Note 21 — INTRODUCTION

Cushman points out that it occurs in only one drama, that of Like will to Like. He attributes the currency of the notion that this mode of exit was the regular one to the famous passage in Harsnet’s Declaration of Popish Impostures (p. 114, 1603): ‘It was a pretty part in the old church-playes, when the nimble Vice would skip up nimbly like a jackanapes into the devil’s necke, and ride the devil a course, and belabour him with his wooden dagger, till he made him roare, whereat the people would laugh to see the devil so vice-haunted.’ The moralities and tragedies give no indication of hostility between Vice and devil. Cushman believes therefore that Harsnet refers either to some lost morality or to ‘Punch and Judy.’ It is significant, however, that in ‘Punch and Judy,’ which gives indications of being a debased descendant of the morality, the devil enters with the evident intention of carrying the hero off to hell. The joke consists as in the present play in a reversal of the usual proceeding. Eckhardt (p. 85 n.) points out that the Vice’s cudgeling of the devil was probably a mere mirth-provoking device, and indicated no enmity between the two. Moreover the motive of the devil as an animal for riding is not infrequent. In the Castle of Perseverance the devil carries away the hero, Humanum Genus. The motive appears also in Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Lodge and Greene’s Looking Glass for London and England, and especially in Histriomastix, where the Vice rides a roaring devil (Eckhardt, pp. 86 f.). We have also another bit of evidence from Jonson himself. In The Staple of News Mirth relates her reminiscences of the old comedy. In speaking of the devil she says: ‘He would carry away the Vice on his back quick to hell in every play.’