From Page to Performance: Essays in Early English Drama

8. “My Name is Worship”: Masquerading Vice in Medwall’s Nature

"My Name is Worship": Masquerading Vice in Medwall's Nature John A. Alford The first known example of masquerading vice in a morality play appears in the work of "the first positively known English dramatist," Henry Medwall's Nature (ca. 1500):1 PRIDE MAN PRIDE My name is Worship. Worship? now, surely, The world told me it was my destiny To come to Worship [ere] I die. Truly, I am the same.2 Pride's assumption of the name Worship is only the first in a series of virtuous pseudonyms taken by the vice figures in this play in order to deceive Man or, as one of them says, "to blear his eye" (81). Pride's retinue, the rest of the seven deadly sins, all follow his lead. Covetousness misrepresents himself as Worldly Policy; Wrath, as Manhood; Envy, as Disdain; Gluttony, as Good Fellowship; Sloth, as Ease; Lechery, as Lust (that is, "vigor, energy, life" [MED, 4(A)]). This simple ploy works to perfection, partly because the vices craftily take the names of near-doubles (Sloth looks like Ease), and partly because Man himself is so undiscerning-as if he actually wished to be deluded. Medwall's Nature is a watershed in the history of English theater. As Tucker Brooke observes, somewhat peevishly, the use of aliases "was repeated ad nauseam in later interludes" (not to mention the countless plays in other genres where it served as the virtual trademark of villainy).3 As in Nature, Wrath takes the name of Manhood in Albion 151 152 John A. Alford Knight (1537-65) and in Wager's The Longer Thou Livest (1560-68). Again, following Nature, Covetousness disguises itself as Policy in Respublica (1553) and Enough Is as Good as a Feast (1560-69), as Frugality in New Custom (1559-73), and then as Careful Provision in The Conflict of Conscience (1575-81). Idleness appears as Honest Recreation in Merbury's A Marriage between Wit and Wisdom (ca. 1579).4 These are only a few examples of the device. "To cite the plays in which it exists," Bernard Spivack claims, "would be tantamount to a roll call of almost the entire morality drama."5 The extraordinary success of Medwall's innovation calls for an explanation. Mter all, a device is not "repeated ad nauseam" over the course of a century unless it expresses an important truth or answers to some deeply felt need in the audience. A. P. Rossiter, one of the few critics to offer an explanation, sees the figure of masquerading vice as a product of social conditions: We met this [figure] first in Nature. But though there is a hint for it in Prudentius [Psychomachia], where Avaritia calls herself Parsimonia (i.e. Greed alias Economy), one reason for its steady persistence in the drama until it becomes stock-in-trade of equivocating villainy is the moral confusion which the Renaissance and Reformation caused, and which the "moral" interlude did much to increase. The contemporary confusion, with its atmosphere of "propaganda" and misrepresentation, made the equivocator the logical symbol for the spokesmen of the other side.6 Undoubtedly, the political and religious climate of the sixteenth century made audiences especially receptive to the device of double-naming . Yet Rossiter's explanation underplays the importance of both earlier "moral confusion" and earlier literary tradition. Tudor playwrights inherited considerably more than a "hint" of the device. It was, after all, a convention "in all moral allegory."7 Thanks largely to Gregory the Great's virtual rewriting of the Psychomachia in his treatises and commentaries, the device was extended from Avaritia to all the other sins. In his Pastoral Care, for example, Gregory warns those entrusted with the cure of souls that "vices commonly masquerade as virtues": "Often, for instance, a niggard passes himself off as frugal, while one who is prodigal conceals his character when he calls himself open-handed. Often inordinate laxity is believed to be kindness, and unbridled anger passes as the virtue of spiritual zeal. Precipitancy is frequently taken as efficient promptitude, and dilatoriness as grave deliberation ."8 In his massive commentary, the Moralia in lob, Gregory gives even freer rein to his penchant for listing the aliases of sin.9 But the "My Name is Worship": Masquerading Vice in Medwall's Nature 153 the prize must go to the fourteenth-century Augustinian friar Henricus de Frimaria who, acknowledging his debt to Gregory, devotes an entire...