402 Elbert N. S. Thompson 
another comedy Jonson treated the Vice as defunct, and satirized 
his old-time role. 
That's fifty yeeres agone, and six, 
(When euery great man had his Vice stand by him, 
In his long coat, shaking his wooden dagger), 
he wrote, and his conclusion was, 
We must therefore ayme 
At extraordinary subtill ones [Vices], now, 
When we doe send to keepe vs vp in credit. 
Not old Juquities. 
The Devil, who passes these strictures on his old companion, the 
Vice, counted evidently upon the audiences’ familiarity with the 
character, and on their sympathy with the new comedy of manners. 
Although the moral play died, leaving behind in regular dramatic 
literature only these few unimportant allusions, its influence must 
not be slighted. As the composite plays prove, no barrier ever 
existed between the old and the new. Elizabethan comedy had 
its roots in the by-play of the morality; early tragedy, even, might 
find scenes of pathos and tense interest in the religious play, and 
learn there the lesson of causality and the doctrine of the freedom 
of the will that form its basis. Moreover, the theatrical traditions 
of the Elizabethan age had their origin in the sacred drama. 
The old methods of organizing the companies, of staging the plays, 
and of costuming the actors, were carried on by the players of 
the secular drama. The audiences, too, trained to expect gross 
anachronism, and the mixture of comedy and tragedy, thought 
nothing of them in later times. Hence, although the abstractions 
of the old play were discarded by Elizabethan playwrights, and 
although allegorized precept gave place to concrete presentation 
of real life, the debt of the secular drama to the moral play is 
greater than any tangible evidence can show. 
But upon the religious life of the age, for whose advancement 
the moral play was first devised, there was left no such impress. 
The dramatists of the late period had been so engrossed with mirth 
and so neglectful of godliness, that the stage, except possibly in 
rural neighborhoods where non-professional methods still prevailed 
in occasional performances, had altogether ceased to be a week- 
day pulpit. Churchmen themselves really hastened the change by 
finding other and more naturally effective means of teaching moral- 

3 Devil is an Ass, 1. 1..83—85, 115-18. See also 1. 2. 30; 5..6. 
