The English Moral Plays 4014 
Nicenes, Dalliance, Jealozie, and Newfangle, the fashion-maker. But 
this strange tale of Boeotian life is colored to please the London 
populace. It is a simple cobbler, a character later exalted by 
Heywood and Rowley, whom Mercury selects to rouse Mars from 
his apathy. Ralph, it must be confessed, is not altogether a hero; 
he hides under the bed to escape his irate wife, he is befuddled 
in the wood by the mocking voice of Echo, and he is too conscious 
of his prophetic calling. He succeeds, however, in reaching the 
court of Mars, and rouses the god to war. Bceotia is invaded and 
conquered, and with the burning of the “cabbin” of Contempt, 
social order is restored. In short, The Cobler’s Prophesie is a play 
combining classical mythology to please the court with a typical 
Elizabethan appeal to the tradesmen; yet here again, at the end 
of the century, appear strongly the features of the morality play. 
Such survivals of the religious drama in these late composite plays 
could have no permanence. The moral play in England had en- 
joyed a long popularity, and, unchallenged by any regularly or- 
ganized secular drama such as existed in France at the opening of 
the fifteenth century, had long professed, if it did not actually show, 
a moral purpose. But in the last years of the sixteenth century 
didacticism and allegory on the stage had already passed their 
zenith, and soon succumbed before a type of play more truly dramatic 
both in substance and form. That fragments of the morality might 
find temporary lodgment in these farces and actual comedies and 
tragedies simply postponed, but did not prevent, the total dis- 
appearance of the dramatic species. How were either serious or 
corrupted dramatic homily to compete with the real comedy of 
Gammer Gurton’s Needle, or poor Honesty and his ilk with the 
familiar human characters of Greene and his contemporaries? So 
the morality disappeared, leaving only a reminiscence behind. The 
play, Sir Thomas More, written about the year 1590, and once 
attributed to Shakespeare, mentions a half dozen of the old morals, 
several of which still remain unknown. Falstaff alludes to the 
“dagger of lath” that the Vice carried, and to the ranting of the 
hero of King Cambyses.1_ Gossip Tattle bears witness to the pop- 
ularity of the Devil on the stage when she says: “My husband 
. .. Was wont to say, there was no Play, without a Foole, and a Diuell 
in’t; he was for the Diuell still, God blesse him. The Diuell for 
his money, would hee say, I would faine see the Diuell.”2 But in 

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* Staple of News, 1’st Intermean. 
