The English Moral Plays 399 
contemporaneous with many true moralities, presents the typical 
characters of Latin comedy: the hero, Calisto; the parasite, Sem- 
pronio; and the bawd, Celestina, from whose plot Melibcea barely 
escapes. But at the close the father delivers a long exhortation 
to virtue that would have done credit to the orthodox allegorical 
dramatic preacher. Still more directly the author of Jack Juggler 
borrowed from Roman comedy, taking from Plautus’ Amphitruo 
the complication caused by Sosia’s returning home to find, he be- 
lieves, his double awaiting him. In the English farce, the hero is 
fooled by his enemy, Jenkin Careaway, gets into trouble in conse- 
quence, and is of course beaten by his master. Yet after this rude 
horse-play comes the moral, to the effect that the world is full of 
deceit. Even the farce was fain to proffer a moral reason for its 
being. 
More freely, though, than in the classical imitations of the humanists, 
the elements of the disintegrating moral play merged in the home- 
bred dramatic products of the time. Two traces of the morality 
are prominent in A Merry Knack to Know a Knave. The Devil 
is brought into the action to claim the soul of the dying Bailiff of 
Hexam, and later to play the part of a human being; and an alle- 
gorical character, Honesty, serves as the connecting link between 
the scenes of the two plots. The main plot is historical, a royal 
romance such as Elizabethans were fond of, telling of King Edgar’s 
love for a maiden, Alfrida, and the faithlessness of the emissary 
whom he commissioned to do his courting. The second plot is 
satirical. Faithful Honesty, who has “the knack to know a knave,” 
discloses the dishonesty of various social types. The conny-catcher 
and the knight of the post in their perjury; the farmer who buys 
up corn for export, and thus oppresses the poor; the priest who 
refuses to help the needy; the courtier and king’s counselor who 
uses his office for self-aggrandizement, all are exposed for what they 
really are. Here, then, we have realistic comedy combined with 
a typical Elizabethan romance, bearing the marks of Euphuism in 
its language, and staged by Henslowe—in short, a typical Eliza- 
bethan play, preserving still the relics of the morality type. 
Similar survivals from the outworn medieval drama persisted in | 
early tragedy. In the old Roman legend of Appius and Virginia 
one unknown author saw not only “a rare example of the vertue 
of Chastitie,” but also the stuff of which real tragedy is made. He 
used it mainly to this end, emphasizing at the start the father’s 
premonitions of coming misfortune, the daughter’s confidence in her 
own strength, the tragic close of her life, and the punishment of 
