382 Elbert N. S. Thompson 
by forbidding the master the use of corporal punishment, and at 
the end the pedagogue gains a clearer triumph by being allowed 
to save the spoiled boys from the gallows and lead them off to 
receive their long deserved flogging. The moral in both plays is 
the same: 
Therefore exhort I all parents to be diligent 
In bringing up their children. 
O ye children, let your time be well-spent, 
Apply your learning, and your elders obey; 
It will be your profit another day. 
The Disobedient Child repeats this warning for parents and children, 
but with somewhat different intent; the lesson it would teach is 
prudence and obedience rather than morality. The son will not 
go to school, and indeed, if the Elizabethan masters were the brutal 
slave-drivers he describes, no one can blame the boy; but instead of 
giving himself to vicious pastimes, he marries—and lives to regret 
it. He has not money enough to support his wife, and is forced 
to peddle fagots from door to door; discord destroys his glowing 
illusion of domestic happiness; and the poor fellow is beaten by his 
wife as severely as the school-teacher could have done. The theme, 
then, is as proper for true comedy as for the moral play. The 
Devil, to be sure, survives, from the old caste of characters; and 
his final reminder that the world is his son, and the flesh his 
daughter, and that his allurements are covetousness, wrath, pride, 
lechery, gluttony, envy, and murder, echoes faintly the morality’s 
proper theme. Were it not for these traits, which were kept alive 
partly through the ethical purpose of the school-drama, The Dis- 
obedient Child would belong strictly to a history of comedy.? 
Naturally the humanists brought to the enrichment of the didactic 
drama new matter and a broader range of ideals. In the school- 
play, Misogonus, for example, whose resemblance to Acolastus Brandl 
has pointed out,’ the allegorical garb, and all else distinctive of the 
moral type except the sermonizing, have been set aside. Misogonus 
is another son gone wrong through parental indulgence, but the 
lesson is enforced by methods peculiar to real comedy. The scene 
at the dicing table and the dancing are explicitly handled, and 

* Cf. the French school-play, Moralité des Enfans de Maintenant. 
> Youth, Lusty Juventus, and Hickscorner are closely related to these 
school-plays in that they deal with the temptations of youth. 
$ Ixxviii—]xxix. 
