The Vice is the name given by John Heywood, in 1532, to the devilish tempter of the morality plays, who seeks the soul of Everyman and his hapless fellows. In doing so he is fond of disguises, typically as a false priest, and as the audience need to know, the guise is donned on stage, enabling a metatheatrical bridge between Vice and auditors as those in the know.
Shakespeare adored the role, and repeatedly fused it with other roles to create some of his most enduring characters. Richard Crookback showed him the capering way, fusing the Vice to the Usurping Brother and the Deformed Villain, as well as the King. Falstaff’s bulk is that of the Lord of Misrule, and his cowardice that of the Braggart Soldier, but Hal calls him a “reverend vice”, and he’s not wrong. Feste names himself as a vice when he sings to Malvolio, needlessly disguised as Sir Topas, and it is his fool’s whirligig of revenge on the steward that drives much of the play’s action. Iago the terrible, the second-longest role in the canon, is at once the Vice and an astonishingly twisted version of the Plautine Clever Slave, and Othello recognises it at the last when he asks why “this demi-devil … hath thus ensnared my soul and body”, and gets no reply. And perhaps most troublingly, because he seems to lack all awareness of the dubiety of his role, Duke Vincentio in Measure, for Measure repeatedly uses the word ‘vice’ to abhor its effects while disguising himself as a priest and ensnaring Angelo as well as Isabella in his web.
There are no singular answers, nor any simple ones, but we will round up these Vices and ask as many virtuous questions as we can, looking at each play hard and teasing out the dramatic and other profits that Shakespeare turned on his long dalliance with the “old Vice” of the moralities.
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