Personifications of Plague in Three Tudor Interludes: Triall of Treasure, The longer thou liuest, the more foole thou art, and Inough is as good as a feast

At the end of the anonymously written Triall of Treasure (1567), a figure named Visitation appears to punish the reprobate Luste for repudiating God, taking up with a number of vices, and inordinately embracing his companions, Pleasure and Treasure. The nature of Luste’s punishment is physical. Visitation declares, “nowe I am come to vexe thee with paine.” He continues,

Anguishe and griefe into thee I doe caste, With paine in thy members continually, Now thou hast paine thy pleasure can not laste, But I will expelle him incontinently.

(E1v)¹

Once “visited,” Luste’s speeches are dedicated to describing his pain: “Gogs woundes these panges encrease euer more;” “shall I still in these panges remaine[?]” (E2r). This scene of affliction is presented as the logical outcome of Luste’s bad behaviour: “Thou shalt knowe that . . . the almighty thou canst not mocke,” Visitation tells him (E1v). Shortly afterwards, Time appears to take Luste offstage to meet his last judgement. Luste’s final appearance in the play is as a handful of dust: “Beholde here howe Luste is conuerted to duste,” claims Time. “This is his Image, his wealth and prosperitie” (E4r). Luste’s affliction and death are connected directly to his status as unrepentant sinner—specifically, as a man consumed with avarice.

The Tudor interlude was a hybrid form of theater that was developed prior to, and alongside, the “professional” theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Unlike Shakespeare’s theater, the interlude did not have a dedicated playing space. Rather, interludes were generally performed in the banqueting halls of private homes as after-dinner entertainment or even as a distraction between courses. Players used the pre-existing doors of the Tudor hall for their entrances and exits; because the hall was crowded with guests, the players almost inevitably interacted physically with their audiences. As W. T. Craik observes, the frequent cries of “Room!” found in the interlude indicate cases where the players aggressively tell the audience to move aside to accommodate their movements.² But the interlude form does more than simply acknowledge the proximity of player and audience. It exploits this relation. Craik argues that the interlude’s unique quality lies in the way in which “continual contact with the audience is sought and maintained.”³ The dramatic impact of the interlude’s playing conditions, that “Everyone was in the play . . . [and] the dramatic action was limited only by the four walls of the hall,” depended, of course, on the contents of the particular interlude.⁴ But it also depended on the broader cultural and historical context of the interlude’s production.

Triall of Treasure and the two other interludes I examine here, The longer thou liuest, the more foole thou art (ca. 1567), and Inough is as good as a feast (ca. 1565–1570), both by William Wager, all stage scenes of judgment. Like many other Tudor interludes, they incorporate a core allegorical plot structure of the medieval morality play (Mankind, Everyman): the battle between virtues and vices for the soul of a representative human figure. But in these three interludes, the emphasis is on the fall from grace without redemption of three villains: Luste, Moros, and Worldly Man, respectively. What makes this group of interludes unique is suggested by the names of the eerie figures who represent divine wrath in each of the interludes: Visitation, Gods Iudgment, and Gods Plague. Together, these figures evoke the bubonic plague, the early modern biological disaster most commonly associated, at the time, with divine retribution. They torture their victims while providing the audience with the satisfaction of seeing a bad man punished. The presence of these figures, and of the physical symptoms they inflict, make these plays more than simple iterations of the moral interlude’s structure of punishment and reward. Using, as they do, manifestations of plague to achieve the reprobate’s destruction, they also reconfigure plague as a punishment only for the wicked, restoring the connection between sin and death-by-plague that...