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Article Excerpt
This chapter examines the use of personification allegory in a number of sixteenth-century morality plays, focusing in particular on the vices' use of assumed names in Skelton's Magnyfycence and Udall's Respublica. It argues that these plays manifest a striking self-consciousness about the limitations of the allegorical mode, and that they thereby both reflect and contribute to contemporary linguistic debates. They should therefore not be thought of as a static medieval survival, but rather as making a practical and dramatic contribution to changing sixteenth-century perceptions of how language signifies.
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It is tempting to think of sixteenth-century allegorical drama as a form that resists innovation. C. S. Lewis implied as much when he wrote of allegory as the dominant mode of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; more recently, John Watkins succinctly restated the case, asserting that 'the allegorical drama written in England during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is one of literary history's most static genres'. (1) It is clear, of course, that there are significant differences between the sixteenth-century interlude and its predecessor, the fifteenth-century morality play. As has often been observed, moralities such as The Castle of Perseverance (c. 1400), Mankind (c. 1465-70), and Everyman (c. 1500) are concerned with the salvation of man's soul; sixteenth-century allegorical drama, by contrast, tends to focus instead on social or secular matters, addressing man's secular welfare rather than his spiritual fate. (2) Moreover, its concerns are frequently political ones. Plays such as Skelton's Magnyfycence (c. 1519), Udall's Respublica (1553), and the anonymous Wealth and Health (1557) and Impatient Poverty (1560) have as their common theme the government of the state. Even those plays that do address questions of faith are less concerned to illustrate the common lot of Catholic man than they are to present polemical religious argument; in Lusty Iuventus (1540), for example, the temptations to which the protagonist is subjected are predominantly Catholic practices, to be resisted by focusing on the word of God alone, while in Bale's King Johan (1538-39; 1558-60) and David Lindsay's Satire of the Three Estates (1552), the true (Protestant) religion is central to good governance. (3) In many cases, as Greg Walker has argued, these plays do not just reflect political issues, but are themselves political acts that contribute to contemporary debate on religious divisions, on immigration, and on the country's political, social, and financial health. (4) Rather than focusing reassuringly on ultimate truths, they respond to the contingencies of the time; while they may take a conservative stance as often as a radical one, the stance is in response to specific historical circumstances and conflicts, rather than a reflection of universal values.
However, despite the fact that the function of the morality play alters quite radically between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it continues to employ personification allegory. This leaves it vulnerable to a charge of stasis on two separate counts. Apart from the apparently unquestioning adoption of an existing mode, personification allegory is itself frequently perceived as static: as Angus Fletcher has argued, characters that personify one or other abstract quality cannot help but go on behaving as their name states that they will. (5) Wrath must always be wrathful; Envy must always be envious; and conflicts between personifications must thus be endlessly renewed without hope of resolution. It could therefore be argued that sixteenth-century moralities not only hark back to a means of representation with its roots in the late classical period (for example, in Prudentius's Psychomachia), but that, in doing so, they confine themselves to a mode which spectacularly 'makes nothing happen'. But is this really the case? The shift from theological to secular concerns might itself be said to mean that the morality's conflicts become less than 'eternal'; if they are played out in the context of this world rather than the next, they are necessarily finite. Yet more significantly, the drama of this period manifests a striking self-consciousness about the limitations of the mode it deploys.
Theoretically, at least, personification allegory depends on the assumption that universal, abstract qualities exist, and that these can be fully and accurately represented by the individual figures that take their names; the transparency with which a name describes a character seems to entail a close, almost magical correlation between the two. Maureen Quilligan has argued persuasively that:
Allegory always presupposes at least a potential sacralizing power in language, and it is possible to write and to read allegory intelligently only in those cultural contexts which grant to language a significance beyond that belonging to a merely arbitrary system of signs. Allegory will not exist as a viable genre without this 'suprarealist' attitude towards words; that is, its existence assumes an attitude in which abstract nouns not only name universals that are real, but in which the abstract names themselves are perceived to be as real and as powerful as the things named. Language itself must be felt to have a potency as solidly meaningful as physical fact before the allegorist can begin. (6)
Such potency is apparent in the reliance that morality characters place on a name, as when Honest Recreation in Redford's Wit and Science (c. 1540) points out to Wit that he should be able to judge how much more worthy a companion she is than Idleness simply on the grounds of their names (p. 149). (7) It appears still more clearly when the mere use of a name summons the eponymous character, even when the speaker has no intention of calling him. In Youth (c. 1513), for example, Riot appears the instant he is mentioned (ll. 207-11); so too do Newguise, Nought, and Nowadays in Mankind, while in Wealth and Health (in a knowing take on this convention) a reference to 'Will' summons his negative counterpart, Ill Will (p. 283). (8) In sixteenth-century moralities, however, this magical correspondence between name and character is increasingly called into question as it comes under pressure both from the contradictions inherent in staging universals, and from changing perceptions of the 'truth' value of language itself. Many of the plays bear witness to a shift from the assumption that personification allegory is an effective means of 'cloaking' abstract qualities, providing them with a local habitation and a name, to questioning the effectiveness of allegorical representation. Some do so implicitly; others (including the plays discussed here), with various degrees of explicitness. Their allegory is thus very far from static: rather, the allegorical mode is interrogated in such a way that these plays can be seen to participate not only in the political and religious debates, but in the linguistic debates of the time.
The most conspicuous means by which morality plays test allegorical assumptions is the vices' adoption of false identities in order to gain influence over the protagonist. This is a feature of the vast majority of moralities of this period, to the extent that Thomas Dekker, writing in 1608, observed: 'All Vices maske themselves with the vizards of Vertues. They borrow their names, the better and more currantly to pass without suspition.' (9) However, it would be wrong to think of the adoption of false identities as a practice that originates in the sixteenth century. Vices are found disguising their true identities as early as Prudentius's Psychomachia, where Avarice disguises herself as Thrift; and the practice appears in medieval literature too: for example in the fourteenth-century allegorical poem, Winner and Waster, where Coveteousness adopts the same disguise. (10) In Medwall's Nature...
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