! 
The English Moral Plays 393 
Nou beit in pes & beit hende 
& distourbit nozt oure place [stage]. 
But usually the actors anticipated disturbance. The first speaker 
of Wealth and Health is surprised by the quiet that greets him: 
Why is there no curtesy, now I am come 
I trowe that all the people be dume 
Or els so god helpe me and halydom 
- They were almost a sleepe. 
No wordes I harde, nor yet no talking 
No instrument went nor ballattes synging 
What ayles you all thus to syt dreaming 
Of whom take ye care? 
The professional spirit of the players and the environment 
in which the plays were usually given, which thus hastened the 
downfall of the religious drama, brought with them also important 
modifications in form that less directly contributed to the process 
of secularization. The most noticeable of these changes was the 
greatly reduced length of the later moralities, or moral interludes, 
as they are often called. The Castle of Perseverance has almost 
four thousand lines and some thirty-five characters, while The World 
and the Child, which attempts to cover virtually the same ground, 
contains scarcely one thousand lines, and only five parts. The 
two parts of Nature contain together almost three thousand lines, 
but an interval of perhaps three days intervened between them.! 
Some of the controversial plays were extremely long, notably Res- 
publica, and Ane Satyre of Thrie Estaits, whose performance before 
King James lasted nine hours, with only one intermission for re- 
freshment.? But the typical morality of the later period was short, 
arranged to be played by four or five men within a period of an 
hour or two. To effect such simplification each actor was given 
two or more parts to play. One actor, for example, took in Mew 
Custom the parts of Ignorance, Hypocrisy, and Edification ; a sec- 
ond, the parts of New Custom, Avarice, and Assurance; a third, 
the single role of Perverse Doctrine; and a fourth, the parts of 
Light of the Gospel, Cruelty, God’s Felicity, and the lines of the 
Prologue. Zhe World and the Child might have been performed by 
two actors.’ How great the need for such simplification was, may 

4 OE 2 Nichol, Introduction, xlv. 
3 See Ramsay, ed. Magzificence, exxxiii, and also Brandl, 33, 46. 
