The English Moral Plays 387 
the drama the affairs of the world, the other the affairs of domestic 
life and all the wider interests and richer experience of secular 
learning. Consonant with the extended scope of these late moralities 
Lupton’s Al for Money presents the three newly-mated associates 
—Theology, in a “long ancient garment like a Prophet,” who 
survives from the older type of play; Science, the philosopher, who 
speaks for humanism; and Arte, who bears “certeyne tooles about 
him of diners occupations” to represent the business of ordinary 
life. They meet in perfect harmony, agreeing that 
No good order in the lande can be without vs three, 
and their lesson is conveyed not through abstract precept, but by 
“Plainly representing the manners of men and fashion of the world 
noweadayes.” Before the growing power of realism and of learning 
neither the religious purpose nor the allegorical method of the old 
play could hold its own. 
The universal interest in the manners of men had won for real- 
ism a place even in the early and yet serious didactic plays. The 
godly counselor Mercy of the Macro play, Mankind, is a learned 
moralist whom Mischief finds lamentably “full of predycacyon.” 
Evidently he was dressed as a preacher, for Mankind recognizes 
him at first sight as one able to give “gostly solace.” Be that 
as it may, he speaks his “mellyfluose doctryne” at great length, 
sowing liberally with ecclesiastical Latin his homilies on the signif- 
icance of the Atonement, the value of good works, and the temp- 
tations of the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. But the moral tenor 
of the piece is submerged in the rude banter and the obscene jest- 
ing and song of the tavern and the market-place, and the spiritual 
abstractions are boldly elbowed by types from real life. The 
author, to be sure, has not given either the vices, Now-a-days, 
New-gyse, Nought, and Mischief, or his hero, Mankind, Christian 
names, but all belong clearly to a rural community. When the 
hero would “eschew ydullness” to please his adviser, he gets his 
spade, and, like Piers Plowman, sets himself to husbandry. The 
devil, Tytivillus, and the vices torment him, stealing his seed and 
hiding obstructions where his spade will strike. Their own status in 
the neighborhood is not concealed. New-Gyse, himself a horse- 
thief, having barely escaped the gallows, swaggers in with the 
broken rope yet about his neck; Now-a-days returns with booty 
from a church; and Mischief clanks his fetters as he comes to aid 
in making a village criminal of poor Mankind. Their talk is racy 
with native idiom and slang, and their songs obscene. Despite the 
Trans. Conn. Acap., Vol. XIV. 26 Marcu, 1910. 
