urges him to learn to preach 
better. Here the text breaks off; but the prologue tells how Death, 
after first sending a messenger, wrestles with the king, and overthrows 
him, and gives his soul to the devils. 
The vivid conception of the coming of Death with his summons 
to judgment, gave rise to another closely allied allegorical motif, 
the Debate between the Body and the Soul. The popularity of this 
theme, however, in the lyric poetry of Europe did not gain for it 
any important place in the drama.?_ In only two English moral 
plays are traces of it found. Toward the close of The Pride of Life, 
the Virgin begs Christ to allow the King’s soul to dispute with his 
body, and thereby gets a reconsideration of his sentence, and his 
eventual release from the hands of the devil. Of the incident, un- 
fortunately, there remains only the outline in the prologue. Another 
trace of the same theme is found in The Castle of Perseverance, 
when Soul crawls “from beneath the bed under the Castle,” and 
reproaches Body for his sins. 
body! bou dedyst brew a byttyr bale, 
to bi lustys whanne gannest loute ; 
pi sely sowle schal ben a-kale ; 
I beye pi dedys with rewly rowte; 
& al it is for gyle. 
euere pou hast be coueytous, 
falsly to getyn londe & hows; 
to me pou hast brokyn a byttyr jows; 
so welaway be whyle! (3013—21) 
The debate in both plays follows the mission of Death, and with it 
covers one Crisis in the spiritual life of man. 
But no one of these three important English plays that represent 
allegorically the coming of death closes the story of man’s life with 
that point. As that incident looks back, implicitly at least, to the 
record of a misspent life, a losing struggle with the vices, so in 
Christian dramaturgy it could not but look forward to the possi- 
bility of salvation. Another episode, therefore, was necessary to give 
the last stage of the pilgrim’s progress. For this, the dramatists 

1 The theme is similarly treated in Zhe Castle of Perseverance. See 
above, 318. Death appears in the French morality, Les Blasphémateurs, 
(Repertoire, 42), and in the Hegge play, Zhe Slaughter of the Innocents. 
For later appearances of Death on the stage see Langlois, 1. 291-307. 
2 See above, 345. 
